Not All Nudes are Sexy: Psychoanalysis and Stalinist Biopolitics in in Freeze – Die – Come to Life

Abstract

The chapter examines Vitaly Kanevsky’s drama Freeze – Die – Come to Life! (1989). It argues that the film’s representations of nude bodies articulate the destruction of complex psychoanalytic subject by the processes of Stalinist biopolitics. The chapter draws on the Sergei Prozorov’s theory that posits that, contrary to Foucauldian models of biopower, Stalinist biopolitics was not focused on the biopolitical regulation of a pre-existing reality. Rather, it pursued the making of the new order and a new subject at the expense of destroying any anterior forms of subjectivity. In Kanevsky’s film, the chapter argues, this destruction of anterior subject is conveyed through images of nude bodies and the ways Freeze – Die – Come to Life! challenges conventional relationship between on-screen nudity and sexuality. Precluding any scopofilic pleasure, nude bodies in Freeze – Die – Come to Life are gradually stripped off sexuality, signaling the weaking of a psychoanalytic subject. Drawing on Hilary Neroni’s work on the relationship between complex psychoanalytic subjectivity and biopower in cinema, the chapter argues that Kanevsky’s desexualized nudes signal the inability to resist the totalitarian biopolitical project as well as convey the cyclical nature of violence that it engenders.