Ex-Static Values: Queering the Dialectic with Sergei Eisenstein

 In 1927 the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein decided to “make Capital according to the script of Karl Marx.” Instead of a film, Eisenstein produced over 500 diary pages filled with notes, drawings, press clippings, diagrams, plans for articles, negatives from his film October, theoretical reflections and extensive quotations. Remaining unpublished to this day, the project has haunted the imaginations of many filmmakers, historians, and writers, from Guy Debord to Alexander Kluge. This lecture explores these materials, analyzing the immanent construction and deconstruction of values through the semiotic excess in chains of montage. Transposing Marx’s value theory to the level of the circulation of images—in film, but also in advertisements, news and propaganda—Eisenstein uses the cinematic technique of montage to dissociate and exceed the causal relations constitutive of capitalism. An encounter with Georges Bataille in Paris in 1930 provided him with further ground for an understanding of a dialectics of value as expenditure: bodies produce values, materializing complex economies that exceed the merely functional unity of their parts. A year later in Mexico Eisenstein spoke of “bi-sexual,” “cannibalistic” and “ex-static dialectics.” “Ex-stasis,” for him, literally meant “standing outside of oneself,” “departing from one’s ordinary condition.” While never renouncing the dialectical model, Eisenstein continuously expanded and queered it by inventing new polymorphic bodies, forms of subjectivity, and impossible theoretical alliances. The figure of a “bi-sexual Hegel” or the model of “ecstasy as a concentrated psychological (emotional) perception of dialectics” exemplify relations that have been viscerally conditioned through such queering. I will show how Eisenstein abandons logic as the modus operandi of dialectics, by multiplying and dissolving the stability of binary relations and gender codes.

Followed by a Q & A moderated by Ethan Spigland, Professor of Humanites & Media Studies.

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