Hitchcock's Cryptonomies: Volume I, Secret Agents; Volume II, War Machines

Film Criticism, Fall, 2005 by Christopher D. Morris

Hitchcock's Cryptonomies: Volume I, Secret Agents; Volume II, War Machines by Tom Cohen

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005 Vol. 1,284 pp., $24.95 paper, $74.95 cloth; Vol. 2, 300 pp., $24.95 paper, $74.95 cloth.

Tom Cohen's Hitchcock's Cryptonomies is an intellectual event of the first order for film studies, critical theory, and philosophy. In the originality of its challenge to received critical approaches, it has no peer in film theory: from Cohen's perspective, the work of Eisenstein, Bazin, Metz, Silverman, and Zizek, Deleuze amounts to the same tradition--hermeneutics. A better sense of its newness would be gained by comparing Cohen with literary critics like Northrop Frye, Frederic Jameson, Harold Bloom, or Hillis Miller, whose critical paradigms broke entirely with earlier ones. In the consistency of its vision, Hitchcock's Cryptonomies warrants comparison with Norman O. Brown's adaptation of Freud; in its grasp of culture and technology, it recalls the work of Marshall McLuhan. Like these thinkers, Cohen forces the reader to reassess not simply the ostensible object of his study--here, Hitchcock's films--but the nature of reality, the history of the West, and all ways of knowing. Hitchcock's Cryptonomies stands outside most academic genres; the work it resembles most closely is Derrida's The Truth in Painting, where the "explication" of works of visual art serves as the occasion for a sustained articulation of the possibility of representing truth. Obviously, the stakes Cohen sets for himself are very high and the risks he runs are commensurately dangerous. After situating Cohen's project in the contexts of his earlier work and of Hitchcock studies, this review must content itself with a summary of the book's thesis and a few guarded questions. Fully to engage Cohen's argument would be impossible here, and guesses about its probable reception empty.

Cohen's previous books, Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock (1994) and Ideology and Inscription (1998), placed his thesis about Hitchcock within a larger philosophical framework derived primarily from the work of Nietzsche, Derrida, de Man, and Benjamin. From the first three writers Cohen inherits the deconstruction of logocentrism, Cartesianism, and hermeneutics; from the fourth, the loss of the "aura" in the age of mechanical reproduction, which Cohen reads in the same deconstructive tradition, as overthrowing Enlightenment epistemologies. From such a quartet, especially from de Man, the possibilities of establishing some new way of reading might seem few and remote: de Man, notoriously, thought that the inherent rhetoricity and irony of language undid reason itself, while Derrida's late Heideggerian quest for the tout autre has been likened to a negative theology. From these exigencies Cohen forged his own system by reading de Man's late emphasis on "materiality" as providing a starting-point that did not necessitate any empirical or referential content. (In de Man's writing, "materiality" has no necessary connection with "matter," just as "messianicity" in Derrida's work has no necessary connection with any particular "messianism." The former concepts simply point to a potential that may or may not be realizable but is unquestionably a condition of the latter's existence.) By discovering a convergence in de Man's ideas of "materiality," "inscription," "anteriority," and the "pre-figural," Cohen is able to make his own brand of deconstructive film criticism possible: retaining the interrogation of all grounds of discourse, Cohen reads Hitchcock's films as narrating the vengeance of an unsuccessfully repressed "anteriority," which now vitiates Enlightenment discourses. They do not allegorize any transcendental signified "in the world"--like the Freudian/Lacanian unconscious, gender, class, or political systems, as argued, for example, in Bordwellian/empiricist, Zizekian/Lacanian, Modleskian/feminist, Edelman/queer theoretical, Carrollite/analytic criticism. Cohen believes that his approach can be emancipatory in establishing a "post post-humanist" project of disinscription--of exposing the anteriorities that give rise to various oppressive referential systems. Interestingly--and against most received opinion--he reads Paul de Man as engaged in just such a project.

Starting with this framework, Cohen reads Hitchcock's works as allegories of the way Enlightenment hermeneutics is always put in jeopardy by the inscripted anterior it must forget. One of his many metaphors for this process is the way Hitchcock "brings murder into the home"--as the director joked about his television series. "Home" here is is not just some exterior, white-picket-fenced house within which lurk Freudian demons; instead, it subsumes all comfortable, deluded, hermeneutic ways of looking at the world, including Freud's. Hitchcock's work destroys this world by injecting into it evidences of the arbitrary anteriority on which it is built. This subversion might take the form of Verloc's anarchism, in Sabotage, or literal poisons, like the toxins of Notorious, but also any number of what Cohen calls "secret agents"--repeated visual patterns, sounds, disjunctures of voice and face, puns, numbers, letters, foreign languages, Hitchcock's cameos, and so on. Some of these intrusive devices have been noticed before by critics but have almost always been lumped under the rubric of "reflexivity" and then discussed in moral or psychological terms, as raising issues of voyeurism or the ethical function of film, for example. Cohen changes the register of these discussions completely by reading secret agents not in moral terms (and therein lies one of his major risks) but in epistemological terms--as challenges to all hegemonic regimes of reading and viewing.