Buñuel’s Messy Law and the “Extimate” Image in El ángel exterminador and La Mort en ce jardin

Luis Buñuel’s notable Mexican film El ángel exterminador (1962) and his less familiar Mexican–French film La Mort en ce jardin (1956) coincide in their interest in portraying overbearing spaces of entrapment within which customs and rules of order reach points of exhaustion. With readings informed by elements of Lacanian thought, this paper explores the emergence of a messy, defective law and its implications for the mediatory qualities of language and the experience of subjectivity. I begin by arguing that the films make use of failures in communication to disrupt the paternal myth and the law of the signifier as these concepts are discussed in Lacanian thought. I then examine how these same disorienting forces also affect the imaginary support of the unified subject: Buñuel’s camera often reduces the prefigured image of subjects into piecemeal assemblages of partial objects or blends these images with surroundings. This paper concludes with a discussion of how El ángel generates visual lacunae that respond to this disorder. Unlike in La Mort, which portrays an authority that attempts to impose order in response to these gaps, El ángel produces sense through them, in a function understood by the term “extimacy.” This concept describes a foundation that is simultaneously intimate and exterior, and it is crucial to affirm the singularity of the subject before the mechanical operations of the signifier.

路易斯·布努埃尔（Luis Buñuel）的经典墨西哥电影《毁灭的天使》（El ángel exterminador，1962）以及相对鲜为人知的墨法合拍片《花园中的死亡》（La Mort en ce jardin，1956），均将创作旨趣聚焦于描绘令人窒息的封闭场域，其中社会习俗与秩序规则已然走到其约束力耗尽的境地。本文依托拉康主义思想（Lacanian thought）的理论视角，探讨了混乱失序的法则的兴起，及其对语言的中介性特质与主体性体验的影响。首先，本文提出，正如拉康主义思想中所阐释的那样，两部影片均借助沟通失灵来解构父权神话（paternal myth）与能指法则（law of the signifier）。随后，本文进一步分析这些同样令人迷失定向的力量，如何作用于统一主体的想象界支撑（imaginary support）：布努埃尔的镜头常常将预先被建构的主体形象拆解为部分客体（partial objects）的零散集合，或是将这些形象与周遭环境融为一体。最后，本文讨论了《毁灭的天使》如何生成回应这种无序状态的视觉空白（visual lacunae）。与《花园中的死亡》不同——后者刻画了试图通过填补这些空白来重建秩序的权威力量——《毁灭的天使》通过这些空白生成意义，这一过程可通过“外在亲密性（extimacy）”这一概念加以阐释。该概念所描述的基底同时兼具内在性与外在性，而在能指的机械运作之前，确证主体的独一性至关重要。