Mucous, monsters and angels: Irigaray and Zulawski's possession

This article will offer an analysis of Andrej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) with the work of Luce Irigaray to suggest female desire both is and can create monsters. Through the parabolic configuration and ultimate collapse of the transcendental mystical with the carnal, mucosal monsters can be understood as angels enveloping and unfurling configurations of pleasure beyond phallologocentrism. Extending this exploration I will suggests spectatorship as mucosal, and the screen as angelic-monstrous, which through shifting from signifying to mystifying, forms with the spectator a mucosal ethical relation. Irigaray states: “Perhaps the visible needs the tangible but this need is not reciprocal.” She directs us away from the visible as the phallic apprehensible through demarcation of form as solid, subjectivity as rigid and recognition or repudiation as objectifying dialectic distance toward mucous as feminine carnal interaction.