The English word „writing“ and the German word „reissen“ (ripping) are related. To write means to rip, to draw and drag, to sketch and carve. If I inspect closely the page on which I have written I will see that my letters have left a physical imprint as well, the writing carves and rips into the body of the medium. 

And so it does into my own body. What touches me leaves a mark on and in my body, visible or invisible, physical or psychological. According to the psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire „the finger [of the parent] with its loving caress, imprints a mark in this hollow, opens a crater of jouissance, inscribes a letter“ onto the body of the child, this „first book“. And „what is thereby marked or inscribed in the body can be considered just as well a point of appeal, a calling point, as a focus of energy.“ 

The gesture of inscription connects the bodies and the texts and leaves nothing unchanged. 

And as I was planning to make this video my students showed me marks on their bodies as forms of inscriptions. It was their inscriptions that formed the guiding text around which these visual quotes from filmic texts gathered – calling points, on which the energy of film images can be focused.

Serge Leclaire. Psychoanalyzing. On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter. Transl. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford University Press 1998.