An Inclusive Litany

4/14/97

A screening of Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film "Weekend" at the University of California at Santa Cruz was advertised as "a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism, and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations." It was accompanied by a lecture by Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, titled "Anal Capitalism," which promised to deal with the film as "a meditation on late-twentieth century capitalism, one which proves the truth of Marx's claim that the ultimate form of class struggle is that between commodities and gold. The speakers will argue that in this class struggle the phallus will sooner or later lose its position of privilege, giving way to an anal libidinal economy. However, as 'Weekend' shows, this is no cause for celebration: it will level not only sexual difference, but difference as such."