Lo sguardo del morto

Freud, Lacan, Buttgereit

Abstract

Since antiquity, closing the dead eyes has been an act of mercy. Psychoanalysis and cinema have reversed the meaning of this gesture: we close our eyes because we fear their gaze. Jörg Buttgereit’s cinema can be under- stood as an extreme point of this question: seeing the dead/being seen by the dead. He leaves those eyes open, so the dichotomy be- tween the living and the dead remains undecidable. The duplicity that binds the gaze to matter, the organic to the inorganic, cancels both perspectives.