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Times have changed since Hugo Münsterberg's day, when his reluctant encounter with the Spiritualists testified to the persistence of the mystical within an age of scientific progress. Yet the presence of soul in contemporary film theory, whether it is placed under erasure by deconstructive thinking, or embraced less hesitantly, albeit briefly or in passing, suggests its tenaciousness in an age that is once again characterized by signal scientific advances. That the brain is now more likely to be posited as the seat of selfhood is reflected in Tom Wolfe's response in 1996 to the rise of brain imaging, and is epitomized succinctly in the title of his article on the subject: "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died".¹ Whether everyone would agree that such advances testify to the loss of soul, or whether people would see them as proof that we never had one in the first place, as Slavoj Žižek opines,² they raise the spectre of a definition of the human that went out of fashion with the rise of post-structuralist theoretical thinking but can now be enquired into again.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137328588_5

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