Politics of Insects

Scott Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in film history, film theory, and cultural studies in the Department of Performing and Screen Arts at Unitec, Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand.

In The Politics of Insects, Scott Wilson has produced a penetrating account of David Cronenberg as political modernist. Drawing on Slavoj Zizek's notion of the heretic, as one who takes specific ideological injunctions and disciplinary structures at face value in order to reveal their fictive, constructed nature, Wilson shows, through sustained and exact analysis of Cronenberg's films, from Shivers to Eastern Promises, the political critique effected by his cinema. He re-invigorates many of the issues that characterised an earlier phase of film theory, drawing on Althusser, Foucault, Baudry, Narboni, and others, to draw out what it is for Cronenberg to have laid bare the devices of cinematic narration. Paying close attention to the determining structures of films like Spider and Videodrome, Wilson makes clear how narrative can be made to operate in such a way that the reality it describes merges unendingly with its own reality as narrating process. Narration is to be seen, not as the representation of an event, but as that event itself. What films such as Videodrome represent is thus, in Lacan's words, the lack of the very function that engenders them. As a result, the structure of diegetic reality is rendered ‘permeable and the boundary between objective and subjective is breached'. Taking as his guide Cronenberg's description of his ‘project' as being ‘to show the unshowable, speak the unspeakable', Wilson contends that the aim of these films is to extend cinema up to and beyond its limits, to move beyond what is intelligible, to show what cannot be shown, the Real, the ‘pre-ontological': to penetrate the region of ‘insect politics'. This project is seen to extend through the increasingly sophisticated texts of Cronenberg's later work. I have no doubt that this book will establish itself, not only as the most profound study of David Cronenberg, but also of the political theory of cinema, to have appeared this century. --Michael Grant, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent

• Acknowledgements; Chapter One: The Filmmaker as Heretic; Chapter Two: The Body Explodes; Chapter Three: The Mind Erupts; Chapter Four: Functions of Failure; Chapter Five: The Subject Under Examination; Chapter Six: "All Agents Defect..."; Bibliography; Index.