“This politics of innervation that I have tried to propose in Benjamin supposes an understanding of cinema as a form of aesthetic, sensory and psychosomatic experience directly related to the challenges and damages that capitalist industrial modernity brings with it. The great promise of cinema was that this new medium allowed the technically altered human sensorium to access a contemporary, material and collective form of reflection that did not imply a renouncement of the mimetic and temporal dimensions of experience (that history has become an individual phenomenon). At this crossroads, the cinema seemed to be the only institution capable of linking the antinomic evolutions of modernity and thus pulling them off their catastrophic course; that is, instead of continuing and deepening the spiral of shock, anesthetics and aestheticization, the new medium had the possibility of working to dismantle the deadly violence that capitalist technique had unleashed and even of being revolutionary, at least as a 'purely measure. preventive to try to avoid the worst. ' While Medusa's gaze on the camera is linked to the backward flight of the angel in the story, Mickey Mouse embodies the possibility of meeting that gaze and counteracting it through apotropaic innervation games. "

Miriam Bratu Hansen