Metallic Affects in Hiroshima mon amour: The Unconscious via Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix GuattariAbstract
Intersecting the works of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this essay analyzes the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Written by Marguerite Duras and directed by Alain Resnais, the influential film is the encounter between a French woman and a Japanese man in post-World War II Hiroshima. The narrative of a woman and a man meeting after the atomic bombs configures an opportunity to elaborate an original approach to French discussions concerning the relations between the unconscious and semiotics while conceptualizing important questions that cause both the convergence and the divergence of the disciplines of psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis. Several notions are studied in the essay, such as: the categories of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, as well as memory, desire, dream, agency, affects, and the war machine.
Keywords:
Unconscious; Psychoanalysis; Schizoanalysis; Hiroshima mon amour; Desire
Resumo
Cruzando os trabalhos de Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, este ensaio analisa o filme Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Escrito por Marguerite Duras e dirigido por Alain Resnais, este filme influente é o encontro entre uma mulher francesa e um homem japonês em Hiroshima, após a Segunda Guerra Mundial. A narrativa de uma mulher e de um homem que se encontram depois da bomba atômica configura uma oportunidade de elaboração uma abordagem original de discussões francesas acerca das relações entre inconsciente e semiótica, enquanto conceptualiza-se questões importantes que, ao mesmo tempo, fazem convergir e divergir as disciplinas da psicanálise e da esquizoanálise. Diversas noções são estudadas neste ensaio: como as categorias de real, imaginário e simbólico, desejo, sonho, agência, afetos, e máquina de guerra.
Palavras-chave:
inconsciente; psicanálise; esquizoanálise; Hiroshima mon amour; desejo
Résumé
À l'intersection des travaux de Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, cet essai analyse le film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Écrit par Marguerite Duras et réalisé par Alain Resnais, ce film influent est le rendez-vous d’une Française et d’un Japonais à l’Hiroshima d’après-seconde guerre mondiale. Le récit de la rencontre d’une femme et d’un homme dans les effets de la bombe atomique configure l’occasion pour élaborer une approche originale sur les débats en France concernant les relations entre l’inconscient et la sémiotique ainsi que pour conceptualiser des questions importantes qui font converger et diverger les disciplines de la psychanalyse et de la schizoanalyse. Plusieurs de notions sont étudiée dans cet essai : les catégories du réel, de l'imaginaire, et du symbolique, la mémoire, le désir, le rêve, l'agencement, les affects, et la machine de guerre.
Mots-clés:
inconscient; psychanalyse; schizoanalyse; Hiroshima mon amour; désir
She: You see, Nevers is the city in the world, and even the thing in the world, I dream about most often at night. And at the same time it’s the thing I think about the least.
Hiroshima mon amour, 1959
Written by Marguerite Duras. Directed by Alain Resnais.
This essay explores Alain Resnais’ film, written by Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour (1959). A canon of post-World War II European cinema, the film was already studied by Gilles Deleuze in his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). Yet, the problems we want to underline in the film relate to a more schizoanalytic approach to moving images, highlighting the crossroads between the unconscious, its immanence, and semiotics; an approach that comes from Deleuze’s intellectual intersection with Félix Guattari and their connection to Jacques Lacan. If Hiroshima mon amour, after the readings we find in both the books Capitalism and Schizophrenia I and II (1972 and 1980), is not representation - but a thinking and feeling animistic machine interfering ecologically in our own thoughts and feelings -, we come up with a challenge: How does the film assemble metallic affects produced by the agency of its characters’ manifestation of desire - war machine in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s jargon (1980, p. 434) -, clinically working with the organizations and reorganizations of both memory and libido?
In the film, the audience does not know how the characters met each other, but it is because of their meeting that the possibilities of new trans-semiotic assemblages are at play. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, metallurgy is taken as a psychic activity of nomadism that focuses on the agency of producing weapons such as iron swords or steel sabers. Nomadic agencies are at war with the State and its institutions: nomads that invoke a people to come, yet to walk through existential territories; a people called by the transformational schizo-forces of bodies, using weapons that open semiotic lines of flight for life to liberate itself. The operations conducted to assemble each weapon are different, and their materials and shapes have different machinic phylum. In the élan vital, Deleuze and Guattari propose that we should understand the machinic phylum of each weapon with vitalism: metallic affects come from inorganic life and will become part of their producers’ own phylogenetics after their invested practices of metallurgy.
The claim of A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the second part of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, is poignant when analyzing Hiroshima mon amour - on the strength of the deadly weapon that led to the character's encounter: the atomic bomb and its long-lasting radioactive half-life. The atomic bomb stresses the dilemma of schizoanalytic processes of territorialization and deterritorialization. When analyzing atoms and their connections, one must consider the ecological transformations happening between the organic and the inorganic. Depending on how agency is conducted, the analysis of atoms may lead to the atomic bomb extinguishing life on Earth or to more investigations concerning the origins of the universe; we are facing, with quantum mechanics, a politics of the cosmos. For schizoanalysis, the quantum mechanics of the clinic works on molecular or molar compositions, within microphysics. Novelty and destruction are together transforming everyday pathos. Our problem is whether analysis is opening spaces for molecular lines of flight that invent new values - empowering the emergency of unpredictable new attributes within bodies and worlds -, or fabricating molar capturing devices that restrain life’s autopoiesis with the gravity of Newtonian Laws. Agency is not metaphorical because it must be studied with the concept of the unconscious and its immanence interfering in the transversality of disciplines, introducing both a shift in our approach to technology, art, moving images, and an epistemological change in Cartesian divides between nature and culture as well as between subject and object.
In this essay, we are interested in elaborating on both the possibilities and impossibilities of transformation the characters of Hiroshima mon amour reach when meeting each other in post-World War II Hiroshima. Former enemies, she is from Nevers, France, and he is from Hiroshima, Japan. Before, she was also in love with another enemy man of her country of origin, suffering the consequences of having a relationship with a German soldier. Are the characters in Hiroshima mon amour at risk, on the threshold of mutations? How does their bodies’ sexual encounter produce a path for their own resemiotization of life? Are affects epistemologies: capable of transforming or creating new methods, perceptions and expressions, intellectual and philosophical categories? These questions are placed transversally, working with the schizo-pragmatics of sensation (Deleuze; Guattari, 1980, p. 182) - so the film actively produces both transferential and resistant forces that operate with the semiotics of the audience’s unconsciouses, being able to alter both their modes of creation and existence. That capability of transformation that we find in moving images will be conceptualized with the notion of the death-image. Death, in death-images, is not a theme: it is a condition for life because it makes mutations possible in the entanglement of the organic and the inorganic.
Short-circuits between the real and the imaginary
Death-images, as this essay proposes in its hypothesis, are part of the schizo-machinic composition of bodies and their ecological relations; death-images are weapons assembled to manifest forces of desire by investing in a direct path between Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic categories of the real and the imaginary. This direct path breaches the mediation of the symbolic - which is represented by castration. These images that we call death-images are running in the relations between the semiotic unconscious and the world, beyond language structures, creating new universes of reference that can be clinically listened to, enabling new trans-individual expressions that open fissures in closed striated spaces of signifying organizations we find in mixed regimes of signs (Deleuze; Guattari, 1980, p. 168). Regimes of signs are mixed because they can either be open by semiotic deterritorialization and resemiotization or attached to a signifier chain codifying representations after a master’s discourse or the name-of-the-father; in Lacanian terms, the S2 chained to the S1.
The productive act of confronting or detouring from the symbolic by thinking and feeling with the vibrations of the unconscious, after Deleuze and Guattari, is called desire - which will produce more desire on the strength of agency. Agency is precisely the focus of the concept of the war machine brought by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus; agency is what we underline when, to manifest desire, the war machine chooses components of weapons, of death-images. The war machine is what makes possible for the nomadic movements of the semiotic unconscious to create weapons against the symbolic: so, renegotiations may take place between desire and the Law - more precisely: these renegotiations are between the minor of desire, and the institutions of the State coercing the becomings because of molar Laws. Desire drives the vitalist circuits of entangled life and death, when nomads open passages and crossings, when nomadic forces create a potent patchwork of Eros and Thanatos. Desiring nomads, fighting to keep their movement, weave existential territories outside of States. Clinic is when we listen to the sounds of nomadic agency because the analyst is a neighbor of the body’s schizo-machinic processes; namely: using their bodies, analysands may become something else by composing weapons that produce lines of flight, dispersing libidinal occupations and reassembling configurations of the body and the world in different unforeseen molecularities.
For us to go further with the debate relating death-images and the weapons of the war machine to the short-circuit between the real and the imaginary, it is important to study one specific diagram (Figure 1) made by Jacques Lacan in one of his seminars. Composed during Seminar XX: Encore, Lacan proposes with this diagram a comprehension of the fluxes crossing the categories of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. These fluxes are precisely where Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari will interfere with the pragmatics of schizoanalysis.
Differently from Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic discourse, where the clinic of the unconscious is concentrated in the mediation of the symbolic, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write down the conceptualization of schizoanalysis when searching for short-circuits between the real and the imaginary. For Lacan, the symbolic articulates psychic activities based on castration - he places the truth of the unconscious subject in opposition to the phallus of reality. The real and the imaginary would be subordinated to symbolic regimes of truth and semblance. Also, Lacan’s notion of object a would only move between the real and the symbolic - being the imaginary a result of these negotiations where a transits from a real missing piece or hole in the body provoked by the myth of Oedipus occupying the organism with the unreal yet representational organ of the lamella (Lacan, 1973), to a cultural elaboration of both discontentment and acceptance of the bedrock of castration.
How can we produce a new trajectory for object a? Object a is what refuses a place in the symbolic because it is resistant to representation; a is running away from a fitting phantasmatic place in the bigger object A - the culturally located Autre, the Other, in Jacques Lacan’s native French language. Lacan will understand a as what falls from the real body and is swallowed by the barred subject in the moment of alienation in language, the moment of symbolic castration when the erogenous zones are colonized by signifiers. For Lacan, the analyst is put in the place of object a during analysis by the analysand. In neurosis, in Lacanian terms, object a is the root of desire: under the pleasure principle but beyond the phallic order of demand naming things in the world. Object a is a concept that is not what the analysand names as the lack in both its symbolic configuration of substitutive metaphor and its phantasmatic image of unification by being the missing piece to complete what lacks in the Other - that is to say: in culture, or civilization; or even institutional components of the Other such as the dynamics of family, church, or school.
For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, object a is also an important invention for the clinic and the production of desire, but its appearance would not be the result of castration. Object a, in schizoanalysis, is not lost because desire does not come from giving a name to the lack. Phallic reality, between the real and the imaginary as we see in Lacan’s diagram, is not an illusion. In psychosis, things are real, not representation. When language is not structuring the unconscious, making it work with representations standing in for things in the world, Sachvorstellung is deliriously fighting Wortvorstellung. Everything is a thing in the psychotic unconscious, not a substitution of things - words that mean things in the world, phallic naming these things with interpretations - as we find in neurosis. In schizoanalysis, the unconscious is not structured as language, or as an unreachable barred Other where signifiers are ordering chains and effects in relation to culture. Thus, object a, originating desire, for schizoanalysis, can be a constant everyday practice in the pathos of machinic organisms - where a is not guided by a relationship with the Other. Object a is the link to the entanglement of the organic and the inorganic, to the war machine investing in the production of weapons that aim at manifesting more desire, organizing new references for the analysand. In a field of tense negotiations, object a is not absorbed by the Other, by the structures of language, by culture or civilization, and by the institutions: it is difference in the repetition of machines, sounds of heterogenesis (Guattari, 2022, p. 65). Harnessing the psychoanalytic theory of libido in favor of schizoanalysis, object a is an element in the sea of the Thalassa’s ecology (Ferenczi, 2018) that may provoke the assemblage of new bodies, composing new worlds - mutations in the evolution of species.
Armed with new considerations about object a, proposing for them a schizo-journey between the real and the imaginary, we produce the opportunity for multiple intensities aiming at the conceptualization of death-images. The schizoanalytic territory of the clinic is one that transferentially supports a new aesthetic paradigm where moving images in the world are in direct relation with signs of the unconscious. With Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, we must look at the region of Jacques Lacan’s diagram where we find both reality and the phallus enabling a plane of composition of the unconscious. Between the real and the imaginary, the unconscious reaches the world with agency: rhythms of non-castrated forces running from the real and the imaginary. That would be the focus of the clinic. Analysts listen to analysands by alerting to the importance of taking lines of flight, calling attention to what becomes possible when neurosis is not guiding or controlling perspectives. In contrast to the Lacanian discourse, schizoanalysis attempts to clinically destabilize both the transcendent truth and the semblance as the protections of analytic practices.
Anchored in the Oedipus complex, Lacanian psychoanalysis considers that transference would be established by the analyst’s mysterious position as the holder of answers to the analysand’s questions - the semblance, for Lacan, is the riddle separating the analysand from possessing the truth. Of course, as the analysis proceeds - if it ever starts -, analysands may occupy the position of knowledge, and the demands to the analyst are turned into the praxis of desire. The problem with this articulation of desire is that transference is always related to Jacques Lacan’s notions of the lack attached to the Other, to language as a striated space, that there is no Other of the Other, and that one’s desire is always metonymic to the Other’s desire. Therefore, culture and castration, in their divide from nature, would always be the core point of psychoanalysis. For Lacan, the real of the body is mediated by substitutive pleasures: his body is an effect of the symbolic. For schizoanalysis, though, the real of the body attacks the symbolic with the organic/inorganic nature of affects - metallic affects, in the case of the war machine. Also, Es, the Thing, the unconscious, is not a transcendent barred Other structured as language: it is a chaotic non-civilized force of immanence vibrating within bodies, aiming at emancipatory agency (Ferraço Nassif, 2025); it is in negotiations with the narcissistic Ich, and trying to become imperceptible to the panopticon of the Über-Ich.
Working with object a when looking at the connections between psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis breaches dichotomies that separate Jacques Lacan’s from Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s approaches to the unconscious. We could call schizoanalysis a post-Lacanian practice, one that questions the primacy of language in relation to the body but that emerges on the strength of relevant Lacanian conceptualizations and readings of Sigmund Freud. We underline the importance of Jacques Lacan’s categories of the real and the imaginary but dismiss the understanding that the clinic happens only through the mediation of the symbolic. We ask: How do signs move between the real and the imaginary, unsettling signifying structures? In a mixed regime of signs, codes and semiotizations may despotically be ruled by a master signifier as well as they can produce affects that disrupt representations, inventing new modes of existence. Object a, when it is not a result of cultural castration, subverts the epistemology of the lack by deterritorializing libidinal investments that coordinate an image built on narcissism. As much as we need anti-Oedipus, we need anti-Narcissus (Viveiros de Castro, 2009). Death-images are moving images because they open the space for mirror-images to move again, driving the fluxes of the libido into new journeys throughout the world.
The question of schizoanalysis is: Which Others can you produce? Instead of hunting object a through the symbolic to reach the real with words and interpretations supplied by the signifiers of the Other, schizoanalysis - using the concept of the war machine to build weapons that open the space of the Other - stresses the importance of inverting such clinical mise en scène. Object a is what hunts the symbolic by disarming as well as attacking its logocentric and intellectual organizations. Psychic activities become much more semiotic once the clinic of the unconscious encourages both new gestures and instances to enter the practice. Analysands, instead of remembering family trees, are asked to dismember the bodies of the neurotic narcissism built during the mirror stage - bodies that were recognized and confirmed by the Other as Ich -, and rhizomatically call for other people to come. Calling, or chanting - the chant we hear coming from the text of Duras, filmed by Resnais, in each pause: Hi-ro-shi-ma; in the block of word spoken directly: Nevers - for other people to come, as we read in Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s books (1980, p. 427), is not a metaphor because these other people are in the realm of vitalism: they are semiotic unconscious potentialities of the body in relation to the world. Instead of working with symbolic identification, schizoanalytic practices need to listen to what is disidentification, or un-identification; energizing, with transference, a in its fugitivity from the castrating structures of language. Proto or trans a that desires so it can escape from the references of A, creating its own references and making new alliances.
Dreams are sex
The concept of ritornello (Deleuze; Guattari, 1980, p. 381) is also important when elaborating on the rhythms of the unconscious with the notion of a mixed regime of signs because space-temporal encounters may lose potency, being turned into obsessive rituals, or potentialize novelty. Beyond clinical appointments occurring inside of practices, we must underline energy movements vibrating from decaying masses - the molecular detaching from the molar - due to transference and resistance, bearing in mind that analysis is happening all the time: that both transference and resistance are no exclusivity of the analyst-analysand relationship. The unconscious is in connection to the world and runs with the materiality of the ritornello: it is music, sound that needs surfaces so it can vibrate; it is in the agency of bodies that spend energy when investing or restraining the libido. Psychic activities are cartographies because the nomadic war machine is creating maps of existential territories while sleeping, watching television, sitting inside of the film theater, talking to a random person, taking the bus, calculating, walking the dog on the street, cooking, writing, singing, having sex, and playing the piano. Everyday chores can manifest desire and be transversed by a different musical line, by a Möbius strip sound coming from the inside or the outside that makes the body vibrate unexpectedly.
Outbursts of libidinal rearrangement are triggered by meetings in the world such as the in medias res introduction of Hiroshima mon amour - a dialogue in a meeting between two characters that is also a meeting between the film and its audience. Hiroshima mon amour begins with intertwining bodies covered in shining dust, the result of an explosion, while the film’s musical theme plays and voice-overs enter the room. Are these metallic bodies at war, or are they in love? The audience will never know the name of the film’s main characters, how they met, how they approached each other, how they flirted and went to her hotel room. “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima,” “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing:” indeed, we certainly did not see the facts leading to sex in Hiroshima that night. But we listen to the dialogue happening after it; the film is an aftermath. We know the characters in the exposure of their first meeting, after sexual collision. They keep attracting each other and crashing, intensifying vectors of futures that are only possible because of their first encounter.
The introduction of the film triggers non-metaphorical processes of disorganization and reorganization in its audience’s thought that run in the rhythm of the narrative. The audience becomes anxious in the middle of the couple’s conversations, listening to remembrances, to the repetitive musical theme, and to the atomic syllables in the word Hi-ro-shi-ma. Object a is moving - but the mystery of the film is different from the unbalanced psychoanalytic mystery of Lacanian practices that happens between analyst and analysand because both the film and the audience will expose their narratives during the projection and after it. As the film goes by, audiences unconsciously invest their personal narratives and contaminate the images and sounds of the film; when the film ends, the audience will embody the narrative’s audiovisual experience, being contaminated by it.
What is specific in Hiroshima mon amour, nevertheless, is that the nameless characters never really stabilize in both a comprehensible and meaningful interpretative form or confirm a choice for the future after their meeting. That is the investigation of Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras: they make the members of the audience clinically analyze a new kind of memory, encouraging free association instead of appealing either to truth or to semblance. This new kind of memory is memory that becomes the radiation of the characters’ stories emitted by the crypt of their trauma - as we read in Nicholas Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s studies on cryptonymy (1976). It is memory that is composed of explosions and that will affect its audience’s own bodies. Bodies will rhyme, in transference, with the crypt, moving in its strange rhythm.
The memory of the characters is the radioactive half-life, decaying because it is transforming the thoughts of the living bodies of the audience, mixing with their soma. This is a problem posed by films such as Hiroshima mon amour, underlining that they are not representations - they are affects, in the circuit of object a. Bodies are always in decay, spending energy; they are intensities living with images: dreams are proof of that entanglement. Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras will keep investigating the problem of memory turning into flesh with the technology of cinematographic moving images in other works such as L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) and India Song (1975). Memory is not memory anymore, they are affective images, death-images: they are becoming because, with a, they are part of the audiences’ body and may transform its organs into something else. Within the élan vital, the audience may dream the film, with no preposition separating dream and film - film is the matter of the dream composed of organic and inorganic links. To dream the film, not about the film: with no separation. This is a poetic procedure we also find in the title Hiroshima mon amour because - without a comma, a verb, or a preposition - we need to rethink the way a sentence is read. Dreams are body, images of the real, assemblages of the dreamer’s semiotic unconscious. Studying metallic affections of radiation, Hiroshima mon amour becomes a spy that works with the war machine in the semiotic unconscious, within bodies, infiltrating the flows that travel through the categories of the symbolic, the real, and the imaginary.
In Capitalism and Schizophrenia I: Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari conceptualize the revolutionary specificity of desire. Desire is the revolution that comes from sexuality, disordering a divide between nature and culture or the rules of human reproduction, considering the presence of chaos amid libidinal occupations. Revolutions come from affected bodies. Deleuze and Guattari write in the chapter Psychoanalysis and Familism:
It is quite troublesome to have to say such rudimentary things: desire does not threaten a society because it is a desire to sleep with the mother, but because it is revolutionary. And that does not at all mean that desire is something other than sexuality, but that sexuality and love do not live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of wide-open spaces, and cause strange flows to circulate that do not let themselves be stocked within an established order. Desire does not “want” revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants. From the beginning of this study we have maintained both that social-production and desiring-production are one and the same, and that they have differing regimes, with the result that a social form of production exercises an essential repression of desiring-production, and also that desiring-production - a “real” desire - is potentially capable of demolishing the social form (Deleuze; Guattari, 1972, p. 141).
How do dreams work with desire in the factory floor of the libido that is unconscious? Dreams are vectors of future that demolish memory as a social form; they are the sexual encounter in Hiroshima mon amour, decomposing remembrance into affects. Manifesting desire, dreams provoke revolutionary questions: How to live after meeting the images you had contact with during the night? Which alliances or free associations make the dream possible when sleeping and not repressed when awake? Dreams are the war machine causing strange flows to circulate in the body, reaching its mucous extremities, hitting the censorship of the symbolic and exceeding intellectual representations of emotions and things.
Revolutionary desire, linked to sex, is a poignant difference from Slavoj Zizek’s Hegelian understanding of the unconscious and its flows. In his book about cinema - Lacrimae Rerum (2013) -, Zizek captures sex and places it in the realm of the symbolic. He says that sex is language and that one dreams about sex because the symbolic is waking up the dreamer. Reading Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, we indicate that sex, in its revolutionary attachment to desire, is not language; thus, we confront Zizek’s hypothesis. Social practices are disrupted because of the crossings between sex, desire, and dreams. In schizoanalysis, social practices become much more connected to the categories of the real and the imaginary than they are to the symbolic. How to film after a dream? How to write? How to talk? How to walk? How to think? We assemble weapons to bring the images of the dream from the unconscious to the world. To dream is to meet potential death-images that move from the body with agency. The compositions of dreams are singular in their power because they are uncastrated, unexpected, ungoverned, and undetermined. Images, in dreams, appear without warning while someone is sleeping and they may also have consequences yet to be known if dreamers are attentive to their unconscious productions, not always vetoing them from emergency in daylight actions.
The singularity of the dream is haecceity (Deleuze; Guattari, 1980, p. 318), when intensities of a body produce the opportunity of new compositions in life. The eye and the I - the Ich - may become something else on the strength of Es. Unconscious vibrations of the dream are tensioning forms, enabling challenges to stable fictions or myths of the Über-Ich to take place. Dreams are renegotiations. Emmanuelle Riva’s character says: “You see, Nevers is the city in the world, and even the thing in the world, I dream about most often at night. And at the same time it’s the thing I think about the least.” What should Okada Eiji’s character see? What should we, the audience, see? The woman sees something in her dream that she does not talk about when awake. The man also says: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.” - Hiroshima is his traumatic Nevers. It is important, though, not to take their sentences as demand and to work with trauma with both the agency of the unconscious within the body’s machinic difference in repetition and ecological transversalities. Nothing, no-things, never, nevers: in the neighborhood of Jacques Lacan, we can play with the words, tensioning signifiers so they can burst from memory-linguistic structures, being signs, impactful vectors that open new geo-coordinates for nomadic movements, for wide-open spaces. These are impacts of the non-discursive sexual body composing the dream.
Disagreeing with Jacques Lacan, we must say that yes, there are sexual relations - since relations are not ruled by symbolic interventors that institute metaphorical pleasures to stand for what is lacking due to castration. Dreams are fortuitous sexual relations. What we did not see from Nevers or Hiroshima can make us create death-images with our bodies: weapons of artistic sensation, of percepts and affects (Deleuze; Guattari, 1991, p. 196). Dreams are sex, revealing a path for desire to be manifested by the operations of the war machine: they are activities that work with the vulnerability and the exposure of the body to revolutionary agency. Because of the conditions of vulnerability and exposure, the body may be reassembled, changed from its social form; so we could say that all dreams are actually nightmares, presenting a dilemma to the dreamer that happens between social-production and desiring-production.
The position of the characters in Hiroshima mon amour makes us positively approach the limitations of both seeing and the scopic drive, disorganizing sight, transforming it into no-things, or productive nevers, multiplying imperceptibility (Deleuze; Guattari, 1980, p. 284). The impossibilities of clear visibility, though, are the possibilities of new ways of image-making and production of thought, creating aesthetic paradigms for the work with the unconscious. When sleeping, the eyes are closed - nevertheless, there are images in the dream. Images of no-things, of nevers, potential death-images escaping from representations; these are haptic images produced by the body in its physicality that exist over the organs of vision. Dreams alert to new drives that transverse scopophilia, beyond both the pleasure principle and the cogito that would doubt the affects crashing against the social form of the body. Dreams can bring to the opened eyes of the ones that are awake delirious new images from transgressive sleep, migrating from the unconscious to the world, resulting in migraines to repression. These are nomadic images of no-things, of nevers yet to exist as ground stones to different universes of reference.
Concluding
During the research that led to this essay on Hiroshima mon amour and the semiotic unconscious - trying to work out new possibilities of study that underline the connections between Jacques Lacan’s signifiers and Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s metallic affects -, the image of this building in the city of Nevers, France, was a valuable finding (Figure 2). Deleuze and Guattari create the jargon of the war machine, which operates in a mixed regime of signs, because they are concerned with a space and time that includes social meanings and articulations as well as incomprehensible acts and disruptions in language. A mixed regime of signs formulates that the molar and the molecular move together, alongside Eros and Thanatos, in planes of composition. In their Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine, one of the regions in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the associations of the war machine with nomadism, and the smooth and the striated spaces. They conduct the readings on Paul Virilio - precisely one of the architects who projected the bunker-church in Nevers:
Photo by Gilles Ehrmann. Sainte-Bernadette-du-Banlay Church, in Nevers, France. Designed by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio.
As Virilio emphasizes, the sea became the place of the fleet in being, where one no longer goes from one point to another, but rather holds space beginning from any point: instead of striating space, one occupies it with a vector of deterritorialization in perpetual motion. This modem strategy was communicated from the sea to the air, as the new smooth space, but also to the entire Earth considered as desert or sea. As converter and capturer, the State does not just relativize movement, it restores absolute movement. It does not just go from the smooth to the striated, it reconstitutes smooth space; it restores smooth in the wake of the striated. It is true that this new nomadism accompanies a worldwide war machine whose organization exceeds the State apparatuses and passes into energy, military-industrial, and multinational complexes. We say this as a reminder that smooth space and the form of exteriority do not have an irresistible revolutionary calling but change meaning drastically depending on the interactions they are part of and the concrete conditions of their exercise or establishment (for example, the way in which total war and popular war, and even guerrilla warfare, borrow one another's methods) (Deleuze; Guattari, 1980, p. 481).
For the clinic of the unconscious, being either analysand or analyst - that is, indeed, the process of transformation one takes to become a practitioner of psychoanalysis/schizoanalysis -, the interaction happening with rhythms and rhymes is what provokes the most important configurations produced in planes of composition. Deleuze and Guattari, in their readings of Virilio’s archeology of power and concept of the fleet in being, allow us to stress that the bunker-church built in Nevers expresses that war is not over. Eros and Thanatos compose bodies and worlds, working with agency in the circuits of smooth and striated spaces. Representation can be periclitated, liberating fluxes, but the drives of life and death are moving from one to the other in deterritorialization. The outcome of death-images, the results of transference and resistance when working with the unconscious, are never-ending matters of analytic precaution.
Hiroshima mon amour reaches a grim scene by the end of the projection. Back in her hotel room, after a long night of talking and running away, the French woman says to the Japanese man that Hiroshima is his name; to that sentence, he replies saying that her name is Nevers. At the crossroads of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, we must ask: How is it possible to overturn the semiotics of that last scene? This essay is an attempt of fighting against that last scene’s Lacanian meaning - displaying a perverse strategy, a theater of cruelty, that aims at semiotically reenergizing the trajectories opened by the cinematographic forces of Alain Resnais’ and Marguerite Duras’ achievement. Thus, we underlined the metallic affects composing Hiroshima mon amour. Instead of understanding the end of the narrative within Jacques Lacan’s framework of the lack - which is the traumatic imprisonment of the characters in the space of the Other, represented in the film by both Hiroshima and Nevers -, we insist on conducting the analysis of their revolutionary movement of desiring-production, listening to their creation of new vectors of futures, on the strength of metallic affects that decompose both memory and narcissistic identifications. Man and woman meet the enemies of the States of France and Japan - these enemies are alliances against the institutions of language, family, school, church, and past. Their movement is agency: looking for encounters, free associations, dreams, and desires.
References
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MORENO MORENO, María Pura; SOLANO ROJO, Montserrat. “The Crypt Concrete of L’Église du Banlay de Sainte Bernadette in Nevers (1963 - 1966): Claude Parent and Paul Virilio”. In: En Blanco N 26. Valencia, Spain. Barclay&Crousse, 2019. https://doi.org/10.4995/eb.2019.11208
» https://doi.org/10.4995/eb.2019.11208 - VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, Eduardo. Métaphysiques Cannibales Paris: PUF, 2009.
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