The Irreparable Act: Dogtooth

The chapter interprets Lanthimos’s Dogtooth as a joint critique of the neoliberal discipline of gesture and of patriarchal, identitarian, and economic power over lives. The animalisation of the children in the film is discussed in connection with Agamben’s understanding of the open—that is, as a way to curtail the very performativity and potentiality of the human. Reading the film in connection with Arturo Ripstein’s El Castillo de la Pureza, Pasolini’s Teorema, and the work of Sade, the chapter establishes Lanthimos’s continuing concern with the operativity of language and performances, and with power as the articulation between life and its forms. In the cloistered universe of the white bourgeois family that is the main object of the film, a fleeting hope of rebellion proceeds from an insurgent and mimetic experience of sexuality and cinema, in a way that understands dis-identification and self-shattering as the originating gesture of politics.