The Mission Impossible of Love: Sex-Politics-History in Lust, Caution

This paper takes the affective politics of patriotism as a point of departure to explore the emotional interpellation and visual mechanism of love mapped out in Lust, Caution by Ang Lee. It elaborates upon two lines of enquiry: the first one focuses upon the possible difference between patriotism as “visual representation” and patriotism as “visual mechanism” by asking how the montage and mise-en-sc?ne of the camera, in parallel to the actions of the characters in the plot, can also love the country and kill the national betrayer; the second one centers upon the paradoxical relationship between romantic love and love of country by asking whether they might share the same psychic mechanism of love as imaginary identification. Accordingly, the paper is divided into four parts to map out respectively the intersections of love as acoustic interpellation, love as visual suture, sex as body politics and history as internal folds. It highlights patriotism as a repetitive and iterative “performative act” and Lust, Caution as a film of “patriotism with the state,” endowed with a historically sensitive and affectively powerful “singularity” to challenge the “postnational” concepts of “nations without nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism without the nation-state” and to provide a new possibility to theorize beyond the current discoursive impasse of nationalism, transnationalism, diaspora and globalization.