The Violence of a Fascination with* a Visible Form (on Martyrs, Cruelty, Horror, Ethics) [*on and vs. with vs. as]

Eugenie Brinkema (bio)

Abstract

This essay argues that Pascal Laugier’s 2008 new-extremist horror film Martyrs generates a formal violence coextensive with the aesthetic fascinations that structure it, rendering an account of violence that is monstrative and creative. Reversing theoretical presumptions that horror is a mixed sentiment comprised of fascination and disgust, or that horror names a fascination with violence, the essay positions Martyrs as part of an alternative philosophical lineage that posits a fascination with form itself constitutes a mode of violence. Martyrs cinematically demonstrates the impersonal, non-embodied violence of a fascination with formal possibility, one shared by horror and metaphysics.

The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn’t move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory. From the start, greedy to play a role, scenes take their position in memory: often I feel this, I foresee this, at the very moment when these scenes are forming.—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

Fascination is neither knowledge nor ignorance: It is an enigmatic relation to what we do not know, a response to other imaginaries, other musics, other strange gods. We can call it, in a first approximation, a paracritical mode of attention.—Ackbar Abbas, “Dialectic of Deception”

Yeah, I like you in that like I like you to screamBut if you open your mouth, then I can’t be responsibleFor quite what goes in or to care what comes outSo just pull on your hair, just pull on your pout—The Cure, “Fascination Street”

Fascination and [X]

and, conj., adv., and n.
from the Old English ond, ‘thereupon, next’
I. Coordinating. Introducing a word, phrase, clause, or sentence,
which is to be taken side by side with, along with, or in addition to,
that which precedes it.
* Connecting words.
1. a. Simply connective.

Almost all discussions of the aesthetic-affective mode called horror arrive at some point at the foundational assertion that horror is a mixed sentiment comprised of fascination and negative affect. Sometimes this formulation is given as a dialectic of fascination and disgust, fascination and revulsion, fascination and abhorrence, fascination and anxiety, even fascination and boredom. In The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart, Noël Carroll insists that fascination is the affect most central to “art-horror”; what mitigates the fear and disgust that the ontological impropriety of the monster compels is that “this fascination can be savored, because the stress in question is not behaviorally pressing” (190). In Powers of Horror Julia Kristeva describes her theory of abjection as “a discourse around the braided horror and fascination” (209) that names a seductive yet rejected and oblique meaning for the constitutively incomplete yet speaking subject. In volume two of The Accursed Share, Bataille writes that one’s fascination is ethically bound to what most disgusts, most horrifies: “If they horrify us, objects that otherwise would have no meaning take on the highest value in our eyes” (104). This critical genealogy insists that horror turns on a dialectical oscillation between a negative affective pole or cluster and an undertheorized placeholder given by the name fascination. That oscillation is asymmetrical and nonreciprocal: the fascination and the mixed sentiment comprise an overwhelming compensatory pleasure that, each time, without fail, compromises, redeems, mitigates, colors, accents, domesticates, supersedes, even obliterates the negativity of whatever X stands in the place of that negative affective pole or cluster.

The bond between revulsion and fascination is not a recent phenomenon or structure of thought—it dates back at least as far as the founding texts of metaphysics. Consider the story of Leontius in Plato’s Republic: “on his way up from the Piraeus under the outer side of the northern wall, becoming aware of dead bodies that lay at the place of public execution at the same time felt a desire to see them and a repugnance and aversion, and that for a time he resisted and veiled his head, but overpowered in despite of all by his desire, with wide staring eyes he rushed up to the corpses and cried, There, ye wretches, take your fill of the fine spectacle!” (682). The Greek description of the spectacle uses the term kalon, which means “fine or beautiful,” “admirable or noble.” It confers a worthiness of being-attended-to that is simultaneously reproached, presenting an ironic juxtaposition of the language of the ideals of beauty and the appetitive lure of what is ugly or base, at once debased and debasing. Fascination in relation to violence thus comes to name an attraction that draws affective, aesthetic attention towards something while also compelling critical if not kinetic retreat. Fascination as a type of conscripted curiosity names an epistemological drive (to know, to know more) that functions against a revulsion marked as naming epistemic reluctance or resistance (the drive above all not to know, the flailing impossible wish to unlearn); in a final rotation, fascination recursively comes to name the sticky Western philosophical fascination with the capacity of fascination to coexist with an empty placeholder for negative affectivity as such and in general.

The conceptual bond between fascination and bad feelings points to a meta-textual experience lodged at the origin of philosophical aesthetics itself: a critical fascination with the question of how negative affect can be pleasurable under certain aesthetic constraints or in certain aesthetic contexts. Is tragedy corrupting or purgative, inciting or pedagogical? Why spectators would seek out occasions for unpleasurable feelings is a question fundamental to the broader aesthetics of the negative affects, including Kant’s 1790 prohibition on Ekel (disgust) in The Critique of Judgment—for that which arouses loathing is an ugliness that “cannot be represented in a way adequate to nature without destroying all aesthetic satisfaction, hence beauty in art” (190)—and Freud’s opening rejoinder in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” that “As good as nothing is to be found upon this subject [the uncanny] in comprehensive treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime—that is, with feelings of a positive nature—and with the circumstances and the objects that call them forth, rather than with the opposite feelings of repulsion and distress” (194). In 1757, Hume formulated what has become a general model for this problem: “It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle” (433). More than two hundred years later, Hume’s formulation still has currency as the starting point for aesthetic treatments of horror; James Twitchell follows this blueprint to the letter in Dreadful Pleasures, which asks “why we have been drawn to certain images in art and popular culture that we would find repellent in actuality” (9).

Noël Carroll brings the most robust thinking about Hume’s tragic structure to horror, orienting his exploration in Paradoxes of the Heart around the foundational question: “why would anyone want to be horrified, or even art-horrified?” (158). Carroll repeats this question, “Why horror?” throughout his text with variations: “Why are horror audiences attracted by what, typically (in everyday life), should (and would) repel them?” (158) and “How can horror audiences find pleasure in what by nature is distressful and unpleasant?” (159). Though he revives the Humean aesthetic meta-concern, Carroll’s preferred interlocutor, and the source of his book’s title (that “paradox of the heart”), is the lesser-known poet Anna Laetitia Aikin, author of the 1773 meditation, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror”; for Aikin, “well-wrought scenes of artificial terror” are not themselves pleasurable, but engage “the pain of suspense, and the irresistible desire of satisfying curiosity,” which “once raised, will account for our eagerness to go quite through an adventure, though we suffer actual pain during the whole course of it. We rather choose to suffer the smart pang of a violent emotion than the uneasy craving of an unsatisfied desire” (32). Aikin uses the word “fascination” to extend the affective range of displeasures that are aesthetically endurable, from boredom to extreme sympathetic suffering in cases of representational cruelties:

And it will not only force us through dullness, but through actual torture—through the relation of a Damien’s execution, or an inquisitor’s act of faith. When children, therefore, listen with pale and mute attention to the frightful stories of apparitions, we are not, perhaps, to imagine that they are in a state of enjoyment, any more than the poor bird which is dropping into the mouth of the rattlesnake—they are chained by the ears, and fascinated by curiosity.(32)

Aikin the poetic critic is, of course, in a manner, fascinated by this capture of fascination and curiosity—turning from aesthetic law to metaphor to put to her reader’s imagination the death-dealing snares in which the pale, mute children are caught; the chaining by the ears of these pale, mute children, these children who will reappear not as children in general but as specific, particular children—as Anna, as Lucie, as traumatized little running naked things in the course of this article when I turn to the film Martyrs (but it is not the proper conjunction for this; not yet). Aikin concludes with a hierarchy of aesthetic evaluations, according to which the highest promise of the gothic text, she submits, is the good feeling offered by “surprise from new and wonderful objects,” such that, stimulating the imagination, “the pain of terror is lost in amazement. Hence, the more wild, fanciful, and extraordinary are the circumstances of a scene of horror, the more pleasure we receive from it” (32). Likewise, Carroll resolves his paradoxical presumptions in favor of the deeply pleasurable fascination with and curiosity about the category admixtures that constitute the provocative object of fear and loathing. Ultimately, the reason the analytic philosopher’s theory of art-horror requires a monster—conceptually it fails without one—is that that figure is the non-arbitrary site of revulsion, disgust, and fear that simultaneously constitutes a riveting attraction and curiosity, itself enhanced and sustained through narrative structures related to disclosure.

And yet, the form of these questions—Why spectators find horror and its many violences endurable yet pleasurable? Why that fascination? How can fascination mitigate or supersede or suspend or trouble the general unpleasure of negative affect?—cannot, it seems, be left behind: it is the tic of a nervous criticism. So Alex Neill responds to Carroll in an article entitled “On a Paradox of the Heart,” while Berys Gaut quibbles with, and ultimately nullifies, the paradox in “The Paradox of Horror”; years later, considering both of those essays, Katerina Bantinaki pens “The Paradox of Horror: Fear as a Positive Emotion.” Offering a titular interrogatory that crystallizes the emotional puzzle, “Why Horror?: The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre,” Andrew Tudor turns his version of the query into a meta-inquiry—”precisely what we are asking is far from clear”—and then into endless iterations of the question, insisting finally that the question should be “why do these people like this horror in this place at this particular time?” (461). The classical paradox of tragedy, and its contemporary update as/in the paradox of horror, pose a dilemma: paradoxes tense a field; they like to be resolved. In place of aporetic thinking-with undecidability and irresolvability, this affective puzzle of fascination and some negative affect is constantly solved and resolved. Each time, the verdict forgoes and forgets the very negativity of negative affects, supplants it with forms of attentive, attracted fascination that reassert the dominance of pleasure or at least the neutralization of displeasure. This is, in itself, a judgment of value, a way of reviving a priority of the good, the establishment of noncontradiction at the cost of failing to read the negativity of negative affect as such and thereby obliterating the very object one would contemplate.

The insistence on slotting fascination into structures in which it names the general positivity of positive affects, and is always available to mitigate the general negativity of negative affects, makes the history of fascination into a form of violent eradication in which fascination’s ancient bond to wounding, violence, transfixion, and the denaturing work of force is erased or at least suspended—a bond both etymological (fascinare: to bewitch, enchant, with evocations of witchcraft) and mythological-critical, as in Sibylle Baumbach’s summation of the privileged trope of fascination, the petrifying gaze of Medusa, as “a double image of fascination and counter-fascination: she also resembles an unspeakable event, functioning as both a symbol of and a talisman against trauma in a myth that deals with physical and visual assault” (67). Instead, the captivations of fascination (its modern, and accelerating, discursive bond to sublimity, awe, wonder, attraction, desire) supplant those etymological and mythological links to bewitchment, occult forces, the exercise and direct action of maleficence—in other words all performances of harm. In this way, the vicissitudes of fascination are not so unlike the transformations of the word passion, which transitioned in just a few centuries from the early medieval sufferings of Christ on the cross to a seventeenth-century absorption into the episteme of the sentiments—what Diderot dubbed “penchants, inclinations, desires and aversions carried to a certain degree of intensity”—rendering passion akin to “enthusiasm,” or “strong liking,” and even figuring it as the lusty core of erotic love. Fascination, paradoxically, despite its etymological, intellectual-historical, and mythological debts to transfixion and stasis—to what stuns and stills—is thereby put to work for the busiest of philosophical labors: it names the frenetic machine of sublation, defending against the losses and risks of the negative as such. Fascination takes on the speculative burden of a positive project of the negative affects, thereby erasing its own debt to forms of violence. In the long history of an aesthetic philosophy of horror, violence is the constant companion of fascination—and my argument here does not attempt to cleave the two so much as to insert a rotation and infidelity at the heart of their intimate relation. In place of the conventional understanding of horror as comprising a fascination and X combined in a sentimental structure, and in place of assuming that horror narrates fascination with violence, positions shared by the diverse theoretical camps named at the outset, my claim is that horror, rather, is an attestation of a logic of the violence of fascination, or, rather, of a specific type of fascination, a fascination with an eidos or a visible form, a fascination that is to be thought as itself a mode of violence. Horror will come to name the aesthetic mode that attempts to literalize what it is for fascination not to mitigate violence or make violence tolerable, even pleasurable, but to constitute a mode of violence that is coextensive with textual form. And by literalize, in relation to a mode of violence coextensive with textual form, I specifically mean formalize. In formalizing a mode of violence that is coextensive with a fascination with textual form, horror becomes a privileged site for testing formalism’s own aporias, ultimately bearing out something of a law for an ethics of formalism: a formalism that refuses to linger with visible forms, continually relocating itself with what undoes visible form, but formally so. Rejecting foundational presumptions about the relation of horror to form, such as Twitchell’s claim that “the experience of horror is first physiological, and only then maybe numinous” (11), figuring horror as an immanent experience of the body such that “the instructions embedded in horror resist literary, especially formalist, interpretation” (17), I argue that horror constitutes an ultraformalism, that it puts on display form’s own (terribly) risky and unavoidable bond to violence. This ultraformalism does not require that we renounce formalism but, in fact, that we pursue it through the maze as far as we can.

Fascination with [X]

with, prep., adv., and conj.
from the Old English wið, against, opposite, toward or by or near
I. Denoting opposition and derived notions (separation; motion towards).
1. a. In a position opposite to; over against
b. In exchange, return, or payment for
2. Of conflict, antagonism, dispute, injury, reproof, competition, rivalry, and the like:
In opposition to, adversely to
5. a. Towards, in the direction of
II. Denoting personal relation, agreement, association, connection, union, addition.
* Senses denoting primarily activity towards or influence upon a person or thing.

While it now means space, means towards or near, with used to mean force,
meant against or opposite: the Old English wið færstice meant
against a sudden, stabbing, violent pain—

And so which is it, really? What is against, as in battle, as in what injures, directs force,
or what is in exchange for, as in reciprocity or barter; what is asunder as in
what moves farther and farther apart, or as in what inches towards
or in the direction of,
as in friendship, as in love?

Push-pull: the separation and the conjunction at once.
A tension that could tear some, any form apart.

Pascal Laugier’s 2008 film Martyrs, sometimes awarded the mantle of “New Extremism” or considered “torture porn” (itself a designation and denigration of what ostensibly ought (a moral judgment) to count as an object of spectatorial, critical, or fannish fascination), is a privileged testing ground for the way horror speculatively grapples with the violent logic of fascination. First and foremost, the film’s narrative obsessively turns on fascination, understood in its modern sense as a mode of attraction or interest or affective-epistemic captivation. From the viewpoint of the agental cause of violence in the film’s narrative structure, it is nothing but the alibi for a fascination with violence all the way down.

Martyrs has a strict AB structure, consisting of two halves in hypotactic relation; the violent cleaving at the film’s midpoint leaves many viewers disoriented. The film opens in medias res with a young girl, Lucie, running towards the camera in a frantic state of corporeal disrepair. The cause of her hysteria is articulated through psychoanalytic and anthropological discourse in the first half of the film, which presents a narrative of her unimaginable torture and abuse. The mute, traumatized creature is safely placed in an orphanage in the first half of the film, and is befriended by a girl named Anna, who becomes her protector. Still in the first part of the film, the text jumps forward fifteen years to depict the morning rituals and unremarkable domestic conversation of a family at this point unknown to the viewer. At the ring of the doorbell, a grown Lucie stands in the frame. She murders the two adults and two children in an explicit, protracted, nearly wordless sequence. Anna then shows up to care for her friend, and she, like the viewer, is left in doubt as to whether Lucie imagined a connection between her childhood abuse and this anonymous family. The film’s near lack of dialogue, overt refusal to confirm causality, and Lucie’s hallucinations and eventual suicide frustrate epistemic closure, framing the narrative as either a revenge tragedy that has concluded too quickly, or an ironic if vicious melodrama about the potentially asymmetrical and unpredictable (and complicit, guilt osmotic) reactions to violence by those who suffer extreme trauma.

The second half begins at the exact midpoint of the film when Anna, cleaning up the corpses and the blood splattered around the house, opens the doors to a wooden hutch, finds a staircase leading into the basement, and proceeds to descend into a cavernous wall. Like the film’s beginning, the B-part begins without apparent cause and without words. Ultimately, it validates Lucie’s account of events, confirming that the murdered parents did have a direct hand in her abuse as a child. Simultaneously, the B-section dispenses entirely with the narrative of the first part of the film as a subject of concern or attention. The second half of the film, in other words, withdraws any and all cathectic spectatorial investments in the story of Lucie, burying them as unceremoniously as the corpses of Lucie and the family, which are thrown into a ditch by a group of bureaucrats after Anna’s descent into the wall. The mass grave does not just include the cast of the first half of the film, save for Anna—it also brutally dismisses the epistemic, ethical, and formal conceits of the first half. Part A is endured solely to be rendered irrelevant; it solicits an aesthetic interest in order to announce through a volta that the text itself no longer retains any interest, or finds any value, in its own preliminary structure.

The underground—the second part of the film—produces epistemic closure about Lucie’s childhood through a new rhetorical mode governed by epistemic abundance. If the first half of the text is marked by extreme doubt, the second opens with excessive confirmation, presenting an overt attestation to what is now happening (with what motivation, cause, reasoning) and what is going to happen (with what process, methodology, consequence). A woman known only as Mademoiselle explains to Anna that she is in charge of a sect obsessed with the literal question of metaphysics, the ta meta ta phusika: What is beyond, or after, the physics? What is beyond the world of being? After decrying how easy it is to create a victim (she intones the protocol: “It’s so easy to create a victim. You lock someone in a dark room. They begin to suffer. You feed that suffering methodically, systematically, and coldly. And make it last.”), Mademoiselle praises the counter-case of the martyr: “Martyrs are exceptional people. They survive pain, they survive total deprivation. They bear all the sins of the earth. They give themselves up, they transcend themselves. […] They are transfigured.”

There are at least three modes of fascination demonstrated in Martyrs: first, and most plainly, the narrative superstructure that retroactively sutures together the two halves of the film, presenting the cult’s fascination with the martyr as a rare, exceptional case of perseverance through suffering, a remaining-alive while glimpsing death, a fascination with the knowledge uniquely accessible to the ecstatic martyr, a knowledge the cult seeks (a Gnostic fascination); second, the visual fascination shared by both the cult and the film with the image of the martyr in a liminal state, evident in the magnified photographs of tortured martyrs on the wall and in Mademoiselle’s photographic archive of transformed and transfigured faces, which are presented through a haptic, pre-technological montage as she turns pages in a perverse album. The figure that condenses epistemic and visual fascination exemplifies the last stage of martyr-production: the suspension of Anna’s body and its flaying, an act that reminds one that a lineage dating back to Francis Bacon bonds scientific experiment and the discovery of knowledge to the language of torture (he advocated putting nature “on the rack,” forcing it to reveal its inmost secrets). The third mode emerges in light of the presumed commercial investment in a positive fascination with the capacity of the spectator to endure intense negative affective experiences, which can be seen, for example, when Martyrs is considered “New Extremism” or “torture porn.” The aesthetic privileges the opened body and unwavering images of fluids, viscera, and all manner of abject stuff and matter, and provides minimal metanarrative diversions or alibis.

The film thereby attempts the project that it depicts the sect undertaking—to formalize the conditions for the possibility of fascination with a visible appearance, with the possibility of a successful attestation and demonstration of a limit—a project to which both spectators and adherents are bound as their singular drive. The film obsessively tracks the sect’s obsessive efforts to martyr Anna; it dispenses with extraneous projects and ends at the task’s culmination. Not unlike The Odyssey, which Blanchot interprets as organized around Ulysses’s meeting with—and fascination with, survival of, endurance despite—the Sirens, Martyrs is organized around a single event: the martyring-but-not-yet-extinguishing of Anna. Blanchot’s formula for the conversion of a fascinating encounter into the communication of fascination on the level of narrative begins with the general formulation that “something has happened, something which someone has experienced who tells about it afterwards, in the same way that Ulysses needed to experience the event and survive it to become Homer, who told about it” (109). The narrative of fascination with an “exceptional event,” however is also a transformation of that endurance: “[I]f we regard the tale as the true telling of an exceptional event which has taken place and which someone is trying to report, then we have not even come close to sensing the true nature of the tale. The tale is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where the event is made to happen” (Blanchot 109). In Martyrs the event of fascination with a visage, enduring the limits of the most extreme cruelty, is made to happen; it is not narrated or reported on, but is the event itself of encountering, studying, being fascinated by (as in, attending to) the visible form of that limit state of transcendence. The text is nothing but that event, occurring solely to the extent that Anna persists in enduring it; the sect is nothing but the effort to make the unbearable event of survival (despite what is taking place) possible to bear. Both signify above all that unbearable process, the toleration of the intolerable in time. For Blanchot, fascination with the violence of the encounter and with the survival of this violence is the necessary precondition for the tale, for relating the encounter as event. Commuting writing to witnessing in its ineluctably visual register, the final title card in Martyrs traces the etymology of martyr back through marturos to the French témoin, meaning “witness”—but with whose witnessing is the film most fascinated? Whether the tortured (body, subject) or the spectatorial (body, subject) is the ultimate martyr of the work is the central question that the film invites.

However, it is not the right question to pose of the film. For the question operates at the expense of a different question altogether (one has to choose, that is: it is either to be and or with or ?). Put another way, one should not take the film’s posing of this question at face value or in good faith. It is not the question that actually permits a confrontation with how the violence and negative aesthetic-affectivity of horror work. These dominant readings of fascination as fascination with in Martyrs share the problematic use of the term with which I began, presuming that fascination functions as a positive analogue of attention and curiosity, the drive to look offsetting an affective negativity opposed and exterior to it. These approaches are marred by their fundamental inability to speak to the aesthetic language of the second half of the film without converting it into a mere instrument of visual displeasure, or an index of intensity for a spectator positively fascinated by their own capacity to endure that displeasure. Unable to speak to the way the torture sequences of the second half are themselves formalized in Martyrs, these readings convert torture into a positive object of fascination, its violence thereby erased by this conversion into spectacle. In the next section, I recover an alternative philosophical thinking of fascination and suggest that the only way to account for violence and form in Martyrs is to see the film as part of a philosophical lineage that posits a fascination with form as itself constituting a mode of violence.

Fascination as [X]

as, adv., conj., pron.
c. 1200, worn-down form of Old English alswa “quite so, wholly so,”
literally “all so” (as in: also)
Phrase as well “just as much” is recorded from late 15c.;
the phrase also can imply “as well as not,” “as well as anything else.”
Phrase as if, in Kantian metaphysics (als ob).
Phrase as it were “as if it were so” is attested from late 14c.

The idea that fascination itself be thought as a form of violence is at the heart of Derrida’s essay “La forme et la façon,” his preface to Alain David’s 2001 Racisme et antisemitisme. Derrida views David as suggesting that the “originary crime” of racism and anti-Semitism is “privileging form and cultivating formal limits” (“la faute quasiment originelle du racisme et de l’antisemitisme consiste it privilegier la forme et it cultiver la limite formelle”; 15). By this he means that the violence of racism results from a primary investment in form and from the limitations it poses. Catastrophic violence is driven by this obsession with a purity of form, which posits within its own thinking a threatening contamination of that purity. Derrida writes that the violence of such evil pivots on “rien d’autre que la forme elle-même, la fascination pour la forme, c’est-à-dire pour la visibilité d’un certain contour organique ou organisateur, un eidos, si l’on veut, et donc une idéalisation, un idéalisme même en tant qu’il institute la philosophie même, la philosophie ou la métaphysique en tant que telle” (“nothing other than form itself, the fascination for form, that is for the visibility of a certain organic and organizing contour, an eidos, if you will, and thus an idealization, an idealism itself insofar as it institutes philosophy itself, philosophy or metaphysics”; 10). Note that the promiscuous même runs through Derrida’s accusation of la fascination pour la forme: as in very, even, the same, itself, a self-folding, self-referring accusation of a kinship, an even-the-very-sameness-as-itself of a fascination with form that belongs equally to violence and to philosophical thinking.

Unlike (and in some tension with) Derrida’s other treatments of racism—for example, his reading of apartheid in “The Last Word of Racism,” the piece in which he pronounces, “there’s no racism without a language,” such that it “is not that acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they have to have a word” (292)—here the violence of racism and anti-Semitism is rendered as fastening to a fascination with a visible form. If, in the earlier piece, the linguistic violence of racism “institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes” and is a “system of marks,” something that “outlines space in order to assign forced residence or to close off borders” (292), in “La forme et la façon” visible form (la forme: shape, appearance) organizes via delimiting processes as if it were a natural or inevitable form, as opposed to what marks distinctions and boundaries and differences as the essential workings of language. The subtitle for Derrida’s preface indeed vows “(plus jamais: envers et contre tout, ne plus jamais penser ça ‘pour la forme’)” (“never again: against all odds, do not ever think ‘merely formal'”). What is never to be done again is to act “pour la forme,” for form’s sake, to do something only superficially or perfunctorily or rhetorically (or what is never again to happen is to insist that something done is merely for form’s sake, only just for formality’s sake, what is pro forma). The problem here is that of qualification: mere, only, just. The danger of being pro forma, however, is also the risk of all formalisms. The more resolute the formalism, the more this risk of a fascination with form as a mode of violence, an acceptance of its perversion, an acceding to its idealisms. Despite the fact that, of course, Derrida’s preface is nothing but a thinking of, a being-in-the-service-of a thinking of, what is for—as in towards, as in thinking before, in the face of, in the presence of, for the sake of, an advocacy of—this very problem of the question of form (for philosophy). Thus, in his own writing, Derrida promises an erasure and effacement of the labor and discourse of the metaphysical philosophy he simultaneously writes and is bound to (fastened to)—”J’ai déjà commis les deux péchés (philosophiques! si la philosophie peut pécher!), les deux délits incriminés par Alain David. Ce serait d’ailleurs une seule et même faute: délimiter en donnant forme ou en croyant voir une forme.” (“I have already committed the two sins (philosophical ones, if philosophy can sin!), the two offenses incriminated by Alain David. It would be one and the same fault: to demarcate by giving form or in believing to see a form“; 11).

Acknowledging that it is a surprise that “une chose aussi abstraite, la forme, la limitations, la limitation par la forme” (“such an abstract thing, form, limitations, the limitation by form”) is to be regarded as so horrific, as what “déforme la forme, à savoir le monstrueux” (“deforms form, namely the monstrous”; 11), Derrida writes that it is the “désir de la forme et de la limitation formelle” that “produire due tératologique” (“it is the desire for form and for formal limitation that produces monstrous anomalies”; 11). Racism and anti-Semitism are iterations of the idealism of philosophical thinking’s fascination with the question of essence, the foundational “What is it?” of the study of being in Western metaphysics. Philosophy, misrecognizing its own debt to the notion of the “objectivity of form,” is unable to see how its own passion for a purity and generalizability of formal delimitation colludes with the monstrosities of the worst violence. David’s book, as Derrida reads it, comes to constitute a critique of form as such, putting “form on trial”—and in turn, David’s counterproposal is a new phenomenology that would be based on the limitless and on a responsibility to affirm what is unlimited (with strong affinities to the ethical thinking of Levinas), to interrupt form and to exceed a formalism of limits aligned with visibility and the gaze.

Jean-Luc Nancy pushes the logic of the violence of metaphysics and form even further; in “Image and Violence” he suggests that particularly excessive violence involves a fascination with a specific form. Violence, he finds, is not only monstrous, but “monstrative” (21): violence is what “exposes itself as figure without figure” (17). All violence thus makes an image of itself, imposing and enacting a specific visual fascination with a specific aesthetic possibility. As Nancy writes, “Cruelty takes its name from bloodshed (cruor, as distinct from sanguis, the blood that circulates in the body). He who is cruel and violent wants to see blood spilt. [ … ] He who is cruel wants to appropriate death: not by gazing into the emptiness of the depths, but, on the contrary, by filling his eyes with red (by ‘seeing red’) and with the clots in which life suffers and dies” (24-25). Cruelty is a fascination with “a little puddle of matter” (25), precisely what representation seeks to stand in place of and supplant. If for Derrida philosophy shares the violence of racism’s fascination with form, for Nancy, representation stands as the violence of cruelty’s fascination with rendering a specific form (the “seeing-red” that metonymizes an encounter with a form that can stand in for the real of matter).

The thinker of horror must move away from the claim that Martyrs is either about or performs a “fascination with violence,” and consider the more radical thesis that the film performs “the violence of a fascination with form,” regarding a fascination with form as itself a form of violence, because the second half of the film is nothing but a study of purely formal propositions: the rhythm of frantic, frenzied straining against chains (see fig. 1); the light tones and the sounds of metal rings; the glottal choking panic of Anna’s hysteria.

Fig 1. Laugier, Martyrs (2008).

Having erased and withdrawn the narrative of the first half, having declaimed an exhaustion of the conceit of the second half, the only remaining thing for the text to do is to distend Anna as a form until a sufficient transformation occurs. This rendering of a martyr does not involve the torture (which is to say: twisting and torment) of a body so much as the distortions of pressure, duration, rhythm, chromatic intensity, and the modulations of light that posit the body as nothing but a series of constraints given, limited, and navigated by matters of form. Put another way, the sect is fascinated with the singular limit case of the martyr’s strange ontology, transfixed into a privileged instant in the photographic stills in the basement archive—fascinated, that is, with martyrdom as end (as peras: the limit or boundary of being at the reach of possible still-beingalive-in-death)—while the aesthetic object Martyrs is durationally fascinated with unfolding forms of violation, with martyrdom as means (with the texture, sound, and movement of chains that bind; with the struggling of the pale, mute martyred girl; with the pulsations of forced feeding; with flailing and skinning as light- and chromatic-modulating processes). The two fascinations are simultaneously fascinations with form but they do not line up: one is fascinated with the form of the martyr, the other fascinated with the distensions of aesthetic form that martyring effects. A robust theory of form itself is required, therefore, to account for the multiple ways in which fascination as violence manifests. One place to start is the double sense of the term form itself: not unlike fascination’s etymological vicissitudes, which name both the most unpleasurable (and death-bringing, vulnerable) captivations and simultaneously positive attraction and epistemic-affective conscription, form is a passive description of outward appearance and simultaneously a determining and shaping active principle. Because it can refer to a Platonic idea or a sensible shape; because it may mean the formation or arrangement of something in and of itself, or, by contrast, the formation or arrangement as determined in opposition to ideological or historical development or the “real” dimension of critical attention, Raymond Williams phrases its essential tension thusly in Keywords: “It is clear that in these extreme senses form spanned the whole range from the external and superficial to the inherent and determining” (94). Fascination with form, therefore, is not quite like fascination with any other thing, for it is a fascination that is unstable and potentially double, refusing to disclose what precise register of appearance or essence, shape or structure, surface or depth, it addresses.

The film’s fascination with processes of manipulating aesthetic form moves through a study of the lines of force of the chains, the rhythms of struggle and passivity, the negative space of the darkness. Each of these studies extracts formal qualities of rhythm, space, color, angle, and line, to arrive at the final formal transformation and extraction protocol: the suspension of Anna in a large metal wheel and the flaying of all the skin of her body, save for her face. Like the originary account of flaying in Metamorphoses Book VI, lines 387-391, the death of Marsyas about which Ovid writes, “his skin was torn off the whole surface of his body: it was all one raw wound,” the target of fascination (what is unable to resist violence) is also that Anna is “nisi vulnus erat” (“nothing but a wound”). Fascination as violence is not a case of force levied against a subject; rather, this spell cast against another now unable to resist, this event marked by a lack of resistance to bewitchment and harm, is addressed to the form of the body, what torture distorts—in other words, continually makes otherwise, against itself. The body becomes the site of the violent transformation of a limitation, transfixion, and modification by a series of formal constraints.

One sees versions of this in numerous horror films—we are approaching a general definition of horror—so consider, as just one example, Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 reimagining of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, orchestrated around the spectacular transformations, transfixions, and formal modifications of various female bodies, most spectacularly early in the film with the blackmagical joining of the bodies of dancers Susie and Olga (a formal corporeal sympathy), such that as Susie moves through space, dances, leaps, bends, and strains, Olga’s body is forced to mimic the formal coordinates of the dance, will-less and art-less: dance reduced to its formal navigation of force on and through extremities, through limbs and joints and organs. The force of Susie’s dancing compels Olga’s body into new postures, such that the dancing of one form, structured and purposive, is commuted to the dragging of another form, deprived of the freedom to choose aesthetic force and its purposiveness, reduced to nothing but force qua force: Olga’s form is dragged; that form is bent; the form is torn; this form’s structure things (= bones) are made discontinuous (= broken; = fractured); its formal touching parts (= joints) are cleaved (= burst), their formal relation to container, to surface (= skin) made perpendicular (= pierced); one form (= unified) is made multiple, one form (= the upright, linear) is made different (= the spiraled, bent). Olga-as-form is neither deformed nor malformed: this She = a this, and this form is reformed (see fig. 2). From the point of view of the feeling body, the scene is one of agonizing and unending torture and the destruction of essential living form; from the point of view of visible form, the same event is the construction of and generation of and attestation of new forms. Navigating the antinomy of form itself, then, torture recalls its Latin roots from torquere, to twist, turn, wind, wring, distort, refusing to settle in itself the subject of what is twisted, turned, wound, wrung, distorted. Suspiria is not a horror film because it portrays witches or gives a vague affective account of its effect on implied or actual spectators; it is a horror film because it attests to the state in which the deformation of the body in one given form is aesthetically generative of another: the destruction of the body from an anthropocentric perspective is aesthetically generative of a new form of bodily distortion (i.e. a new genre of dance from a compositional perspective). Suspiria does not express a narrative fascination with violence so much as the violence of a fascination with form—fascination as a mode of violence—as precisely what ex-presses new choreographic potential.

Fig 2. Guadagnino, Suspiria (2018).

Martyrs‘s presencing of the resulting formal limit of a torture that twists, turns, and distorts form involves a slow zoom into the flayed face of Anna-cum-martyr. Juxtaposed against Anna’s stasis and transfixion, the camera’s relentless projective movement beyond the borders of the body, beyond the limitation of line into a pure field of color, beyond the image to a blinding field of white light, exposes the materiality of the cinema and the condition of possibility for appearance as such (see fig. 3).

Fig 3. Laugier, Martyrs (2008).

Film form here is fascinated—transfixed and wounded—by an encounter with pure abstraction; it arrives at the blankness of a screen and waits to be given form by inscriptive representation at a time that remains in the future, speculative and inaccessible. Martyrs also cites one of the more famous instances of martyring in the history of film, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (see fig. 4), which itself poses the question of fascination’s bond with both violence and affect. This is why Deleuze calls The Passion of Joan of Arc “the affective film par excellence” (106), setting in place a double relation: the narrative state of things, the all of the what-is-happening that he dubs “the trial,” and the realm of emotions as properties, such as the “anger of the bishop,” Joan’s suffering, her ecstasy and agony. This first relation sets in place a difference between the historical and the emotional, but it still links emotion to individual subjects. The second relation, however, what he dubs the genius of the film and what sets in place “the difference between the trial and the Passion,” is the more essential project of the film: “To extract the Passion from the trial, to extract from the event this inexhaustible and brilliant part which goes beyond its own actualisation, ‘the completion which is never completed'” (106). Faciality is no longer the privileged site for a legibility of emotion but the setting for a distension of film form that extracts passion as a desubjectified affective potential in its awkward angles, distorted framing, and broken-up mise-en-scene. “The affect is like the expressed of the state of things,” Deleuze concludes, “but this expressed does not refer to the state of things, it only refers to the faces which express it” (106). This pure form of affective intensity—a swill of anger, martyrdom, rage, suffering, passion itself—is ineluctably bound to form. No longer narratives about emotions or emotions as properties of characters, aesthetic language bears out the pure intensity of passion itself (see fig. 5).

Fig 4. Dreyer, Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).

Fig 5. Laugier, Martyrs.

This encounter with nothing but form, this attestation of the way the shown shows itself, how illumination is illuminated, and what holds together the cinematic image, is not parasitic on the violence of torture that has denatured Anna; rather, the film unfolds in order that Anna be converted into yet another formal element available for being formally given otherwise. From the point of view of form, martyring is not an act of negation or destruction: rather, the deformation of the body is a pure experiment in the formation of variation, that is, of new forms. It is not, as Tim Palmer has it, that new extremisms and horrors are cinemas of the body; rather, they are nothing but cinemas of form. Or, if cinemas of the body, they are cinemas of the body rendered nothing but form. If one follows Palmer’s cinéma du corps, “an on-screen interrogation of physicality in brutally intimate terms” (171), which regards Martyrs ‘ “sadistic torture chambers” (133) as targeting a corpus, the violence remains at the level of a fascination with a visible form (the body). But the interest of horror, as in its investment, what it profits from, is not in fascination with but fascination as the action itself of changing forms into new forms. Fascination as violence in the violence of a fascination with form is precisely this: to the extent that the text commits to a fascination with formal possibility, it rescinds a textual place that would nominate torture’s violence as being on the side of negation or erasure or ruination. Torture, from the point of view of form, is always and inherently aesthetically generative.

Horror is a formal act of decision. Horror is the formal act of decision to regard the body as a form subject to formal constraints, restraints, possibilities, and re- and de-formations and re-and de-formative possibilities.

Horror is the attestation of the state in which torture is ethically neutral but aesthetically interesting.

To refuse to regard the body as a form (in other words, to speculatively retain torture for a critique of violence) is to linger solely with the first half of the film, to put torture to work for what Nancy dubs the realm of meaning: “the element in which there can be significations, interpretations, representation” (22). In that case, the body would remain a body, the torture an ethical abomination. But this requires that we shield our eyes like Leontius and do not look upon the second half of the film. To look, however, and to encounter the formalist attestations of the second part of Martyrs, is to encounter the body stripped of meaning, put on display as formally navigable, which is to say, also indestructible because its form can always be made otherwise. Horror is not the affective-aesthetic mode that puts on display violence done to bodies. My redescription of horror is that it is the affective-aesthetic mode in which violence can, in fact, never be done to the body: the body is made a form, violence to which produces a new form; the body is posited as that for which infinite variations in its formal constitution are possible. Torture, reading, fascination—each thus names the realm of apeiron, of the unlimited and limitless, while each is, simultaneously, within its own thinking, bound to the violence of the boundary, the limit, finitude.

This reversal comes, of course, at an extraordinary critical cost. There is no critique of violence possible within a speculative grappling with horror because horror imagines violence only ever as monstrative, as the condition of possibility for generating the aesthetic. This is coextensive with its formal language: the motor of possibility for its textual continuance is the infinite destructibility of the human imagined as the infinite variability of its form. The conventional reading of Martyrs as demonstrating a fascination with violence never need think horror as such because horror is continually converted into the anti-horrifying, entirely genial, and positive lessons of liberal critique. However, to take seriously fascination as a form of violence requires the critic herself to defend this with her own speculative fascination with reading closely, even obsessively, always with an unhealthy fixation, the details of textual form. This is the most extreme, the last, violence: the transfixion of criticism by the very logic of force one would purport to think, now no longer from the safe distance of the outside, but squarely in the absorptive maw of the structure of fascination itself.

All things come at some cost. Closely reading for form can no longer be obviously claimed for anti-violence.

The question for the formalist is not unlike the question that the metaphysical philosopher puts to himself: how and when and where and with what inevitability have I erred here? How, then, to proceed? If formalisms (as aesthetic or interpretive strategy) share a homological structure with violence in a fascination with a visible form such that we must think fascination as violence, what antidote or reinvention of formalism sidesteps this unwanted intimacy? One answer is to fight tooth and nail, skin and all viscera, against the conversion of form into the intelligible, and to refuse to allow form to remain defined as a partial sense of a visible static shape or appearance (as it is by the sect, and the film, and by plenty of weak formalists as well): to refuse, that is, transfixion’s fixations, fascination’s bond to stasis, and to put back into formalism its motor, its movement, its process, its circulation. Let it go; risk a loss (of control, of payoff); let it stir; let it churn. This requires relinquishing the association of formalism with the recovery of (static, knowable, fixed, given) forms and instead demands that formalism name an unsatisfied, relentless, interminable grappling with the antinomies of form, failing to produce readings that pay out dividends (call them ethical metanarratives, historical analogues, whatever) and instead retaining reading as process, the business of interpretation with what in form remains speculative and as-yet unthought, naming the antidote to a violence that would take the form of a fascination with a visible given appearance. In the language of wonder that continually edges fascination, the critical praxis must not convert fascination with form as the drive of thought into a fascination with intelligible forms (including the very ones that Martyrs seduces: that Anna and Lucie are female; that they are both non-white; that the film moves through nothing but institutions, theological, psychiatric, familial, etc.…).

One must, as it were, take seriously the film’s final cruelty from Mademoiselle as a charge for thought. It takes a double form. After she alone has received Anna’s ecstatic whisper, Mademoiselle insists, “It admitted of no interpretation.” Of her sect’s access to whatever it is that admits of no interpretation, she cruelly declares to the rest of the group “Doutez,” and proceeds to her suicide, taking the revelation with her. The English translation of the film’s dialogue gives it as “Keep doubting,” though douter names a broader register of temporal waverings: to hesitate, procrastinate, linger, defer, put off, delay. Doutez names a truly radical formalism, letting form function as the rootedness of uncertain speculative claims: what names a demand for the work of ongoing reading; what refuses to let fascination resolve into the mere recovery of prior forms, retaining what admits of nothing but an unceasing doubt, in perpetual parenthetical worries about errors of thought that must nonetheless impose themselves; what fails to linger with fascination’s transfixions, instead remaining bound to the vital energies of deriving no interest or profit from reading and yet continuing to read nonetheless. A formalism that could be claimed by nonviolence, that can be claimed for ethics, requires that it be taken to its most extreme limit. If there is a fascination at the heart of a radical formalism that would enable speculative thought about the ethical—and resist Derrida’s and Nancy’s warnings of a formalism perfectly amenable to cooptation by violence, cruelty, fascism, and racism—it is nothing but the risk of allowing the theorist’s fascination with form to never arrive at a final interpretation, nor imagine that any visible form does not require further reading. The antidote to what admits of no interpretation is what admits of nothing but interpretation all the way down. An ongoing risk of a fascination with form that wields itself as a form of violence is risky because ongoing, ongoing because risky. Neither God nor grammar promises the conjunction that would keep aesthetics and brutality (error, force) sufficiently apart. And yet, there is no other way a thinking of violence can go if it is not to merely shield its eyes from the start. So look. And read. Take your formal fill of all fine spectacles. But never for the first time; never for the last.

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