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Abstract:
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The Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater (1985), who claims he is a mere teacher, has drawn an interesting parallel between the history of cinema and that of psychoanalysis, the trajectories of which go hand in hand, as they were born in the same era. In 1895 the Lumière brothers first showed their invention in public, the same year that Freud and Breuer published their Studies on Hysteria. On reading it, I thought that contemporaneity is not just a parallelism. In both trajectories, a group of adventurers and explorers to the end of the night, or the heart of darkness, gradually ceded to applied specialists, skilled in the use of technique and adhering to the limits set out in the manuals of good cinematographic or analytical practices. This cult of dogma versus episteme bears a familiar resemblance to fanaticism and profitability. Incidentally, family resemblance (“aires the familia”) is the title of Mexican Carlos Monsiváis’ great essay (2002) on Latin American cultures.
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