Staging division: power, violence, and theatricality in The Baby of Mâcon

Abstract

ABSTRACT Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon (1993) was highly controversial at the time of its release; its means for critiquing cinematic voyeurism and the exploitability of audiences were received as blasphemous and misanthropic. This essay shows that the politics of this film is more complicated, and more profoundly democratic, than has so far been acknowledged. Drawing on Claude Lefort’s work on the “symbolic dimension” of the political and on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on theatricality and “originary mimesis,” it argues that The Baby of Mâcon is a political-ontological fiction that holds a key to understanding the director’s democratic vision in the post-Thatcherite cultural climate of the early 1990s. In the process, not only does this essay advance a new perspective on the film’s complex structure and on the themes of corporeality and sacrificial violence and their place in Greenaway’s work, it also demonstrates the relevance of an ontologized concept of “staging” for reading this unique cult director’s political films.