Dialectics and Noir (1)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 244-5:

Although Vernet actually undermines a lot of the standard noir theory (for example, the rather crude notion that the noir universe stands for the paranoiac male reaction to the threat to the 'phallic regime' embodied in the femme fatale), the enigma that remains is the mysterious efficiency and persistence of the notion of noir: the more Vernet is right on the level of facts, the more enigmatic and inexplicable becomes the extraordinary strength and longevity of this 'illusory' notion of noir, the notion that has haunted our imagination for decades. What, then, if film noir is none the less a concept in the strict Hegelian sense: something that cannot simply be explained, accounted for, in terms of historical circumstances, conditions and reactions, but acts as a structuring principle that displays a dynamics of its own--film noir is a real concept, a unique vision of the universe that combines the multitude of elements into what Althusser would have called an articulation. So, once we have ascertained that the notion of noir does not fit the empirical multitude of noir films, instead of rejecting this notion, we should risk the notorious Hegelian rejoinder 'So much the worse for reality!'--more precisely, we should engage in the dialectic between a universal notion and its reality, in which the very gap between the two sets in motion the simultaneous transformation of reality, and of the notion itself. It is because real films never fit their notion that they are constantly changing, and this change imperceptibly transforms the very notion, the standard by means of which they are measured: we pass from the hardboiled detective noir (the Hammett-Chandler formula) to the 'persecuted innocent bystander noir (the Cornell Woolrich formula), and thence to the 'naive sucker caught up in a crime' noir (the James Cain formula), and so on.

The situation here is in a way similar to that of Christianity: of course, almost all its elements were already there in the Dead Sea Scrolls; most of the key Christian notions are clear cases of what Stephen Jay Gould would have called 'exaptions', retroactive reinscriptions which misperceive and falsify the original impact of a notion, and so forth; but none the less, this is not enough to explain the Event of Christianity. The concept of noir is therefore extremely productive not only for the analysis of films, but even as a tool to help us retroactively cast a new light on previous classic works of art; in this vein, implicitly applying Marx's old idea that the anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the monkey, Elisabeth Bronfen uses the co-ordinates of the noir universe to throw a new light on Wagner's Tristan as the ultimate noir opera. A further example of how noir enables us to 'deliver' Wagner's operas retroactively are his long retrospective monologues, that ultimate horror of impatient spectators--do not these long narratives call for a noir flashback to illustrate them?