ABSTRACT
In his essay entitled “L’acinéma” (“Acinema”), originally published in 1973, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard famously draws two complementary parallels: on the one hand, that between the body of the infans and the social body; on the other hand, that between the function of mirror stage according to Lacan and the function of the cinema screen. On the basis of this double parallel, Lyotard suggests that the cinema screen works to produce an imaginary unity of the social body, in a similar way to the mirror, which produces an imaginary unity of the infans’s body, i.e., a unity reached by assuming one’s own specular image. Lyotard thus points out a fundamental objective for our reflection: “We will have to ask ourselves how and why the specular wall in general, and thus the cinema screen in particular, can become a privileged place of the libidinal cathexis.” 2
