"The Return to Enunciation"

Looking back through John Mowitt's book, Re-takes has taken me back to the glorious nightmares of reading Lacan's 11th seminar last semester.  In particular, this statement: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think".  The human (ego) cannot be (soley) located at the site (sight) of its thinking.  

This reminds me of some work I did on humanism last semester.  Reading Américo Castro, I argued that (Renaissance) humanism was always "en medio de camino" and requires an outside to predicate its "humanness".  This already confuses the supposed gap between human/nonhuman.  In a phrase that I very much enjoy, Morton calls this borderline "thick and permeable".  Yes. 

Back to the Seminar, Lacan distinguishes the hidden (occult) cause from a law (which "absorbs" causal chain).  Énoncé gives way to limps, gaps, gasps, slips and faltering and shows what lurks around a discourse.  

As M. points out, this terminology seeps into Metz, to think about cinema as impersonal enunciation.  Cinema's medium is always full of a double absence.  It is composed of fictitious story and then of absent images.

This complicates the phenomenology of landscapes.  Metz explains: "[cinema] presents us with long sequences in which only inanimate objects, landscapes, etc. appear and which for minutes at a time offer no human form for spectator identification: yet the latter must be supposed to remain intact in its deep structure, since at such moments the film works just as well as it does at others, and whole films (geographical documentaries, for example) unfold intelligibly in such conditions" (412).  We might question Metz as he glosses over the presence of the nonhuman here.  It seems to work until we look too closely.  What if the film is trying to look too closely at the relationship between a landscape and its (human) creator? I think this is what Rocha is doing in O deus e o diabo na terra do sol.  Resources, landscapes, mythical terrifying gods, Antônio das Mortes guns, dead animals all have their terrible effect and presence on the human.  In this film, it becomes even more terrifying because we do not always see the cause, but witness the characters perception of their ensuing deaths.