ABSTRACT
This chapter is about extracting political theory from Lars von Trier’s film The Element of Crime. Shaping the analysis is a method borrowed from Caesar Casari, “philopoesis,” which he applies to literary texts, a concept of that (in Casarino’s words, which “names a certain discontinuous and refractive interference between philosophy and literature.” What results, according to Casarino, is a mode of critical thinking that becomes available because the interference between genres opens up “emergent potentialities that disrupt the status quo of the history of forms.” Specially, the philosophical framing interferes with the film-concepts deployed on affects and percepts-as it draws from Immanuel Kant on what is elemental, Friedrich Nietzsche (on metaphor), and Gilles Deleuze (on cinema, among other things). As for the approach to the details of the film, the reading looks at the broader frame within which a crime drama is sequestered, a treatment of Europe as a dystopic space. The European continent is treated as the major protagonist as von Trier’s film challenges the presumption that Europe is the essence of a progressive historical narrative. Through the film’s image narrative, Europe is anything but a fulfillment of a progressive civilizational narrative. Instead, it is represented as a degenerated terrain. Two cartographic migrations by the detective/protagonist, Fisher, shape the dramatic aspect of the film narrative. The first migration is oneiric; it is Fisher’s dream state migration from Egypt to Europe when he begins narrating his story, identifying himself a policeman called back to Europe to solve a murder case. The second cartography, which articulates the movement of the film narrative is “tailing report” created by Fisher’s mentor, Osborne, who had preceded him as the investigator on the case. Ultimately, however, what emerges is a postcolonial critique of Europe, analyzed by drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of despotic enlightenment.
