The Off-Screen by Eyal Peretz

Author:Eyal Peretz [Peretz, Eyal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Play is the activation of the nongiven, experimentation with an absence, the play of the world as an open Whole. In his famous discussion of the play of his grandson in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud analyzes the relations between the origin of play and loss and absence, examined in the case of the grandson from the point of view of the loss or departure of the mother. As the mother leaves the child alone, Freud notices, he starts—by taking an object that he repeatedly makes disappear and then come back again (the famous fort-da game)—experimenting with absence and disappearance, both activating his own disappearance (for the loss of his mother means for him the loss of who he is) as well as his mother’s. This play with absence should not only be understood as a restorative attempt on the child’s part to bring back the absent mother and his absent self, an Orphic endeavor, but also as the very opening of a world—that is, the opening of a realm structured by the relations between an “origin” understood as a groundlessness, an emptiness from any givenness, an emptiness out of which new identities can emerge—through the activation of a distance (from the mother), an undetermined distance that allows for the question of his own identity to arise out of this playing with distance, insofar as identity has to do with the question of determining one’s place in relation to a distant “origin.”55

The interruption of the factory through the activation of the poetic screen therefore represents a moment in which the effort to defend against the collapse of the metaphysical frame and exposure to groundlessness is co-opted neither into production of the same nor, as in the Nazi logic examined in The Great Dictator, into bringing about a new divinity characterized by holding a power to frame the “off”—a self-grounding, self-enframing agent that turns the screen into a temple. The screen, for Chaplin, should be released from being a surveillance apparatus or a place of worship and become a playground.56

Chaplin, then, through activating a poetic screen as exposure to the “off,” is the one who, in Modern Times, interrupts the factory and its logic of surveillance, eventually causing the whole factory, through the havoc he wreaks, to become paralyzed and to shut down. This interruption is understood by Chaplin in Modern Times, perhaps for the first time in his work in such an explicit manner, as an event from which the question of the political emerges. His interruptive nature seems to turn him into some sort of “political” leader, the leader of a strike, the one who guides all those who have lost their place.

BETWEEN PLAY AND POLITICS

As Charlie exits the institution where he landed following his breakdown—the break in his functioning productively in the factory—he walks down the street and notices that a passing truck has dropped a flag. Charlie picks up the flag and tries to stop the truck, waving to get its attention, unaware that behind him (and coming from the off-screen) is a group of strikers following him as if he were their leader.

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