7KH6RFLHW\RIWKH6SHFWUDO

Serge Margel, Eva Yampolsky

diacritics, Volume 40, Number 3, Fall 2012, pp. 6-25 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/dia.2012.0008

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v040/40.3.margel.html

Access provided by New York University (6 Apr 2015 03:12 GMT)

THE SOCIETY OF
THE SPECTRAL

SERGE MARGEL

The body of a star could open a new interpretative horizon of the body-machine, along
with its representations, its theater, and its staging. The definition of a body-machine
lies between two hypotheses: the repressed body and the utopian body. The first is closed,
limited, censored, withdrawn, oppressed, watched over, controlled, always directly involved in a political field, writes Michel Foucault. It is engaged in power relations that
invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies,
to emit signs.1 The utopian body is open to multiple, even infinite forces, existing in
an unlimited state, under a spell, imbued with possibilities, virtualities, or power that
place the body in communication with secret powers and invisible forces,2 according
to Foucault, between repression and utopia, enclosure and opening, at the limit of extremes and on the threshold of tension. Not only does the body-machine exist between
these two hypotheses, but it is also here that the body maintains a secret relation to its
own death, its specter, or ghost. I will proceed by suggesting something quite simple:
the expression body-machine can also be understood as power over death, a power,
a force, a virtus that always acts between repression and utopia, enclosure and opening,
censorship and freedom. More importantly, it is a power that expresses and stages itself
within our Western, Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian culture, through a signifying chain
of exemplarities, or by the challenge of exemplary bodies, hybrid and mixed, as that of a
hero, a martyr, a saint, an angel, like the kings two bodies or, as is increasingly the case,
like the body of a star.3
The body of a star, or the exemplarity of power over death that marks the unworked
(dsuvr), disillusioned, disenchanted world of modernity, today evokes the implications of such bodily power, once it becomes body-machine. From Marlene Dietrichs Garters to James Deans Jeans, a possible alternative title of this text, offers two exemplary
modalities or, to put it more simply, two figures, embodiments, or forms of the staging
of a death machine that announces the body in its hybridity. By evoking the machinery
that exists between production and deception and between industry and trickery, from
merchandise to farce, I want to focus specifically on the stage, or the act of staging, but
also on the obscene: that which is behind the scenes, withdrawn, in a gesture similar to
the way one rolls up ones sleeves or turns a glove inside out. According to Jean Baudrillard, the obscene is the body that covers itself in its own secretions, that appears, represents itself, exposes itself, or reveals its secrets.4 It is a body that stages itself in and by
its secretions, one that secretly manifests or renders externally visible what it produces
internally. Secretion quite obviously concerns the question of the secretof secret
powers and invisible forces, in Foucaults wordsthat expose themselves in all their
obscenity, though discreetly, within the signifying chain of exemplarities that in our case
is the body of a star: its esthetic, rhetoric, and grammar, known as glamour. My sole argument here is this: glamour is the grammar of the obscene.
But lets return to the body-machine: a body that is machine, that is nothing but
machine, and perhaps also a body that machinates, and therefore one that, according
to the definition given by Le Robert, secretly creates plots or schemes that are contrary
to honesty and lawfulness. Machinating implies mixing up, tricking, plotting, scheming,
DIACRITICS Volume 40.3 (2012) 623 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Serge Margel teaches philosophy at the

University of Lausanne and visual anthropology at the Geneva School of Art
and Design. For the past several years,
his work has focused on cultural production, especially on discursive methods
used by the human sciences, literature,
and art. He has published numerous
books, including Alination: Antonin
Artaud. Les gnalogies hybrides (2008)
and Les archives fantmes: Recherches
anthropologiques sur les institutions de la
culture (2013).
Translated by Eva Yampolsky

DIACRITICS>>2012>>40.3

processing, but also conspiring or intriguing. And yet, what is it about the body-machine
that makes us say that it machinates, and how must one understand the internal link,
secret but sovereign, between the machine and machination? What we are concerned
with here is the secretto manipulate is to form secretlybut also with the secretion
that secretes the body-machines power over death. Drawing a hasty conclusion, one
could already claim that the body-machine is a body that secretly constructs a relation
of sovereignty to its death or disappearance, creating the secrecy of its death, which,
as we will see, secretes on itself a surface of illusion, the image of its disappearance, of
its ghost or specter. Here, the Latin machina necessarily implies an ingenious means
of obtaining results. And this is precisely what the machine consists of: a means, an
ingenious means unlike any other, by which one can obtain results, envision an outcome
or a goal, attain an objective. It is, above all, a means that allows one to produce something for someone.
But let us take a step back: machine, machina in Latin, evokes the Greek machana,
also a machine, yet which derives from me chos, on the one hand, signifying a means, an
expedient, a safeguard, or a remedy, and from me chane , on the other hand, connoting a
clever invention, a war machine or a theater machineand here the question of the stage
reemergesa machine of artifice and tricks that fabricates, molds, and invents. Continuing this lexical game with the term machana, we can link it to the Germanic and Slavic
verb mag, with magen and megin in Old High German, and mgen and Macht in modern
German, the first signifying to be able to and the latter force. The powerful, important, influential figure of the mogol or mogul symbolizes today, and particularly in the
movie industry, a powerful person in Hollywood who influences, owns, and dominates
the market. The machine implies a power or a force that allows it to influence or to create
a network of influences, and at the same time to secretly form schemes that are beyond
control, to invent plots and tricks, in order to elude attention and avoid expectations. The
machine is cunning, it is a ruse, a trick, a clever and witty remark. It always acts in secret,
it always creates a secret that produces something, an object or a body, by secreting its
own death, a relation to its death, that resembles an image of its disappearance.5
The machine is a body, just as the body is a machine that machinates, rearranges,
schemes, manipulates, and plots. In body-machine, however, there is the machine and
there is the body. Our concern here is that which machinates. And in Greek, this body or
thing (machin) means first and foremost a cadaver, an inanimate or dead body. And if
the invention of philosophyyet another machine and another schemeplaces the body
in radical opposition to the soulthe soma and the psuche to reason, speech and the
logos, it is because the term soma, as it appears in Homers texts, designates a dead
body, or more precisely the body of a dead person, of one who died in combat: cold,
rigid, and motionless. It contrasts not with the psuche but with the de mas, the living
body, its posture, allure, and style. In Homers texts, no unified body exists in subjection
to a logos: there are merely various forms and positions that isolate body parts, arms, legs,
hands, genitals, eyes, mouths, or parts that produce gestures, acts, gazes, and speech, in
the framework of a muthos, a story, a narrative, or an odyssey. When speaking of soma

The Society of the Spectral>>Serge Margel

or corpus, the story or the narrative is completed and the body is dead, like a cadaver or
something that falls to the ground. And if the machine is a power or a force that secretly
creates something for someone, the body, on the other hand, is a cadaver, always the
body of a dead person, or of death itself. This is why we can translate body-machine as
power over death.
Defining the body-machine as a power over death suggests a certain reading, approach, perspective, or point of view that allows us to consider the challenge of exemplarities, from the hero to the star. How can one speak of the body if its power or force
is always invested, by the body itself, as
power over death? In Spinozan or Deleuzean terms, the body mechanically expresses the capabilities that are at once proper
to it and that it manifests or exposes, doing
so only as power of death, or as power over
death, exercised through different representations and various physical, biological, symbolic, and even socio-political effects.
Yet, the body can also manifest power that is proper to death, where it is death itself, so
to speak, that functions, creates, affects, and even represents by acting on the body by
its own means. Within and by the body-machine, death is also a means, a me chos, a tool,
an expedient, or a remedy. Death is never simply reduced to an accident that happens
to the body. Death is notor is not onlywhat happens to the body accidentally, but,
rather, it always constitutes that which the body produces mechanically. Like a productive force, a working or useful force that shapes and fictionalizes, death allows the body
to produce itself, just as one might say that an actor appears (se produit) on stage, presents or represents himself in communication with secret powers and invisible forces.
Death allows, accords, or, as we will see, promises to the body a relation to the secret, or
to its secret powers and its own secretions. Death promises it sovereignty, or to reveal its
secret through the metamorphosis of its reality into illusion, or by shaping the image of
its disappearance.

Glamour is to the star what combat is to

the hero, what sacrifice is to the martyr, and
devotion is to the saint.

>>
All exemplary bodies secrete, secretly expressing a relation to death. A hero who dies
in combat, a martyr who dies for his faith, a saint who dies out of love, all these deaths
are stories, similar to the ones we find in Homer. They are narratives, mise-en-scnes,
rhetorical discourses, a grammar of disappearance. Today we might call them aesthetics, particularly when referring to the exemplary body of a star and its aesthetic called
glamour. However, I would rather talk about grammar. Following the hypothesis that
I put forth here, glamour is to the star what combat is to the hero, what sacrifice is to
the martyr, and devotion is to the saint. It represents the secret place of the power over
death, the stage where the productive force of death and disappearance is presented,
where it takes shape in secret and is plotted. In other words, it is a place of secretions,

10

DIACRITICS>>2012>>40.3

between the body and its death. But what precisely does glamour refer to? It has nothing
to do with death, nor with love. Josef von Sternberg, the film director who invented or
machinated Marlene Dietrich, describes it as follows:
Glamour is the quality of being provocative, tantalizing, entrancing, fascinating, ravishing
and bewitching, all these implying vibrating and twisting the beholders emotional wiring.
Glamour can also produce, though this is rare, a purely aesthetic satisfaction, divorced from
all primitive impulse, by first draining the blood from your body.6
Terms such as provocation, fascination, ravishment, and bewitchment all indicate a
rhetoric of subordination, of chase and captureall these implying vibrating and twisting the beholders emotional wiring. More importantly, what these terms express is the
magic of a secret and, at the same time, the power of secretions. Indeed, and contrary
to what one might expect, the word glamour comes from grammar, denoting gramiae,
gound, or discharge from the eye, the viscous, thick secretion that collects at the corner
of the eye, a viscous discharge or rheum in the eyes. As Le Sage writes in Gil Blas, He
cleaned his eyes of a thick gum that filled them.7 The Latin source for these terms is the
grammarian Festus, known as Festus Grammaticus, from the end of the second century
CE: Gramiae oculorum sunt vitia, quas alii glamas vocant.8 Gramiae is another term for
glama, from the Greek glamon, rheumy, which can be found in several Slavic terms,
among others: the Lithuanian gleive s, the Polish klejacy, or in the English clammy, sticky,
tenacious, and in the French glamour, this viscous secretion, a glutinous discharge that
collects at the corner of the eye, and sometimes even covers the eyesas if to veil, blur, or
bewitch them. This meaning is rooted in the French word chassieux (rheumy), from the
Old French chacie, which originates in the Vulgar Latin caccita, derived from cacare, to
shit, or, more precisely, to excrete, to secrete something from the inside to the outside.
In glamour, there is not only glama, but also gramma. Here is another definition of
this term from the Oxford English Dictionary:
Originally Scots, introduced into the literary language by Scott. A corrupt form of grammar;
for the sense compare gramarye (and French grimoire), and for the form glomery.
1. Magic, enchantment, spell; esp. in the phrase to cast the glamour over one.
2. a. A magical or fictitious beauty attaching to any person or object; a delusive or
alluring charm.
b. Charm; attractiveness; physical allure, esp. feminine beauty.9
Here again, it is a question of bewitchment, rapture, fascination, seduction, and
charm. Glamour is magical, but this magic is secret, encrypted, encoded, obscure, or incomprehensible. Similarly, grammar in Medieval Latin also denotes various regimes
of unintelligibility, which explains the shift in terms to gramoir, and then to grimoire, a
mysterious book of magic or a secret book of witchcraft. In Mallarms Igitur, the grimoire is the place where the secret of the Book is hidden. It is a book that must be decoded, whose secret must be deciphered, in other words, it constitutes everything that
implies vibrating and twisting the beholders emotional wiring.

11

The Society of the Spectral>>Serge Margel

But the chain of significations does not end here. From grammar to gramoir, from
gramoir to grimoire, there is also grima of French origin, meaning a mask, as in grimace;
the French grimaud (pedantic); grimage (makeup); and grimer (to put on makeup or to
disguise, especially in reference to an actor who draws wrinkles on his face to appear
older). By metonymy or synecdoche, this term can go so far as to denote a manner, an
expression, or the head itself. Faire la grime in French means to make a face or to sulk.
We also find Grimm haben in modern German (to be angry) or grimmig gucken (to look
with rage), and grim in Russian (theatrical makeup). In Old Saxon, however, grima also
denotes the specter, which can still be found in the English phrase grim reaper, often
serving as an allegory of death. The word glamour contains all of these connotations: secretions, the grimoire, and the face of death. A manner, an expression, appearance, a look
that expresses a secret relation to death or a relation that secretes something related to
death, one that in a certain sense stages a
viscous secretion or a grim, deathly pallor.
Glamour is the body-machine of a star, a
body that machinates or schemes, mixes
up, processes, tricks and plots a secret of
death, in order to cast a supreme spell, to
bewitch and beguile, to entrap or capture
the spectators gaze. Glamour concerns
the eyes, not in the sense of vision, the visual, or the visible, but rather of the ocular,
the eyes globular sphere that encompasses (englober) everything, secreting a viscous, mucus-like liquid (les glaires), that
agglutinates images. Yet, how is this exemplary body-machine perceived, once its glamour is limited or reduced only to feminine charm? Is the body of a star always a female
body, or a body in the feminine? Is the body-machine only able to machinate a female
body and to concoct femininity? In other words, is the sex machine necessarily female?
Is this exemplary body, as a prototype of a disenchanted modernity, still able to produce
or to stage anything other than the name, and only the first name, of a woman: Marlene,
Greta, or Marilyn? We can recall von Sternbergs claim: I am MarleneMarlene is me.
I will return to this statement after the following long passage on feminine glamour:

Glamour is the body-machine of a star, a

body that machinates or schemes, mixes
up, processes, tricks and plots a secret of
death, in order to cast a supreme spell, to
bewitch and beguile, to entrap or capture
the spectators gaze.

There are styles in glamour, as in everything else; one year glamour is partial to plump ladies
in tights and on a bicycle, as in the early daguerreotypes; another year it embraces inflated
bosoms, gartered legs, veils and extravagant hats, features rapturous expressions, angelic eyes,
saccharine nudes of the pinup syndrome, and now documentary bleakness, but oneand the
principalfacet of glamour never changes: it promises something it cannot deliver. . . .
Glamour in a photograph is the treatment of surfacea surface that is not even skin deep: it
is only as deep as the paper which reproduces the image.10

12

DIACRITICS>>2012>>40.3

>>
Glamour is fashion, the art of the ephemeral, of the temporary, of change, of the transitory in Baudelaires terms, and of trends, as one might say today. Glamour is a trend,
creating preference for a body on a bicycle at one moment, for gartered legs at another,
but no matter the trend, what is crucial is that it almost always concerns womens bodies.
In Valentinos case, his glamour is grotesque, his appearance, his looks and expressions
are ridiculous: As far as Valentino is concerned, the less said the better, writes von
Sternberg, his antics bordered on the ridiculous.11 Valentino adopts expressions and
fashions various styled, affected, and contrived, seemingly unnatural looks lacking in
simplicity and constancy. Garbo, on the other hand, displayed remarkable persistency.
She was taught by a master craftsman: Brought from Sweden and tutored by a master
craftsman, Mauritz Stiller, she succeeded in making an entire world aware of her grace
and personality.12 Like a demiurge, the master craftsman reveals to the world, and with
his firm and skillful hand brings to light and into consciousness a womans potential,
her dormant virtues, her secret powers, her latent and invisible forces of elegance, fascination, rapture, seduction, and provocation, which, like a sex machine, exist in the bewitching body of a woman. A woman does not have access to her own strengths. Without
the intervention of a master craftsman, an interpreter of signs, a hermeneutist, a kind of
translator of charm, she would never be capable of freeing, expressing, openly exhibiting, or displaying, rendering comprehensible, staging or performing her essential qualities, her specifically feminine attributes, her sex appeal, her impulsive properties, from
grace to elegance, nor could she reveal her secret, which took nature millions of years to
create. As von Sternberg explains,
It is not my intention to diminish the stature of womanhood, for there is nothing on earth
that is more graceful and attractive than a female in bloom. Nature did a lot of experimenting before it arrived at a perfect version. But man is not content to value a woman for the
extraordinary qualities that took millions of years to flower, and will often favor an image that
has qualities that took no longer to produce than the split second that transfers the real thing
into a black box to become an illusion.13
The anthropo-phallocentric claim I am MarleneMarlene is me resonates here.
More importantly, this passage shows how in the course of history, glamourwith its
grammar, rhetoric, and aestheticsappears as a moment of rupture, discontinuity,
and utopia. On the one hand, Nature did a lot of experimenting before it arrived at a
perfect version [of woman]. Von Sternberg also adds that legends of glamour go deep
into history, with Helen who launched a thousand ships, Cleopatra of the rolled-up
carpet, and many other stories that could confirm natures experiments, whose aim
was to achieve its own completion.14 On the other hand, however, manthe masculine,
the master of a work, a craftsman or a demiurgewill not be content or satisfied with
such exceptional, extraordinary qualities, among all the beings that nature has created.
Man will never be able to reduce his pleasure, his perspective, or attention only to the

The Society of the Spectral>>Serge Margel

state of exception, even to the most extraordinary one. Masculine pleasure will not be
content with reality or nature, seeking instead an image or an illusion, the sexual machine par excellence. Von Sternbergs claim is at once superb and superbly troubling.
Seemingly placing man in competition with nature, or perhaps even in competition with
God, the masculine with the divine, von Sternberg chooses to compare the millions of
years that nature took to create the reality of a woman with the fraction of a second
that was necessary for cinema to transform this reality into an illusion. But man is not
content to value a woman for the extraordinary qualities that took millions of years to
flower, and will often favor an image that has qualities that took no longer to produce
than the split second that transfers the real thing into a black box to become an illusion.
The black box, the book of magic, the gramoir, or the grammar of glamour that agglutinates the dull, glaucous, blurry, bewitched, dispossessed eyes of the spectator with
a viscous discharge or secretions. The perfecting of a woman by man, in this case, is
revealed in and by this fraction of a second, this overwhelming irruption of the machine,
of the sex machine that transforms natural reality into a grammar of illusion, makeup,
or a face that has been made up. It would not have even taken cinema a secondand we
would not have been able to count or measure the time that the masculine, lets call it
the cinemasculine, needed to shut the reality of a woman in the grimoireto reduce it
to the treatment of surface, a surface that would no longer look like skin, but have the
thickness of film, which reproduces the image.15 This transformation occurred in the
blink of an eye, a transformation that could otherwise not be achieved over millions of
years. That is the perfect version of a woman: an illusion, the treatment of a surface,
secretly hidden in the grimoire, preserved mechanically but unfailingly in the black box
of cinema. And if, in this overwhelming instant of metamorphosis, it is indeed a question of glamour, if, after a million years of natures striving without succeeding toward
glamour, as if toward its end or telos, in other words, if glamour has always been natures
tendency, its teleological principle, or a trend (tendance), as that which attracts or seduces, provokes or bewitches natures spellbound eyes, it is precisely because glamour
contains or possesses, shuts up or hides natures secret, the secret of its end, its death and
disappearance, in the grimoire or the black box of cinema. Thus, in nature, glamour will
have always already played the role of a transcendental principle, exhibiting a desire for
power, life, and preservation.
We could compare von Sternbergs idea of glamour to Kants notion of metaphysics: it
is everything and nothing, on the one hand, and everything or nothing, on the other. Nature by essence is glamour, while glamour is the illusion that nature desires. Hence, the
secret of glamour, the secret hidden in the black box, or more precisely the illusion that
the box secretes when it transforms a womans natural reality into perfection, in such
forms as Greta, Marlene, and Marilyn. If, as von Sternberg claims, it is difficult to see
[glamour] objectively,16 and to say what glamour is as such, to define the concept, its secret reality, or simply the secret that provides it with the sovereign power to bewitch the
eyes of the spectator, or to drain the blood from his body, we can nevertheless establish
among its various styles a principal and never-changing facet. As von Sternberg states,

13

14

DIACRITICS>>2012>>40.3

but oneand the principalfacet of glamour never changes: it promises something it

cannot deliver. This claim resembles the Lacanian definition of love: to give something
that one does not have to someone who does not want it. Von Sternberg, however, is
more concerned with the promise, not in terms of a true or a false promise nor of keeping
or breaking a promise. Here, not offering or not giving what one promises does not mean
that one breaks a promise, nor that one makes a false promise. It is not a question of a
lack, a defect, or failure, nor of a lie or deceit, but rather of perfectionof [arriving] at a
perfect version of a woman.
The body of a woman, the body-machine of a star, or a sex machine, is perfect, it has
finally reached perfection, it is finally reduced to its surface, treated like a surface, as
paper or film that promises something it cannot deliver. A gendered body, or the sexual
dimension of the body, can only machinate this promise, mix, trick, plot, scheme, or secretly create the promise of precisely that which it cannot give. We will later see the
direct, objective link between the promise and the illusion, either as a promise of an illusion or as the illusion of a promise. What concerns us most for now is that such a precise,
singular, and unique promise, which, according to von Sternberg, is typically masculine,
set the conditions necessary for the existence of the black box, where the illusion of reality took shape. Promising something one cannot givewhich ultimately means being
glamorous, embodying a star, being a sex machine, or the only copy of a paper surface
would produce a singular image, unprecedented in the million years of the history of
representation, images, copies, imitation, and mimesis. This image, surface, screen, or
stage results neither from the double, nor from reproduction, nor even from mimesis, but
rather from a certain promise. Indeed, this paper image no longer belongs to the category
of oppositions: the model to its copy, the authentic to the simulacrum. This image does
not reproduce nor represent anything, it does not imitate anything, nor does it represent
a double of anything. Whats more, it does not say anything, it does not express itself on
any subject, nor does it turn away from anything. We learn nothing from it about reality,
which it transfers into a black box to become an illusion. This transcendental image of
glamour is nothing more than a promise, neither real nor falsea promise that promises
and does nothing other than not give what it promises. The magic of this promise, as
that which seduces and bewitches the eyes of the spectator, its charm, is that it promises
precisely not to give what it promises. It is the only promise promising this, thus contradicting the formal, customary, conventional laws, the performative laws of promises in
general. In other words, this promise is the only one that promises not to keep its promise. This, for von Sternberg, is the perfect version of a womans body, the body of a star, at
once sex and machine, a surface that is treated and arranged by the cinematographic
grimoire of a master craftsman that I would call the cinemasculograph.

15

The Society of the Spectral>>Serge Margel

>> The Automaton, the Marionette, and the Star

Lets imagine now the body of a star as a theater. Once again, lets consider what is done
to the body, and what is said of and understood by it, if perceived as a stage or a miseen-scne. A theater, a spectacle, a whole society of the spectacle are staged in the body,
and at the same time manipulate this body. It is a society that exploits and abuses the
body, not just by marking, tattooing, dissimulating, or painting the body, dressing and
disguising it, nor by hurting, wounding, and subduing it: all violent, diabolical gestures
and common practices that transform an individual body into a social one. Many modes
of expression also share, exchange, and trade bodies, with the intention of using and
benefitting from them. The theater of the body, however, will never be reduced to this.
Marking the body would never suffice to incorporate it in the writing of history, to subject it to the authority of the Law, nor to share the political body. The theater of the body
represents the actions played out on and by the body, manipulating it into becoming like
a marionette, a doll, or a ghost.
But what type of theater, what kind of knowledge, history, or drama does the body
stage? Heinrich von Kleist, among others, speaks of a theater of marionettes, situated
between an automaton and a star, where a doll moves on its own, with the automatic
or mechanical movements of a dancing body. Yet, this kind of movement is ambiguous, for it does not constitute in itself the movement of an individual body. The order
of realities seems to be reversed or overturned, perhaps even calling into question the
metaphysics of the body, the physics of movement, and the aesthetics of gestures. In this
type of theater, movement is no longer an attribute of the body. Rather, the body itself
becomes the attribute of a movement. The body of a movement is always what constitutes
the body, what is said of and understood by it, what is acted out and staged in it. When we
speak of body movement, or of falling bodies, it always involves shifting from one place
to another. It is always a body that has already been constituted, named, marked, set in
place, already established as a principle, a
body that is mobile, that moves and changes position. A body of movement, however,
refers to movement that has no body, no
individual body, with no attributed, designated body, as if detached or separated
from all subjection to property and to the
principle of a body. The body of movement does not move from one place to another, nor
is it a principle that controls body parts, instead, it is nothing more than a limit, a threshold, a boundary that divides, dismembers, or dismantles the body, while at the same time
putting it in communication with external or outside forces and powers.
The enigma of the automaton, the marionette, and the star lies in the possibility of
movement without a body. But this movement would only constitute a limit, or would
simply embody the appearance of a boundary, of an indeterminate, undifferentiated
zone between the major categories of reality, between life and its absence, which in this

A theater, a spectacle, a whole society of

the spectacle are staged in the body, and
at the same time manipulate this body.

16

DIACRITICS>>2012>>40.3

case is death or the machine. It is a movement between genders, between species and
worlds, where only ghosts exist and specters roam. Most importantly, this uncanniness,
as Freud would put it, of a detached, separate, volatile movement, anarchical and without principle, manifests and reveals with the body, inscribes on the body, the limits of
the living. Freuds well-known text quotes doctor Ernst Jentschs article on automata
and dolls:
Jentsch has taken as a very good instance doubts whether an apparently animate being
is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate; and he
refers in this connection to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed
dolls and automata.17
Jentsch also speaks of a zone of incertitude, on the brink of indiscernibility between the
living and the inanimate, between a sentient body and a machine, between a living body
and a cadaver. This zone of indiscrimination incites anguish in response to the uncanny,
the familiar unknown, or the common and ordinary beyond. Nevertheless, power or biopower, in Foucaults terms, invests and takes possession of this zone or limit, seeking to
occupy and appropriate it, in order to dominate, manipulate, and exercise power over
the body, to reduce it to certain properties, and to subject it to principles.
The bodys actions, occurring at the limits of the living, become perceptible at the
threshold of incertitude. Something of the body becomes perceptible and apparent,
manifesting movement or expression. A movement manifests itself in the body, a movement that indicates through the body that it is not bound, tied, or ascribed to this body.
A movement appears in the body that is foreign to it. It is the automaton, the wax doll,
the clever marionette, and the star, all indeterminate specters. One thing is certain, this
threshold of incertitude that troubles and worries us, that leaves us with a feeling of
strangeness, this limit of the living is the place within the body where the sovereignty
of power comes into being. These are all exemplary figures controlling the border; they
are guards or safeguards from the obscure limits between the living and the inanimate.
This obscurity generates yet more obscurity, expanding the indiscernible gray area. Just
as we are unable to distinguish with complete certitude the living from the inanimate,
the inanimate too will never be able to differentiate between death and the automaton,
for it is the power of a body-machine, between the society of control and the society of
the spectacle, that is at play in this gray area. This is already present in Descartess The
Passions of the Soul:
And let us judge that the body of a living man differs from that of a dead man as much as a
watch or other automaton (that is, other self-moving machine), when it is wound and contains the bodily principle of the movements for which it is constructed.18

17

The Society of the Spectral>>Serge Margel

>>
Modern sovereignty is the power to control the accumulation of the indiscernible. From
the non-distinction of a dead man and an automaton, we can infer a zone of indiscrimination between the living and the inanimate. More importantly, we can infer that
we will be able to control indeterminate limits of the living, inasmuch as it is possible
to relate death to the automaton, or to
animate death by the automaton, as is the
case with the invention of the marionette
theater, the wax museum, or the celebrity magazine. Playing death, the automaton controls the living. The automatoncontroller plays death, or plays dead, like
a charm seeker who conjures up specters
and stages ghosts and automatons, from
man-machine to artificial intelligence. It
has always represented an effigy of power.
It is the sovereign figure of a power that subjugates the uncanniness of specters. In short,
the automaton itself represents the power to make specters dance. In a theater of marionettes, I am not the one who looks at ghosts, sees the dead wander about and specters
roam. Instead, it is I who am seen by ghosts,19 observed by the dead, for I am the one
external to death, writes Antonin Artaud, as if offered to specters as a spectacle.20 I am
always, states Artaud, confronted with specters that want to control the real. The sovereignty of a society of the spectacle lies in the power to control bodies with specters, automata, marionettes, and stars. In other words, sovereignty is the society of the spectral.
A theater of marionettes always represents or constitutes the place from which I am
seen by ghosts. The stage from which I always observe myself is the point of view of my
death. I am not already dead, nor do I see myself as already dead, anticipating my own
death, by projection, fantasy, or obsession. Instead, I adopt or borrow the point of view
of death, in order to observe or watch myself, spy on and haunt myself. I adopt the point
of view of a doll, which represents the indistinguishable body, that zone of indiscrimination between death and the automaton. But let us at last look at Kleists text. It is concerned less with the theater or the stagein the literal sense of a place where a spectacle
is stagedand more with the fabrication of marionettes, the preparation of dolls, with
art or artifice, invented for the masses.22 The virtuosity of this play, this text that is only
a few pages long, lies in the deliberate confusion of theater and fabrication, of the stage
and artifice or, as Kleist says, of dance and pantomime, the high art and the culture of the
masses. A dancer at the Opera praises a marionette for its perfect mechanism, wound
like a watch, with symmetry, flexibility, agility.23 Here, a dancer not only compares the
high art of dance with the pantomime of a doll, but more importantly he claims that no
dancer could ever equal the power, force and grace of a marionette:

The automaton-controller plays death,

or plays dead, like a charm seeker who
conjures up specters and stages ghosts
and automatons, from man-machine to
artificial intelligence.

18

DIACRITICS>>2012>>40.3

He smiled and said that he dared claim that if a mechanic could build him a marionette
according to the stipulations he envisioned, that he would have it perform a dance which
neither he himself, nor any other skilled dancer of the day, not even Vestris, could execute.24
The reference to Marie-Jean-Auguste Vestris is key here. A leading dancer with the Paris
Opera, he was already a well-known star throughout Europe, on tour, as one would still
say today. He was also the inventor of a new, large traveling step called the grand allegro, which distinguishes itself from the classical terre--terre step by rendering the body
light, as if floating in midair, like a weightless cloud, or mist without gravity. This new
leap frees the body from the body itself, which becomes airborne, just like the elves
that Kleist mentions, who graze the ground. Yet, even Vestrisa star, a birdlike dancer, a
feather, a fairy, who always flies offcannot equal the dance of a doll, the performance of
a marionette. No matter how light and vaporous, at some point Vestriss body will always
fall back down and, at that tragic and fatal instant, will have to stay on the ground and
thus incorporate a moment that is foreign to dance, as Kleist argues, into the movement
of his dance. This moment of standstill must be gotten over and done with:
The puppets only need the ground, as do the elves, to graze it, and thereby to reanimate the
swing of their limbs against the momentary resistance; we need it to rest on it and recuperate
from the strain of the dance: for us the moment of contact clearly plays no part in the dance
and we have no other recourse but to get it over and done with as quickly as possible.25
That is the difference between the movement of a bodya heavy, burdensome individual
bodyand the body of a movement, which has no body, no properties nor principles: one
could call it a body without organs that merely grazes or caresses the ground for an instant, just the time to take off again. For Kleist, this difference also concerns the quarrel
of the Ancients and the Moderns, of high art and the culture of the masses. This social
divide literally creates a schism in history, between an art of imitation and an artifice of
substitution, or more precisely, between a mimetic art and a prosthetic art. Kleists On
the Theater of Marionettes is a text on prostheses, machine-limbs, phantom-limbs; it is
a text that reflects on prosthesis, or the prosthetic, as a new paradigm of art. It provides
a new model for a new industrial art, catered to the rabble.26 Henceforth, it is the prosthetic, rather than the mimetic, that must serve as an artistic model, on which the indiscernible point or the zone of indiscriminationthat vague limit between the natural and
the artificial, between the body and the machine, the living and the inanimatemust be
established, developed, and asserted. In Kleists text, the prosthetic represents the very
essence of the dolls disembodied movement. In other words, prosthesis is the movement without the body of a dancing specter.
Have you, he asked, upon noticing me cast my gaze in silence to the ground, have you
heard of those mechanical limbs that English artists had fashioned for those poor unfortunates whod lost their own?
No, I said. I had never laid eyes on such a thing.

The Society of the Spectral>>Serge Margel

What a shame, he replied; for if I told you that these poor unfortunates could dance with
them, I almost fear you would believe it. . . .
I remarked in jest that he had surely found his man. For the artist able to construct such a
remarkable limb would undoubtedly also be able to build him an entire marionette according
to his specifications.27
>>
We can clearly see now that it is no longer simply a question of substituting one limb
for another or replacing a mechanical limb with a dead leg, but rather of fabricating
an entirely prosthetic body, an entire marionette according to his specifications. The
body must itself become a prosthesis, a phantom body, like the body of a specter. This is
the Opera, the total artwork, the dance of a transcendental doll that makes the weight
of the bodywith its corpse-like return to the grounddisappear or evaporate. And this
suspended moment in dance must be gotten over and done with. The surprising, dazzling function of the prosthesis is its capacity for erasure, its power to eliminate the fall
of bodies. Yet, what is even more astonishing, more worrisome too, is what this erasure
produces: the spectral and the ghostly, generated by this moment of evanescence, dissipation, and disappearance. The perfect, ideal doll, the transcendental prosthesis, between the automaton and death, would have in a way attained the power to occupy this
undifferentiated zone: the indiscernible gray area at the limits of the living. The doll
is prosthetic inasmuch as it stages the complete control of bodies, by imposing a new
massive restriction, invented for the masses. Bodies are no longer controlled by force,
weapons, or the law, nor by being marked, or forced to comply with norms, but by pure
observationthe domination of specters.
The doll is an eye. However, it is not an eye-machine that serves as a surveillance tool
or a media network broadcasting the living. On the contrary, the eye of the doll represents a place of erasure and disappearance: the moment of evanescence, where I am seen
by ghosts and where the living are watched by the dead. A blink of an eye, a flash that
makes the living external to death. The eye of the specter is sovereign: this, in essence,
is the doll. This is the case with the eye of a star, as in Star Academy, where the entire
program is grounded in the eye. Global and globular, integrated into the entire body as
a prosthesis, an eye is anonymous, as the eye of the other, while also being the double of
the same: the reflection, the mirror, and consciousness. Here, we must mention Rousseaus unsettling statement that establishes or anticipates the academic voyeurism of the
star. Facing a public that speaks of me, that takes pleasure in disfiguring and slandering
me, to defend myself against it, writes Rousseau, I had necessarily to say from which
eye, if I were an other, I would view the man that I am.28 An eye of the other. But how is
one to understand this eye, its alterity, its strangeness? How to observe oneself with this
eye and see oneself with the eye of the other? More importantly, what name should we
give this eye? How do we speak of it, indicate it, or point at it? As our anguish increases,

19

20

DIACRITICS>>2012>>40.3

we must ask ourselves what makes it possible, if it is indeed possible, to say how this eye,
at once strange and familiar, determines the place, the stage, or the theater from which I
am seen by ghosts, observed by specters, and controlled by the dead.
The society of the spectralwhere I am controlled by specters and in subjection to
ghosts, where I am reduced to the subject of my own deathrepresents a grand theater
or spectacle, a total staging of the eye of the other. But we must not forget to indicate
which eye this is, from which point of view this eye sees, from which place this eye of
the other allows me to see the man that I am. This eye represents the transformation
of my body into the prosthesis of power, the place, the point of confusion, indecision, and
indiscrimination, between the automaton and death, where the limits of the livingbetween the animate and the inanimatebecome manifest in their ambiguity. In this sense,
the eye of the other is not the eye of another individual, a familiar gazethat of a neighbor, a friend, or an enemy, which can be pointed out and named. The eye of the other
neither announces, shows, nor hides itself. Instead, it is the eye of the automaton that
plays Death, which observes me, watches me live, even lives my life, replacing my life
with a death survived. There is no denying that this eye uses my life as the prosthesis of
a dead body. In the society of the spectral, according to Bla Balzs, writing on the movie
stars of the 1920s, we are no longer simply concerned with anonymously living the life
of an other, a Doppelgnger, living the different life of an other. Nor is it a question of
knowing how to be someone else and still be myself?29 Instead, my life itself is at stake
once it is lived by the death of the other.
No logic of fantasy, no theory of illusion or even of hallucination, will succeed in reducing or diminishing the power, or deconstructing the sovereignty of the prosthetic
body of a doll. It is a body situated between the automaton and death, in the form of the
body of the other playing Death, playing dead, or of this prosthesis of death that observes
me. No knowledge could formulate the concept, nor could any narrative ever have the
last word. In a mass culture, the sovereignty of a doll, as the sovereign exemplarity of
the body of a star, no longer consists of living the different life of an other, but rather
of being lived by the death of the other. This is the new condition of existence that the
sovereignty of a society of the spectral imposes. This biopower of death makes the bodies
available, completely accessible, exposed on all sides, where each subject becomes, like
a marionette, the plaything of its death. In this society of the spectral, like in a theater of
ghosts, everything must disappear, everything can only disappear. We could also speak
of a society of disappearance: itself in the process of disappearing. This society of control
functions, creates, and destroys only through the evanescent movement of its own disappearance. Society, as a pure prosthesis of itself, and of all its subjected, appropriated
bodies, can only control, dominate supremely, and observe at the price of disappearing in
the gray area at the limits of the living, of becoming itself the place of extreme confusion
between the automaton and death. Exhausted, it can only become a theater of disappearance where the specters biopower of death performs.

Cdric Le Borgne, LES VOYAGEURS

Durham, United Kingdom, 2011
Photo courtesy the artist

22

DIACRITICS>>2012>>40.3

Notes
Originally published in Serge Margel, La socit du
spectral (ditions Lignes, 2012). This translation by
Eva Yampolsky is published with the permission of
ditions Lignes.

13

Ibid.

14

Ibid.

15

Ibid.

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 25.

16

Ibid.

Foucault, Utopian Body, 231.

17

Freud, The Uncanny, 226.

See Morin, The Stars and Dyer, Heavenly Bodies.

18

Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 21.

4
A sweaty body begins to offer erotic repulsion
and attractionthe body's urge to cloak itself in its
secretions (Baudrillard, What Are You Doing after
the Orgy?, 44).
5
In his reading of Freud, Derrida observes the
following, in reference to the psychical apparatus as
machine: That the machine does not run by itself
means something else: a mechanism without its own
energy. The machine is dead. It is death. Not because
we risk death in playing with machines, but because
the origin of machines is the relation to death (Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, 227). See also
Szendy, Machin, machine and megamachine.

19 Derrida writes, Vertiginous asymmetry: the

technique for having visions, for seeing ghosts is in
truth a technique to make oneself seen by ghosts.
The ghost, always, is looking at me (a me regarde)
(Specters of Marx, 168).
20 For I, a living man, am a city besieged by an
army of the dead, / intercepted by their mass graves, /
cut off from all external objects, when I am external to
death, / me, / and those who attack me / are outside,/
and it is from within that they act (Artaud, Suppts
et Suppliciations, 68; English translations of Artaud by
Eva Yampolsky).

6
von Sternberg, The von Sternberg Principle,
172. See also Graefe, Marlene, Sternberg, 12425.

21

Artaud, Cahiers de Rodez, 323.

22

Kleist, On the Theater of Marionettes, 267.

23

Ibid., 268.

Le Sage, The Adventures of Gil Blas, 191.

8 Festus, De verborum significatu quae supersunt

cum Pauli epitome, 85.
9
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. glamour. With regards to feminine charm and cinema, the
OED makes a reference to Eric Partridge, Usage and
Abusage, 353: A girl or gigolo may possess glamour:
and it makes no matter whether the girl is glamourous
in her own right or by the catch-guinea arts of her
dressmaker or her cinematographic producer.
10 von Sternberg, The von Sternberg Principle,
172; my emphasis.
11

Ibid. See also Chastellier, Tendanologie, 1315.

12

von Sternberg, The von Sternberg Principle, 172.

24 Ibid., 267. Only a god could measure up to inert

matter in this regard; and here precisely was the point
at which the two ends of the ring-shaped world came
together (ibid., 269).
25

Ibid., 269.

26

Ibid., 264.

27

Ibid., 26768.

28 Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, 6;

translation modified.
29 Balzs, Bla Balzs: Early Film Theory, 3132
passim.

23

The Society of the Spectral>>Serge Margel

Works Cited
Artaud, Antonin. Cahiers de Rodez, avril25 mai 1946.
Vol. 21 of uvres compltes. Paris: Gallimard, 1985.
. Suppts et Suppliciations. Vol. 16, part 2 of
uvres compltes. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.
Balzs, Bla. Bla Balzs: Early Film Theory: Visible
Man and The Spirit of Film. Translated by Rodney
Livingstone. Edited by Erica Carter. New York:
Berghahn Books, 2010.
Baudrillard, Jean. What Are You Doing after the
Orgy? Translated by Lisa Liebmann. Artforum 22,
no. 2 (October 1983): 4246.
Chastellier, Ronan. Tendanologie: La fabrication du
Glamour. Paris: Eyrolles, 2008.
Derrida, Jacques. Freud and the Scene of Writing.
In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass,
24691. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978.
. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the
Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Descartes, Ren. The Passions of the Soul. Translated
by Stephen H. Voss. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989.
Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Festus, Sextus Pompeius. De verborum significatu
quae supersunt cum Pauli epitome. Edited by Wallace M. Lindsay. Leipzig: Teubner, 1997. 1st ed. 1913.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London:
Penguin, 1977.
. Utopian Body. Translated by Lucia Allais,
with Caroline A. Jones, and Arnold Davidson. In
Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and
Contemporary Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones,
22934. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. In The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, 17:21756. London: Hogarth Press,
1955.
Graefe, Frieda. Marlene, Sternberg: Glamour, beaut
ne de la camra. In Stars au fminin: Naissance,
apoge et dcadence du star system, edited by Gian
Luca Farinelli and Jean-Loup Passek, 12130. Paris:
ditions du Centre Pompidou, 2000.
Kleist, Heinrich von. On the Theater of Marionettes.
In Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, translated
by Peter Wortsman, 26474. New York: Archipelago Books, 2010.
Le Sage, Alain Ren. The Adventures of Gil Blas of
Santillane. Translated by Tobias Smollett. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2011.
Morin, Edgar. The Stars. Translated by Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005.
Partridge, Eric. Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good
English. London: H. Hamilton, 1947.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Rousseau, Judge of JeanJacques: Dialogues. Translated by Judith R. Bush,
Christopher Kelly, and Roger D. Masters. Vol. 1
of The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1990.
Szendy, Peter. Machin, machine and megamachine.
Translated by John Tittensor. In HF|RG (Harun
Farocki|Rodney Graham), 6675. Paris: Black Jack
Editions, 2009.
von Sternberg, Josef. The von Sternberg Principle.
Esquire 60, no. 2 (October 1963): 9097, 172.

Cdric Le Borgne, LES VOYAGEURS

Seoul, South Korea, 20082011
Photo courtesy the artist