The Kubrickian-Jungian Mathema

The discerning eye sees far more than mere cinema in Kubrick: it is a complete cosmology, a radical updating of a declining Western tradition, and a mnemonic device unique in its genre. Through successive mandalas he describes the profound causes of evil and enables us to remedy them: medicine, sciences, psychoanalysis, religions, history and magic are all dissected there. From Greek Paideia to temples of Asclepius, from
metempsychosis to the Hippocratic Oath, and through Abrahamic sacrificial magic, this work reveals how Kubrick has taken up the torch of our traditions.

Trying to establish the direct lineage from Jung to Kubrick through an in-depth study of Eyes Wide Shut, and – just as Lacan once did with algebra – I attempt to forge the instrument of a new science of the soul: a Kubricko-Jungian mathema.

This book is also a vertiginous plunge into The Shining, which rules our era and which the author identifies at the heart of his own genealogy, the Stuart Dynasty. Everything indeed suggests that, like Danny in The Shining, Heracles was chosen as the sacrificial lamb of this hierarchy of shadows – and that is precisely what motivated the writing of this treatise. It inscribes itself within that very complexity: the persistence of ancient rites in modern times and the hidden sacrifice of kings, evoking Frazer’s Golden Bough.