Narratives of Estrangement in Infrapolitics and in Lucrecia Martel's Cinema of Perception

Abstract

This essay studies cinema and infrapolitics from the standpoint of estrangement as a narrative device that sets perception and politics in relationship to one another. It proposes that recent books on infrapolitics by Gareth Williams and Alberto Moreiras deconstruct prominent narratives of estrangement in which the processes of perceptual renewal catalyzed by art are ultimately understood in terms of their ulterior political significance, and elaborate alternate narratives in which estrangement instead makes perceptible, and marks the passage to, an in-eliminable strangeness at the heart of the relationship between politics and life. It then interprets Lucrecia Martel’s 2015 short film Leguas in terms of its interweaving of political and infrapolitical narratives of estrangement. It finally turns to a recent essay by Silvia Schwarzböck, titled Los monstruos más fríos: estética después del cine (2017), which narrates cinema history in terms of how twentieth-century cinema, by teaching viewers to identify with the cold, inhuman strangeness of the camera’s gaze, contributed to the increasing estrangement of human perception into the machinations of the modern state. Through its study of these materials, this essay argues that narratives of estrangement form an important standpoint for approaching the relationship between cinema and infrapolitics, due to the central significance of perceptual renewal–that is, the possibility of seeing things differently–to both the cinematic medium and infrapolitical reflection.