“I love you”

 

 

This is the final scene from Todd Haynes’ film SAFE. In it, the character Carol, (Julianne Moore) enters the windowless igloo-like cabin that has been assigned to her, at a New Age recovery centre somewhere in the southern California desert. Suddenly drawn to the small mirror on the wall opposite her bed, she approaches it and while looking into the mirror, and says, in a nearly inaudible hushed tone, “I love you.” Shot from the point of view that we take to be occupied by the mirror, and which is the point of view that we as viewers are now made to assume, it is as though Carol is no longer professing her love to her mirror reflection and thus to herself, but (or perhaps also) to some unidentified and invisible other who inhabits the space outside of the frame, and towards which her gaze is directed. This could be any one of us as viewers, or more simply and expansively, it is an alterity that Carol (and each us) is in rapport with as the singularities that we are amongst other singularities.

Leo Bersani discusses this scene in his recent book, Thoughts and Things, specifically in terms of a certain “unnamed passion” that is presented here, and that Haynes and Moore ask us as viewers to reckon with. This scene, and Bersani’s reading of it, are also featured in my current paper/talk on “The Commerce of Anonymity.” There, I argue that an impersonal and anonymous commerce or compearance is staged here at the end of the film, in which through this “unnamed passion” that is also the passion and pleasure of not naming and of going unnamed, the self is opened up to as yet unknown encounters with yet-to-be-known others.

The “you” of Carol’s “I love you” is the “you” that each of us is in the anonymous commerce of our sociality. The decision that we are left with is the decision to sustain a love that is legitimate to the extent that it operates without the safety and security provided by the legitimizing authority of the name. Love—and therefore friendship and even more broadly the commerce of encounters with strangers, passersby, and other anonymous others—is thus redefined as that which finds its legitimacy in the de-legitimzing pleasures, risks and affects of that unnamed passion that is anonymity.