Buñuel’s Messy Law and the “Extimate” Image in <i>El ángel exterminador</i> and <i>La Mort en ce jardin</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Luis Buñuel’s notable Mexican film <i>El ángel exterminador</i> (1962) and his less familiar Mexican–French film <i>La Mort en ce jardin</i> (1956) coincide in their interest in portraying overbearing spaces of entrapment within which customs and rules of order reach points of exhaustion. With readings informed by elements of Lacanian thought, this paper explores the emergence of a messy, defective law and its implications for the mediatory qualities of language and the experience of subjectivity. I begin by arguing that the films make use of failures in communication to disrupt the paternal myth and the law of the signifier as these concepts are discussed in Lacanian thought. I then examine how these same disorienting forces also affect the imaginary support of the unified subject: Buñuel’s camera often reduces the prefigured image of subjects into piecemeal assemblages of partial objects or blends these images with surroundings. This paper concludes with a discussion of how <i>El ángel</i> generates visual lacunae that respond to this disorder. Unlike in <i>La Mort</i>, which portrays an authority that attempts to impose order in response to these gaps, <i>El ángel</i> produces sense <i>through</i> them, in a function understood by the term “extimacy.” This concept describes a foundation that is simultaneously intimate and exterior, and it is crucial to affirm the singularity of the subject before the mechanical operations of the signifier.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".