Abstract

The chapter revises the connection between ideology and the unconscious in apparatus theory in order to question the passivity of spectatorship, and argues that the fundamental emancipation of the spectator corresponds to the radical heteronomy of the subject—a condition of relational dependency in which a certain vulnerability as well as a certain freedom are expressed. An understanding of the spectator’s agency and responsibility in terms of the heteronomy of subjectivity is in turn used to imagine the spectator’s emancipation beyond a fantasy of self-mastery.