Page - 19 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Reality and Paternity | 19www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 15–32 inated by abstractions. The “discourse of the capitalist”, whose social effects are harshly portrayed in the Dardennes’ stories, weakens the perception of the limit, the power of interdiction and the regulation of desire that characterise the paternal function. Only the encounter with at least one paternal figure, in all its dimensions, ambiguities and inadequacies – Olivier, Hamidou, Bruno and Sa- mantha – seems to make the access to reality, and the belief in it, possible again. “THE SPIRIT IS A BONE”: THE AFFECTED BODY Both Deleuze and the Dardennes resist the dissolution of immanence and strive to encounter “a world of captures instead of closures”,12 which is able to emit signs, disturb automatisms and affect the indolence and drift of their subjects. Luc Dardenne writes, “To go out. To go out simply. To encounter something, someone, a matter, a surface, a foreign, unknown body, I do not know, but to go out of myself, to be reached, touched. I cannot stand to stay inside any more.”13 The “new realism” of the Dardennes therefore corresponds not to an aes- thetic style but rather to a way of encountering the material substance of the world in the thorough search for the possibility to perpetuate life. To achieve this encounter with the materiality of the world, the cinematographer has to penetrate bodily the texture of reality, like a surgeon who has to feel and cut the skin of the world. In this sense, the perpetuation of life can only be con- cretely achieved by believing in the body, which is inseparable from its capacity to be affected. The brothers Dardenne are absolutely captured by the question of “what a body is capable of”,14 by the ensemble of the infinite possible interac- tions and connections among bodies, since the deserted suburbs of the world – mirror of the global human condition – do not even know what a body can do. Deleuze writes, commenting on Spinoza, As long as you don’t know what power a body has to be affected, as long as you learn like that, in chance encounters, you will not have the wise life, you will not have wisdom. Knowing what you are capable of. This is not at all a moral question, but above all a physical question, as a question to the body and to the soul. A body has something fundamentally hidden: we could speak of the human species, the human genera, but this won’t tell us what is capable of affecting our body, what is capable of destroying it. The only question is the power of being affected.15 12 Deleuze 1993, 81. 13 Dardenne 2009, 9. 14 Deleuze 1990, 226. 15 Cf. Deleuze 1978.