Outside and inside the time machines: structure and subjectivity in Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study considers the political significance of Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime through a comparison of the structural determinations imposed on subjectivity by the time machine and the analogous determinations imposed by the mechanism of cinema and the structures of capitalism, demonstrated by the film’s medium and content. To participate in the time travel experiments, Resnais’s character must be both conscious and passive. Like in film spectatorship or life under capitalism, the time-traveling subject is fully aware, but this experience is determined by an exterior structure and its machinations. The exteriorized mechanism of Resnais’s malfunctioning time machine thus permits an outside view of its structural determinations of time that I compare to those imposed by cinema and capitalism, which emerge as time machines of their own. I analyze this using Althusser’s theorization of the conceptual mechanisms that reproduce real objects (time, cinema, capitalism) as thought-concretes. I then suggest, through Rancière’s recent work, that aesthetic experience inside of these time machines presents the potential to recuperate one’s subjectivity from their grasp. To conclude, I contrast Resnais’s character’s solitary experience in the time machine with the collective aesthetic experience of film that is already inclined toward political consequence.