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Steven Shaviro
Mladen Djordjevic's Life and Death of a Porno Gang (Serbia, 2009) contains explicit representations of sex
and violence, including scenes of golden showers,
zoophilia, animal slaughter, rape, murder, wartime atrocities, the production of
snuff films, and suicide. In its extremity, Porno Gang has a lot in common with
its sister film, Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film (2010), with which it shares a
cinematographer (Nemanja Jovanov), as well as the plot premise of porno actors
lured into making snuff films. Both of these movies allude, at least implicitly, to
the American torture porn franchises of the past decade (the Hostel series and
the Saw series). They also bring to mind the controversial but highly visible and critically acclaimed transgressive
art cinema of Western Europe and East Asia,
including such works as Gaspar Noë's Irreversible (2002), Pascal Laugiers's Martyrs (2008), Lars von Trier's
Antichrist (2009, below), Takashi Miike's Audition (2000), and Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy (2002-2005).
However, Life and Death of a Porno Gang stands out among all these films for
a number of reasons. It is unique in terms of its style, in terms of its particular geographical and historical location,
and in terms of the types of social and
economic conditions that it explores. In the first place, Porno Gang rejects both the commercial-genre functionalism
of movies like Hostel, and the art-film self-consciousness of directors like Noë and von Trier. Instead, it adopts
an informal, low-budget aesthetic; it has the look and feel of a video documentary. The film is largely shot in natural light,
in real locations, with small, handheld video cameras, the same kind of cameras that the characters within the film themselves
use. In this way, Porno Gang picks up from Djordjevic's previous film, Made in Serbia
(2005), a downbeat documentary about the small size and limited horizons of the Serbian porn industry. Porno Gang retains
its predecessors' look and feel, as well
as subject matter, even though it is a fictional film, entirely scripted and staged.
Life and Death of a Porno Gang also stands out for the way that it tends to shy away from, and representationally underplay
the horrific violence that it nonetheless explicitly depicts. This is its biggest difference from A Serbian Film,
which presents its depraved visions with a hallucinatory hyperrealism, often pushed to the point of campy excess. In contrast,
Life and Death of a Porno Gang remains largely naturalistic, and is not edited for shock value. Indeed, Djordjevic's
editing style is oddly elliptical; it gives us buildups, but it often cuts away before the horror it depicts has had enough
time to register in its full intensity. Porno Gang neither dwells on its carnage with long takes and a fixed or slow-moving
camera, nor riles up its viewers with rapid, disjunctive montage. Instead, there is a kind of everydayness to its horror.
The film records the experiences of its characters in a manner reminiscent sometimes of a first-person video diary, and other
times of reality television. The film's most shocking moments emerge from this background of everydayness, and then quickly
recede back into it.
Life and Death of a Porno Gang also has a unique social and historical location. The film is set in Serbia, in 2000
and 2001. This is the moment just after the end
of the civil wars that ravaged and destroyed Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The fighting is over, but the wounds remain: from the
wartime atrocities committed by all sides in Croatia and Bosnia between 1991 and 1995, and from the NATO bombings of Serbia
in 1999. There's a legacy of destruction and despair, in the form of video recordings, the memories of the combatants and
victims, the buildings that have been reduced to rubble, and the grotesque mutations afficting both people and animals in
the wake of NATOs use of depleted uranium in its bombs. Yugoslavia
is a country that no longer exists; socialism is just a dim memory. And there is really nothing to replace either of these.
Serbia, in particular, is isolated from the
world; its institutions are bankrupt and scarcely functioning. It's as if the whole country were experiencing the grim hangover
from a violent orgy that it can only
dimly remember.
In giving expression to this sense of exhaustion and depletion, Life and Death of a Porno Gang is an exemplary work
of post-socialist, as well
as postwar, cinema. The feeling of having come too late, of being post- everything (postmodern, posthuman, posthistorical)
is probably a worldwide pathology
at this point. But it is felt with a particular acuteness in postwar and post-socialist
Serbia, torn as it is between a past of vanishing traditions, and a globalized future
that somehow never manages to arrive.
Such is the situation in which we meet the protagonist of Life and Death of a
Porno Gang: Marko (Mihajlo Jovanovic), an aspiring young director just graduated from film school. The movie opens with
Marko facing the camera and introducing himself to us. He presents the movie that we are about to see as his video diary,
an autobiographical documentary about a young lmmaker who wants to make a movie. But Marko quickly learns that it isnt easy
to raise the money
to make a film. His family and friends are indifferent to his efforts; his afuent businessman father refuses to fund his art.
Markos ambition strikes us as being
overly idealistic, and more than a bit naive. In post-socialist Serbia, art is entirely
subordinated to commerce; you can only get money in order to make more money.
In practice, this means that the only person who is willing to fund Markos lmmaking endeavors is Cane (Srdjan Miletic), the
porno king of Belgrade. Cane is
happy to hire Marko to shoot porn for him; he doesnt care about subject-matter or
quality, but only about quick prots and a quick turnaround. For his part, Marko is
thrilled to be shooting porn; it makes him feel like he's doing something dangerous
and transgressive. Nonetheless, Marko gets into serious trouble when he brings his nished work to Cane. Markos film
is a campy, self-conscious porn/horror
hybrid (above), with overtones of political satire. A Serbian peasant fertilizes the soil with his sperm, giving rise to a
super-potent form of marijuana. Smokers get an in-
credible orgiastic buzz; they want to fuck everyone in sight. But when the supply runs out, the users are transformed into
ravenous zombies, straight out of Night of
the Living Dead. Cane is infuriated by what he sees as arty and uncommercial,
instead of straightforwardly simple and Serbian. He demands that Marko give
his money back. Marko, of course, is unable to repay him. Faced with threats and beatings from Cane and his corrupt cop brother
Strahinja (Dragan Djordjevic),
Marko is forced to go into hiding.
On October 5, 2000, Marko is hiding out in an acquaintance's cellar. He horses around with his friend Vanja (Predrag Damnjanovic);
they take turns pretending
to fuck an inflatable pig doll. Marko gets drunk, and finally vomits and passes out. It's only when he wakes up the next morning
that he finds out what he has
missed. For October 5, 2000 is the date on which massive street demonstrations in Belgrade forced the ouster of Serbias tyrant,
Slobodan Miloevic. It was a victory
for democracy, and for workers, students, and young people generally. But Marko only learns of the event by watching it on
TV. And he tells us that he doesnt really care. Nothing for him has changed. Miloevic the one-time Communist Party
boss not only led Serbia through all of its disastrous wars, but also dismantled socialism, by transforming it into the crony-gangster
capitalism that continues to
flourish after his ouster. Marko's enemies, Cane and Strahinja, exemplify the web
of corruption and prot-extraction that extends throughout postwar and even post-Miloevic Serbia.
Finally, Marko realizes that he has no choice; in order to escape Canes clutches,
he needs to ee Belgrade altogether. And this is where the main action of Life
and Death of a Porno Gang properly gets under way. Marko organizes a troupe
of porno actors, most of whom are sick and tired of being exploited by Cane. He
offers them the chance of going on a road trip together. They paint and decorate
an old van in 1960s-hippie style, and spend the summer driving it through the
countryside. The idea is to present what they call the first porno cabaret in the
Balkans. They move from town to town, putting on little shows for the peasants.
These largely consist in live versions of porn/horror scenarios like the ones in
Marko's film. A frustrated peasant fucks the sterile earth. Female aliens from the
planet Erotikon 6 descend to our world in order to eradicate patriarchy in Serbia.
There are mock castrations, and fellatio is performed upon animals. It will be
interesting to see how the villagers respond to our sexual provocations, Marko
says, directly to the camera. We will educate the Serbs sexually. We will expand
their horizons. This is our guerrilla mission.
As Life and Death of a Porno Gang proceeds, we get to know all the members
of Markos troupe, and to empathize with their predicaments. They are all out-
siders of one sort or another, poeple who feel marginalized by, and excluded from, mainstream society. The hulking and rather
sweet Dragan (Bojan Zogovic) is a
refugee from small-town provincialism; he acts the role of the peasant who fucks the earth. Ceca (Ivan Djordjevic), the
teenaged transvestite, leaves his farm in
order to escape his fathers constant beatings; he sucks a horses cock in the show.
The HIV-positive gay men, leatherman Johnny (Radivoj Kneevic) and pretty boy
´
Max (Srdjan Jovanovic), join the group because they feel that they have nothing to lose. Markos new girlfriend Una (Ana Acimovic)
is an actress who sees no
future for herself in the legitimate theater; she serves as the troupes master
of ceremonies. Soja (Nataa Miljuand) cant get an acting job because she is
full-bodied; but she loves the camera. The strung-out junkie couple Rade (Aleksandar Gligoric) and Darinka (Mariana Arandjelovic)
leave their children behind,
hoping that they will somehow be able to get straight on the road. Vanja, being
a pervy voyeur who only likes to watch, serves as Markos cameraman, video-
recording all of the porno gangs adventures.
By focusing on a group of marginalized outsiders who do not conform to social
norms, as well as by adopting low production values, Djordjevic hearkens back to
the Yugoslav Black Wave of the 1960s and 1970s. This movement was something like the Yugoslav equivalent of other cinematic
New Waves of the time
´
(France, Japan, Czechoslovakia). Black Wave directors, like Zivojin Pavlovic,
Aleksandar Petrovic, and Zelimir Zilnik, rejected the conventions of high-minded
prestige filmmaking, dominant at the time in both East and West. Their overtly
pessimistic movies also violently contradicted the Soviet-inspired tradition of socialist realism. Black Wave films exposed
the seamy underside of supposedly
egalitarian socialist Yugoslavia. They denounced State bureaucracy, social conformism, the persistence of class distinctions,
and the ofcial mythology of heroic
Partisan struggle.
But with its focus on sexuality, Life and Death of a Porno Gang most explicitly
recalls one Black Wave film in particular: Dusan Makavejevs WR: Mysteries of
´
the Organism (1971, above). Although Djordjevic doesnt attempt anything on the order
of Makavejev's radical intellectual montage, he does pick up on the older lms
concern with sexual revolution and its limits. WR mocks both Western/American
capitalism, and Soviet-inspired socialism, by playing them off against one another. The film argues that the Yugoslav
socialist experiment is hopelessly compromised, not only by the continuing legacy of Stalinism (despite Tito's break
with Stalin in 1948), but also by its perpetuation of patriarchy, monogamy, and
sexual repression. Milena, the heroine of WR, tries in her own way to educate the
Serbs sexually. But she is eventually undone by her fatal attraction to a Soviet
people's artist, who embodies the deep complicity, at the heart of the Leninist revolutionary tradition, between romantic
idealization on the one hand, and
sadistic, destructive impulses on the other. Life and Death of a Porno Gang carries forward both the sexual utopianism
of WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and
´
its disillusioned recognition of the fatality of the death drive. Djordjevic, like
Makavejev, engages with the cosmic forces of Eros and Thanatos, situating these
forces socially, culturally, and economically.
Life and Death of a Porno Gang also picks up on the tradition of the road movie,
in which the characters travel for the sheer experience of the journey itself, rather
than in order to reach some specic destination. There is a strong utopian element
to the porno gangs summer tour through the Serbian countryside. A group of
self-consciously marginal people form their own small counter-society, fueled by
sex, drugs, and a shared spirit of adventure. Their trip is an exodus, a creative line of flight. They find themselves
living in a kind of idyll: putting on shows,
camping under the stars, and welcoming other refugees from oppression into their
midst. The men and women of the porno gang disregard repressive social norms,
and remain open to all sorts of carnal experience. Viewing the film, we empathize
with all these characters, as we get to know their particular stories, and see how
they are all changed by their interactions with one another.
This doesnt mean that the members of the porno gang live blissfully, without conflict. In Djordjevic's utopia, no less than
in Makavejev's, tension and discord
continue to exist. These come both from the outside and from the inside. Consider,
for instance, the case of Ceca, who is probably 18 or 19. He joins the group after
seeing them perform for the people of his village one evening. Ceca tells Johnny
and Max that he is tired of being beaten by his father, and rejected by all the people
of his village, for dressing as a woman. He is welcomed by the porno gang; he
basks in their full acceptance, which is something that he has never experienced
before. However, Ceca's fulllment comes at a price. The last thing that he does
before joining the porno gang, as he bids farewell to his life on the farm, is to kill
his beloved goat Rado. He has cared for the animal ever since it was born. But
he cannot bear the thought that, once he is gone, his father will certainly slaughter
it, out of vengefulness and spite. So he slits its throat himself, in a kind of ritual
sacrice. Its a moment of both tenderness and horror.
Johnny is very much taken with Ceca, and quickly seduces him. Before they have
sex, he warns the boy that he is ill with HIV. But Ceca simply responds that he
doesnt plan to live forever, anyway. This is a deeply painful moment for the
audience; its clear to us that Ceca does not really understand the full measure of
what he has just agreed to. Even in what I am calling its most utopian moments,
Life and Death of a Porno Gang does not deny the reality of exploitation, pain,
and loss. Eros is always shadowed by Thanatos. But the film does not allow us
to judge Johnny harshly either; for it gives us no outside perspective from which
to do so. We certainly do not side with the police and other authorities, who
regard the porno gang as a bunch of perverts and degenerates. Rather, we find
that we cannot judge the members of the troupe at all, except to the extent as
gradually happens over the course of the film that they judge themselves. The
utopian dimension of the film is precisely this: its rejection of any sort of extrinsic
judgment. The porno gang is not an ideal community; it is just a group of people,
in close contact, who for a time forge their own imperfect affective bonds, and
develop their own autonomous balance between intimacy and privacy.
The developing triangle between Johnny, Ceca, and Max gives us still more insight
into the inner dynamics of the porno gang. When Johnny pursues Ceca, Max is
consumed with jealousy. The three of them argue vehemently. At one point, Max
angrily attacks Ceca, and soon enough the three of them are hitting each other and
shoving each other around. But, although the pain and hurt are real enough, we
cannot quite take this violence seriously, because the other members of the porno
gang do not take it seriously either. They gather around to watch the fighting, and
to laugh at it, while Vanja captures it all on video. For the porno gang, this love
triangle is just another spectacle. In any case, they have all just eaten psychedelic
mushrooms, which they found growing in the forest. The very next shots of the
film, with no transition, show us that the fighting has been transformed into genial
horseplay. Even Johnny now joins in the laughter. Everyone dances and dallies
in the woods; some of them even try to hump the trees. Pain, jealousy, loss and
sexual conict are not denied, so much as they are diverted. The porno gang does
not abolish these things, but somehow it finds ways to make them livable.
If I have been insisting so strongly upon the utopian dimension of Life and Death
of a Porno Gang, this is precisely because it is so precarious. It falls apart in
the course of the film. The sociality of the porno gang cannot maintain itself for
long against the pressures of the Real. Marko and his collaborators may hope
to educate the Serbs, but they get more of a response to their provocations
than they had ever bargained for. Indeed, the porno gang is all too successful in
offending and outraging their peasant audience. These Belgrade hipsters, with
their bohemian ways, are not appreciated by the patriarchal rustics who provided Miloevic with his biggest base of support.
In response to their performances,
Marko and his actors are threatened, beaten, humiliated, abused and (in one
scene) outright gang-raped by furious peasants, brutal cops, and local political
bosses who seem to be still in power from the old Communist days.
These scenes are brutal, but not without their own strange glimmers of humor. At
one point, late at night, all the members of the group are made to kneel, with their
clothes pulled down, so that a line of old peasant men can rape them from behind.
As the camera tracks down this line, the pain of our protagonists is evident. But
all of a sudden, Johnny starts laughing; he goes on, louder and louder. Soon,
all the other members of the troupe are laughing as well. We arent told, in so
many words, just why they are laughing. Is it the inherent absurdity of a bunch of
homophobes punishing the very activity that they detest by themselves indulging
in it? Or is it the further irony that Johnnys punisher is unwittingly infecting himself with HIV? In any case, the groups
sardonic laughter is a sign of resistance
and solidarity, a sign of life. In spite of everything, they will not be bullied out of
continuing their experiment with new ways of living, loving, and expressing.
But there are worse things to come. Marko is approached by Franz (Srboljub
Milin), a German journalist with mysterious police and business connections.
Franz tells Marko about his love for the Balkans, on account of the regions im-
pressive blend of cruelty and creativity. He recalls the exciting times he had as a
reporter, covering the Yugoslav wars. He shows Marko video scenes of wartime
atrocities in Bosnia, and complains that such footage is no longer easy to come
by. On this basis, Franz makes Marko a proposition. He offers him large amounts
of cash in return for making snuff films: that is to say, for actually killing people
on camera, and recording their deaths. Franz explains that there is a lucrative market for such things in the United States
and Western Europe. The Americans and
Western Europeans regard the former Yugoslavia as a primitive and uncivilized
place, torn apart by atavistic violence. Such alleged savagery titillates the West-
ern imagination; the Balkans are a "lawless place," Franz says, but for this very
reason they are "fertile ground" for all sorts of excesses that would be impossible
at home. For Franz's patrons, it is entirely to be expected that things like snuff
films should come from Serbia.
´
One of the aims of Life and Death of a Porno Gang, as also of Spasojevic's A Ser-
bian Film, is to throw the image of Balkan barbarity back in the face of a Western
audience that is all-too-eagerly anticipating, and hoping for, such an image. It
is as if the directors were saying to their foreign audience: So this is what you
expect of us, isnt it? Lets push it as far as we can, and see if you can really take
it. But if this is the basic gesture of A Serbian Film, with Porno Gang things are
a bit more complicated. Serbia has its appointed place in the Western imaginary,
as a site of primitivism; but it is also an actual backwater from the point of
view of transnational capitalism. After the fall of socialism and to some extent,
already before it the nations of Eastern Europe entered into the world capital-
ist marketplace on severely unequal terms. They were condemned to perpetual
underdevelopment, as sources of cheap labor and other natural resources. (Yugoslavian Gastarbeiters in West Germany
had already pioneered this role, as far
back as the 1960s). The Balkans are something like Europes own internal Third
World. Life and Death of a Porno Gang simply extrapolates from all this, when
it imagines Serbia and the former Yugoslavia as a source of veriable images of
torture and murder, for the delectation of afluent Western consumers.
Marko and his troupe are appalled by Franz's offer, but they quickly run out of
alternatives. They are on the run from vicious cops and angry peasants; they are
entirely out of money. And so they find themselves, in desperation, agreeing to
kill people on camera for pay. They have, in effect, been coerced into making the
free choice of entering into an unsavory market relation. Franz assures them
that his police and government connections will protect them from the law. And
in any case, he tells them, they will only be killing volunteers: people who have
themselves made the free choice to die. Its all a cynical business arrangement,
from which everyone supposedly profits. Rich people in the West are willing to
pay exorbitant prices, in order to have access to this snuff material. The porno
gang will receive the money it needs to survive. And the families of the victims
will also receive large sums of money, supposedly allowing them to escape from
their own straightened circumstances.
In the second half of Life and Death of a Porno Gang, Marko and his troupe dramatize for the camera, and then actually
perform, a number of executions. All of
the people they kill have their own stories. First, there's the giggling psycho who
enjoys slashing himself, and who wants his death preserved on camera because
he likes the movies. Then, there's the former soldier who is consumed by guilt,
because of the wartime horrors in which he actively participated. He tells us about
all this, before dying, in a poignant monologue delivered straight to the camera.
Next, there's the small-town bully whose political connections allow him to get
away with rape and murder. He is the only unwilling victim of the porno gang;
they take justice into their own hands, kidnapping and executing him. Finally,
´
theres the old farmer a reverent Miloevic supporter whose granddaughter is
hideously deformed, due to the effects of radiation from the NATO bombings.
The porno gang slowly but surely disintegrates from within, as a result of these
experiments in snuff. The actors all tell themselves that this is just a job, and that
when it is over, they will go on to better things. But they are unable to make
themselves believe this. The groups esprit de corps disintegrates. Performance
now is labor, rather than enjoyment; even the actors attempts to relax and amuse
themselves take on an air of desperation. Marko becomes gloomy and impotent,
much to Una's disgust. Johnny is shot and killed, in the course of a frenzied escape
from the police. Max hangs himself in despair, despite Ceca's attempts to comfort
him. Shortly afterward, Ceca himself becomes ill, and also dies. The remaining
members of the troupe cant take it anymore; as Rade sadly reminds Marko, "we
came on this trip to fuck, not to kill." But death has entirely usurped the place of sex; Thanatos has defeated Eros.
The utopian line of flight has turned into a grim death trip. What started out as a movement of sexual and social liberation
becomes, instead, a nightmarish and nihilistic voyage towards oblivion.
There is one peaceful moment in the second half of the film. The troupe visits an
Orthodox monastery on September 11, 2001: a date of worldwide signicance,
but of whose events the film takes no explicit notice. Just as Marko missed the revolution that overthrew Miloevic,
so he and his friends miss the destruction of
the World Trade Center, and the beginning of the global war on terror. After
years of intervention in the Balkans, the afuent West now has other enemies to
pursue. It is no longer concerned with Serbia at all except, perhaps, as a source
of death and torture porn. In any case, the monastery is a place of withdrawal.
Dragan decides to leave the porno gang, and spend the rest of his life there.
I will not try to comment here on the actual role of the Orthodox Church in contemporary Serbian politics and culture.
I will only suggest that, whatever other
roles the Church may play, in Life and Death of a Porno Gang it seems to be a
stand-in for or better, a displacement of something that is signicantly absent
from the very heart of the film. I refer, of course, to the experience of actually
existing socialism; but also to the ideals that that experience so massively and disappointingly betrayed. The idea of Communism,
like the idea of Yugoslavia itself,
is today utterly disavowed in Serbia as it is in all of the ex-Yugoslav republics.
But I think that this idea still functions, in Porno Gang at least, as something of
a structuring absence; if not, rather, as a ghostly, hauntological trace. It is the
ghostly subsistence of this idea, refracted through Makavejev, that stands behind
the porno gangs utopian experiment in new forms of affective community. And
it is the absence of Communism, and even of its idea, that leaves the porno gang
trapped between the corrupt gangster capitalism of the new social order, on the
one hand, and the repressive traditionalism of the old peasant Serbia, on the other.
By the end of the film, the porno gang has entirely imploded. Except for Dragan in
the monastery, all of its members are dead. Marko ties things up, Clint Eastwood-
style, by killing his tormentors Cane, Strajina, and (nally) Franz. But this does
nothing to restore his blasted hopes. In the last scene of the movie, Marko and Una
kill themselves in the romantic surroundings, as Marko says, of what used to be
Roman hallowed ground. There has to be a return to zero, to the very beginning.
Old Roman ruins are the appropriate backdrop for a situation in which everything
has fallen apart, and reconstruction is impossible. Marko says to Una, "I have the
impression that I wasted my life."
On
its deepest level, Life and Death of a Porno Gang is a movie about the aesthetics of transgression. Early in the film,
when he first introduces his porno cabaret,
Marko announces his aesthetic credo: What is pornography for me? Well, I was
always into destruction. Destruction of the spirit and the body. Our pornography is raw and cruel, no prettication.
A fight between Eros and Thanatos, where
Thanatos wins. Thanatos makes a laughingstock of Eros." Marko always claims
that he has decided to go to the end, and that he is eager to see the face of horror. And it is precisely on the basis of
this vision that Franz approaches Marko,
enticing him with the prospect of taking transgression to the next level, going
further with it than any artist has ever gone before. Franz tells Marko that "one
can always go one step further"; and Marko responds, "I'm always for that step
further." But Marko is sadly unprepared for what it really means to take a step further, and become the first artist of snuff.
In the world of globalized, neoliberal
capitalism, transgression is not a daring risk. It is no longer a repudiation of all social norms. Rather, it is a supreme
commodity, a locus of particularly intense
capitalist value-extraction. Transgression is not an act of defiance, but a reaffirmation of power. One sees as much in the
dour, inexpressive, completely controlled
faces of the Western businesspeople, all elderly white men, who come with Franz
at one point in Porno Gang to witness a "live" performance of snuff.
This recognition is what makes a difference for Life and Death of a Porno Gang. In contrast to the extreme cinema of
Western Europe and East Asia, Djordjevic's
film does not accord any aesthetic or moral eficacy to the excesses that it depicts. There is no self-congratulation at the
rupturing of taboos. Rather, the film portrays, and embodies, the aesthetic and moral impasse that results from
a social
atmosphere of cynicism and demoralization. This atmosphere is the result, not
just of the horror of the nationalist wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia,
but also of the general process under which the formerly socialist nations entered,
upon unequal terms, into the world of Western capitalism. All this becomes apparent both in the narrative content of the
film and in its stylistics. Life and Death
of a Porno Gang speaks of, and to, a time when hope has been exhausted, and when it seems that There Is No Alternative.
If it does nonetheless suggest a way
out from the universal rule of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, this is only be-
cause it speaks so marginally and so obliquely, from a position of humiliation and
opprobrium.
Steven Shaviro is
the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University,US. He is the author of Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille,
and Literary Theory (1990), The Cinematic Body (1993), Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism
(1997), Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society (2003), and Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead,
Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2009), together with numerous articles on film and video, cultural theory, American popular
culture, and science fiction. He blogs at The Pinocchio Theory. .
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c. 2011 Acidemic
C. 2013 - Acidemic Journal of Film and Media
- BFG LCS: 489042340244
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