SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

internal affect takes place. Eisenstein writes that, by means of the pathos construction
Surikov depicts not only the word, but “the flaming word of fanatic
conviction.” 30 The viewer’s pathos coincides with the character’s pathos and
leads to a full deobjectivization of any depictable objectness. Objects disappear
intherealmofastrangeimmanentlytranscendentvoid.
Approximately at the same time when Eisenstein was writing his treatise on
the universal history of cinema, Georges Bataille, in his Inner Experience (1943),
was also searching for the grounds of the absolute “inner” experience, pathos.
Much of what interested Eisenstein was of interest to Bataille as well – Christian
mysticism, thepractice of ecstasy,St. Ignatiusof Loyola’sspiritual exercises,etc.
In Inner Experience, Bataille includes a section entitled “First Digression Concerning
Ecstasy before an Object: The Point.” The point, “marked” by a subject submerged
in the internal and excluding himself from the external world, replaces
with itself the missing object. Bataille writes that this point is a projection of
itself. But this is also a purely fictitious site of contact between “I” and the universal.
“Starting from the felicity of movements, it is possible to fix a vertiginous
point ostensibly containing inwardly all the fragmentation of the world, the continualslippingofeverythingintonothingness,”
31 writesBataille.Thepoint,asin
Florensky, 32 turns out to be not only the expression of nothing, but, at the same
time, the expression of totality, in which the “fracturedness world” is absorbed
byacertainunity.
However,Bataillewarnedofthedangeroftheroadwhichopensuptowardthe
unified and the transcendent: “at the extreme of the possible, experience demands
a renunciation: a renunciation of the desire to be everything,” 33 he observed.Hecalledfornotlettingourownfinitenessoutofsightforevenaminute.
Pathos, transforming the whole experience of the external world into a homogenous
abstraction of pure affect, easily converts the whole world into an abstraction
of the universal. Of course, it is not accidental that pathos professionals –
ascetics(aboutwhomBataillewrites)andmystics–usepathosfortheexperience
ofdissolvingintoGod,theUnifiedandtheUniversal.
Eisenstein is aware of pathos’s nearly inevitable connection with the transcendent,
or simply – with God. He writes that pathos is “ecstasy [which] is exactly
like this in its final peaks: a transport out of understanding – a transport out of
conceptualization – a transport out of imagery – a transport out of the sphere of
any rudiments of consciousness whatever into the sphere of “pure” effect, feeling,
sensation, ‘state.’” 34 However, here he is forced to admit that “For the person
having fallen (been brought) into this state – the uncommonness of it is
connected with the image of the Lord God.” 35 In Eisenstein, pathos often leads
to God; in Kandinsky, as Michel Henry believes, it refers to life as a certain force
which penetrates the human being. Henry thought that what Kandinsky did was
precisely to “give an image of” life, wherein life is, in essence, the same abstraction
and the same affect as God: “How is life present in art? Abstraction’s response:
364 mikhail iampolski