Abstract

ODELLO, Laura. The Infected Eye of television: On Lars von Trier's Riget. Acta poét [online]. 2013, vol.34, n.1, pp.107-124. ISSN 2448-735X.

Riget, the two-season television series directed by Lars von Trier between 1994 and 1997, stages a hospital haunted by ghosts and a scientific community beset by its own superstitions. Guided by this series, the article explores the contamination of the medical gaze as well as the contamination of the beholders' eyes. Reflecting on the practice of autopsy, Foucault described the medical gaze as seeing life through the mirror of death, the "great analyst" that makes it possible to understand and describe illnesses. But it is above all Derrida's notion of auto-immunity that allows us to think of the gaze as already pervaded by another eye-an alien, strange, and uncanny one, infecting our vision while also being its very condition of possibility.

Keywords : Lars von Trier; Riget; infection; death; Derrida.