SubStance

The words Georges Bataille used to introduce La Littérature et le Mal (1957) are well known: "Literature is the essential, or else it's nothing. Evil—a heightened form of Evil—of which it is the expression, has for us, I believe, the supreme value. […] Literature is not innocent, and, being guilty, it should in the end admit to it" (171-72). With these words, Bataille defends a sacrificial conception of literature and of the subversion of which it is the agent. In spite of everything, and contrary to his anthropologically inspired writings, Bataille is not concerned here with the social repercussions of evoking Evil as a category of symbolic representation. Despite the influence of Marcel Mauss, the principle of expenditure that invests the reader is not the object of his study; La littérature et le Mal is not about the sociology of gift exchange.

If this phrase of Bataille's is well known, less familiar is that of Jean Epstein at the beginning of one of his last works, Le Cinéma du diable (1947), whose terms strangely foreshadow those of the foreword of La littérature et le Mal, ten years later: "Let's start the trial. The cinematographer pleads guilty" (339). With these words, Epstein begins a brilliant and rich demonstration that takes the form of a plea in defense of the only conception of cinema that he acknowledges—that of the avant-garde. Jean Epstein is known primarily for his work as a cinematographer: La Belle Nivernaise (1923), Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (1925), Mauprat (1926), La Glace à Trois faces (1927) and La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928), based on Poe's tale. In a vein that is halfway between ethnographic film and formal experimentation, Epstein made the works now known as his "maritime cycle": Finnis Terrae (1929), Mor'vran (1930), L'Or des Mers (1932), and Le Tempestaire (1947). But we cannot ignore the importance of his abundant theoretical works, written between 1921 and 1953, the year of his death.

The argument of Le Cinéma du diable, which follows in the footsteps of Epstein's previously published texts, such as Photogénénie de l'impondérable (1935) and especially L'Intelligence d'une machine (1946) rests on a paradox: cinema, Epstein argues, is intrinsically the work of the devil, since it diffuses a "secret propaganda" whose vectors are the irrational [End Page 3] stimulation of feelings by images, impregnation with perpetual movement, and the revelation of the world valorizing a poetics of the "photogenic." In spite of everything, the very spectacle of this "diabolical" invention has the effect of purging the feelings of the spectator, paradoxically assuring the stability of the social structure. The question I'd like to explore is thus the following: to what extent can an artistic practice motivated by subversion claim to be, from the point of view of its reception in the social body, in contradiction with its initial ambition? In other words, how does the praxis aroused by a work become contradictory to the work's subversive aesthetic? Turning to the writings of Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille for support, I would hope to place this analysis of Le Cinéma du diable in a larger context of French thought on subversion, and to analyze the ambiguities inherent in the latter.

Epstein bases his thought on a given: in the early twentieth century, going to the movies was still considered a socially degrading activity; since animated images participated in the debasing of humanity and in the corruption of morals, it could only be the work of the devil. However, Epstein reverses the meaning of the word devil by associating the activities of the Evil One with the great scientific discoveries of Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus, and da Vinci. According to Epstein, the devil is "the toolmaker of civilization," and should as such be "considered as a benefactor of humanity" (336). Thus the term "devil" designates the succession of negation through which the historical dialectic progresses. The devil is not an evil spirit; it is above all...