A cinema of desire: cinesexuality and Guattari's a-signifying cinema

This article will first describe the benefits and risks in challenging projects of signification as they relate to feminism. I will then point out the ways in which the desiring event of cinema – what I have termed ‘cinesexuality’ – can reorient and rupture structures of signification through a focus on expression. The relation of cinesexuality to feminism will then be drawn, using Guattari’s notion of asemiotic bodies: the ‘homosexual’ and ‘woman’. This will be followed by some brief sketches toward thinking cinesexuality as a form of ‘becoming-woman’. The cinesexual emphasises cinematic pleasure as asignified, pleasure beyond signification that then challenges how genders, and indeed individuals as their own collective of disparate modalities, desire cinema

Crisis and the emotional body : Towards (another) freedom

In his analysis of the recent European crisis, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (2012) looks beyond its economic causes and implications and theorises the role played by poetry and the emotional body in rediscovering the relationship between language and desire and reopening the possibility of social solidarity. Drawing on Félix Guattari’s (1995) reflections on the correlation between singular refrain and universal chaos in the reinvention of subjectivity, Berardi conceptualises rhythm as a poetic feature which can contribute to restoring our ability to conjoin with other singularities and with our social and cosmic environment. This article considers how a close engagement with rhythmical, repetitive and cyclical performative practices in examples of recent European choreography may offer ways of responding to today’s crisis of social cohesion, reimagining channels of intensive communication. In particular, the article looks at works by the Italian artist Alessandro Sciarroni (Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow?, 2012 and Chroma_don’t be frightened of turning the page, 2017) and by the London-based duo Igor and Moreno (Idiot-Syncrasy, 2013) and discusses how, in revisiting elements of folk traditions, they mobilise their potential as formal, semantic and affective modalities that can sustain a reconfiguration of social freedom

Cinematic and aesthetic cartographies of subjective mutation

This article exmaines the use of cinema as a mapping of subjective mutation in the work of Deleuze, Gauttari and Berardi. Drawing on Deleuze's distinciton between the reduction of the art-work to the symptom and the idea of art as symptomatology, the article focuses on Berardi's use of cinematic examples, posing the quesiton in each case of to what extent they function as symptomatologies or mere symptoms of cultural and subjective mutations in examples ranging from Bergman's Persona to Van Sant's Elephant to finish on speculations about Fincher's The Social Network as a cirtical engagement with subjective mutation in the 21st Century