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This essay pairs Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013) with Giorgio Agamben's Nymphs (2013) to offer a feminist perspective on sexual image-making in a post-cinematic digital age. Staging cinematic creation within a sexually differentiated, agonistic frame, Nymphomaniac's "passionate ambivalence" (Honig) recalls a Pygmalion tradition whose Enlightenment avatars engage in creative acts that threaten to transform masculine artistry into nymphomania. Critiquing Agamben's nymph copulatio as men's rationalist projections onto female screens, the essay speculates on what political agonisms might reemerge, post-cinematically, after the nymph shoots back at her creator.
Epigraphs function as a starter that wakes up the palate. ... That the epigraphs are often funny suggests we may also call them amuse-bouches. They aim to give the reader a taste for what is to come.
Bonnie Honig, 20141
I am a nymphomaniac and I like myself for being one. Above all I love my cunt and my dirty, filthy lust.
Lars von Trier, 20132
Patty, you know what your daddy said
Patty, he said, he said, he said
Well, sixty days ago she was such a lovely child
Now here she is with a gun in her hand.
Patti Smith, 19743
What is a nymphomaniac, and how are we to read her spectacular appearance in Lars von Trier's most recent film? From the moment I first saw its hollowed out title
in bright white type against a jet black screen, I was jolted into a disquieting sense of self-recognition. A quick mental scan of my teenage promiscuities, college hook-ups, and subsequent perversions triggered an inchoate but powerful sense of proleptic identification with the titular heroine I would soon meet.
But there was also, immediately, something out of sync in that unsettling self-recognition. Like sodomites and inverts, nymphomaniacs belong to another era. Lars von Trier's recursive transposition of contemporary sex addiction into an outdated nymphomania contributes to the film's tragi-comic feel. Tragically, the nymphomaniac is like one of Michel Foucault's little abnormals: the lost libertines, précieuses, onanists, prostitutes, vagabonds, hysterics, and other social deviants who haunt the archives of madness. Comically, she's an amuse-bouche: a playful grotesque, a mix of old and new who exposes the confessional pieties of our day. Here the medieval Catholic Confiteor, mea maxima culpa, is hilariously reiterated as the self-loving...