Automutilation and Metonymy: The Economy of the Pulse

Abstract

Exploring an economy of the pulse in an analysis of two films, George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Lucio Fulci’s L’aldilà/The Beyond (1981), this chapter shows how ‘splatter’ images have the force of ‘felt’ intensities insofar as the pulse is a flexible and momentary intensity that suggests the flow and flexibility of a ‘felt’, but unseen, operation. Georges Bataille’s concepts of automutilation and metonymy are operations indebted to the consumption, expenditure, and the ‘loss’ in general economy that communicate through affective energies. This chapter argues that the pulse entails a different kind of spectatorship than that seen in subject positions by which meaning is returned in value in a restricted economy. The pulse entails a spectatorship of expenditure in which the spectator is ‘put at stake’ and ‘loses’ oneself to the experience.