ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book argues that while the film presents an opportunity for reading, and reading differently, it cannot determine this activity. It examines what psychoanalysis has to offer for a theory of critical reading, with respect to illuminating questions of sexual difference. Just as important for argument is Bellour's analysis of how the serial form of composition distributes narrative oppositions from one shot to the next. For example, Mary Ann Doane's version of symptomatic reading is informed by Louis Althusser's observations on epistemology and his emphasis on defining the aesthetic, the ideological, and the theoretical as different modes of cognition. The book describes the limits of psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity, including alternative accounts of the female spectator. The psychoanalysis contributes significantly to a historical and materialist analysis of mass culture, especially in terms of defining the modalities of desire underwriting its symbolic forms.
