Anatomizing Hiroshima mon amour (1959): Deleuze’s Cinematic Fossil as an Instrument of Human Rights Advocacy

Replete with images of bodies desecrated by the atomic bombing, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) testifies to the vulnerability of the human form to wounding and mutilation, and thereby affirms the protection of the body as the most sacrosanct task of human rights. Bringing into dialog the pragmatist view of human rights as a safeguard against politically induced suffering with Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of cinematic form, this article posits Resnais’s film as a cinematic fossil in Deleuze’s sense: an image that, by way of a haptic, indexical visuality, conscripts the viewer’s own body as a sensorial witness to trauma. If, as moral anthropological approaches suggest, our conviction in human rights arises not from reason or doctrine but from the felt experience of pain, then the cinematic fossil merits consideration as an instrument for generating the embodied solidarity that ought to underpin our modern human rights regime.