Body as spirit: Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac and Hegel’s Phenomenology

Abstract

Lars von Trier’s film, Nymphomaniac, explores a female protagonist’s, Joe’s, bodily suffering and pleasure from the age of two to fifty. We are first introduced to Joe by her beaten body. Joe is found by Seligman who wants to hear her story. This story, which concerns her sexual journeys, has a strong metaphysical component and involves a type of spiritual self-laceration through the body. While one may expect a film about sex to concern the orgasmic, the film instead shows a failed attempt at union. Using Hegel’s account of the Geist’s (Spirit/Mind’s) enervation in Phänomenologie des Geistes/The Phenomenology of Spirit, I will contend that Lars von Trier’s film is about starvation as much as it is about excess, both bodily and psychical. Hegel describes Geist as defeated in its triumph and always looking for a fulfillment that cannot occur. While Hegel does provide a teleological narrative of the human spirit’s movement, spiritual perfection – Geist’s union with its surroundings – is always in some sense beyond the Geist. Likewise, Nymphomaniac’s narrative moves through time, but is empty of any sense of place. This article argues that Joe is forever a purgatorial identity, a physical manifestation of tortured Hegelian Geist.