Amodal Perception and “la jouissance du voir”: News From Home The Redux Version

In this article, I perform a re-reading of my 2004 article on Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976) in which I had deployed a Deleuzian reading of the film that considered its spectatorial effects as a transformative freedom from identity. In this redux version, I persist with this idea but reconsider it in relation to Griselda Pollock’s convincing insistence that Akerman’s work is a journey towards maternal trauma, a position she develops in relation to Akerman’s installation Walking Next to One’s Shoelaces Inside an Empty Fridge (2004). My main methodological approach is Raymond Bellour’s adaptation of psychoanalyst Daniel Stern’s notion of ‘amodal perception’ as a sensory, kinetic modality of spectatorship.