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This vision of the body, described by the filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux in a special edition of the Cahiers du Cinéma in 2000, is a chaotic and perplexing one. It is a primeval body: one that bears a direct relationship to the bodies first inscribed by prehistoric man on the caves of Lascaux (see Bataille 1955 or Blanchot 1984). It is a fragile body: hallucinatory, feverish, suffering in its attempts to represent itself to itself. That failed representation is also constitutive of a productive failure to account for or produce subjectivity from within that hallucinatory, quivering body. It is also a formless body: opaque and shaped by darkness, only to be eviscerated and exposed by light, and indeed, by representation itself. Representation, as a form of showing, or a manifestation of signification, dematerialises this body at the moment of its encounter.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137283740_6

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