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While Freud stressed the existence of the ego as first and foremost a bodily ego, film theorists since the 1980s who have responded critically to psychoanalysis, especially the Lacanian dimension explored in depth by Metz, have argued that questions of embodiment are better addressed by turning to other theories. Steven Shaviro went so far as to call the psychoanalytic model "utterly bankrupt" in his book The Cinematic Body, and the paradigm shift that his own project announces draws principally from the work of Deleuze and Félix Guattari.¹ Deleuze's philosophy in particular has been central to other moves beyond psychoanalytic, semiotic, and semiological theory in recent years, not least of which is that effected by Laura U. Marks in her work on haptics (inspired by a return to Alois Riegl's scholarship but facilitated through Deleuze's work on cinema and tactility).² Rather than interpretative penetration of the object of study, the spectator-cum-theorist posits body-to-body contact with the materiality of film that is understood through the senses in the first instance. The interest in the body on the part of contemporary film theorists stretches beyond issues of spectatorship, and the literal focus on embodied responses to film, to the representation of bodies in film, or indeed to the question of the "film's body" (Vivian Sobchack; Jennifer M. Barker) or the "cinematic body" (Raymond Bellour).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137328588_4

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