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Intimacies and the Anxieties of Cinematic Flesh: Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis stages a conversation among phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and film, seeking the energy that dramas have when they grow beyond a mere pair of voices. Aristotle says it was Sophocles who brought a third actor into tragedy, and whether or not he did, we see for ourselves how Sophocles explored the possibilities latent in exchanges among three parties. One person speaks while the others respond in different ways to the speaker’s words.
Likewise, in this new book from Patrick Fuery, what could have remained an academic face-off between phenomenology and psychoanalysis keeps getting complicated by a cinematic scene that sends us back to the traditional disciplines to reconceive what they’d said.
Unlike such figures from tragedy as Electra and Clytemnestra, phenomenology and psychoanalysis as Fuery understands them do not need to remain at odds. He seeks resolutions in which the two approaches to human consciousness prove compatible with each other. Whereas the third party in Sophocles may bring news that crushes Electra while it calms Clytemnestra, cinema in its role as third participant in this book’s conversation offers experiences that mediate between the phenomenological and psychoanalytic conceptions of consciousness. It helps phenomenology and psychoanalysis each see what its fellow account of consciousness is thinking about.
The experiences that come from cinema concern intimacy and flesh. This book sometimes takes these terms concretely and sometimes interprets them most metaphorically, depending on the theme of any given chapter. After a first chapter that maps the terrain of the book with reference to Kierkegaard’s “Nothing” as occasion for anxiety, the remaining five situate intimacy and anxiety amid: the passage of time; space as externality; the “ir-Real” unconscious; wildness; the sexual nightmare. Each time, phenomenology (mostly in the person of Husserl, but also Merlea