Considerations on the Nocturnal Strangeness of Eros
Spyridon S. Kogkas
This article explores Albert Serra’s Liberté (2019) as an exemplary work of subtractive cinema, one that dismantles not only narrative and spectacle but eroticism itself. Drawing from Laruelle’s non-philosophy, infrapolitical theory, and the tradition of libertinage, the analysis positions Liberté as a non-cinematic, post-theatrical invocation of democratic night, a shared dwelling of strangers without presence, decision, or climax. Serra’s nocturnal aesthetic is proposed as a visual analogue of generic humanity and subtractive existence.
The Libertine Stranger: From Erotic Annihilation to Subtractive Dwelling
The Libertine Stranger emerges as a paradoxical hybrid: a subject born from the Baroque erotic machine, yet ultimately turning against the spectacular economy of pleasure itself. In classical libertinage, the dissolution of the self is pursued through pleasure, irony, and the theatrical refusal of morality. This subject seeks not stability but vertigo, not identity but excess. However, this pursuit often culminates in a nihilistic exhaustion, a performative annihilation that leaves no space for authentic dwelling. The libertine “dies” into spectacle, consumed by the very mechanisms of seduction they once controlled.But the Stranger as conceived by Laruelle is of a different order.
While the libertine subtracts from normative structures via erotic performance, the Stranger subtracts from Being itself. This subtraction is not symbolic but axiomatic: a generic stance that places the individual beyond mastery, language, or appearance. If the libertine attempts to lose the self through the body, the Stranger loses the body through the Real, not through death, but through an invisible and quiet insurrection against all forms of representation.Here, eroticism shifts its metaphysical grounding. Instead of spectacle or transgression, it becomes a non-spectacular intensity, a form of resistance that does not need to be seen, interpreted, or even named.
The Strangers does not seduce, they inhabit. They do not perform, they insist. Their identity is not a mask but a generic vector, always-already human, always in radical equality with all others. The annihilation of the self through pleasure, in this context, is not a baroque suicide of the ego, but a quiet descent into immanence, where dwelling is possible only in the form of non-dominating presence, what Laruelle calls non-presence.The libertine’s ironic withdrawal from the world becomes, in the Stranger, a more profound withdrawal-with, a shared solitude that permits a new kind of relationality: not based on the exchange of signs or the seduction of the Other, but on a generic co-dwelling of strangers.
Erotic subtraction, thus, is no longer the means to reach a climax or a confession, but to clear a space where humans can be-without-being-enclosed, without hierarchy, without spectacle.This dwelling is not spatial but infra-relational.It is a democracy not of appearances but of equal solitude, a condition where the last instance of being-human is no longer filtered through Law, Visibility, or Ego.The Libertine Stranger, in subtracting themselves from the world-as-stage, begins to dwell in a non-world: a real, immanent, and generic life shared in silence, in refusal, in common.
Albert Serra’s Liberté (2019) is not a period drama. It is not even historical fiction. It is a nocturnal topology, a post-cinematic invocation of a political eroticism that refuses narrative, character development, or visual climax. Set vaguely before the French Revolution and populated by libertines exiled from courtly society, Liberté unfolds in the dark woods where an orgiastic tableau stretches indefinitely across the screen. Yet this forest is not simply the site of transgression. It is a non-space, a non-stage, where the libertine body no longer rebels but drifts, decays, decomposes into gestures of pure duration. Serra gives us neither satire nor pornography, but a radical flattening of erotic time, a despectacularised eros that links directly to subtractive aesthetics in philosophy and art.
If traditional cinema operates through a dialectic of visibility,revealing, building, concluding, Liberté subtracts all such operations. It aligns closer to Laruellean non-philosophy in cinematic form: not a reversal of classical tropes, but a unilateral suspension of cinematic syntax itself. Serra’s long takes, absence of dialogue, indifference to plot, and careful lighting (reminiscent of tenebrist painting) do not aim to represent libertinism but to render it as infra-being, to extract its residue after ideology, after morality, after even psychology.The forest becomes a metaphor for the Real without decision.This is not the Real of violence or excess, but of flat immanence, where the human appears not as subject or object, but as posture, as fragment, as wandering affect. The erotic act here is never climactic, it is process without resolution, a pure gesture of dissolution. Serra subtracts even the erotic from itself, turning the libertine act into a non-event, endlessly suspended in fog and shadow.
This act of subtractive cinema also resists the critical frameworks typically applied to historical libertinage. Where the Enlightenment libertine was once positioned as the satirical disruptor of Church and State, Serra’s figures are too late, liberated after the collapse, not before.They are post-libertine, caught not in rebellion, but in the ruins of pleasure’s dialectic. Serra’s libertines are not rebels; they are exiles from their own bodies. Their gestures, grotesque, tender, absurd,are no longer performed for seduction or domination. Rather, they seem driven by inertia, caught in a state beyond desire. This is where Serra departs from the cinematic lineages of Pasolini or Sadean adaptation.Unlike Salò, Liberté is not allegorical. It does not stage perversion as critique. It simply refuses narration altogether.
In this refusal, Serra’s characters enact a form of infrapolitical anonymity. They are not named; they hardly speak; their faces rarely confront the camera. They are not-present in the Laruellean sense: instances of human drift, without authority or symbolic weight. Libertinism here becomes a method of unworlding, a self-erasure that opens not into transcendence, but into a shared plane of exhausted gestures.The indifference of the libertines is not a pose, but a principle. Their exposure is not eroticized,it is ambient. Bodies are not offered to the gaze, but to the air, the soil, the insects. Serra’s cinema returns the human to its infra-bodily materiality, where subjectivity disintegrates into sheer atmospheric life.
The forest-night of Liberté is inhabited by strangers, in the most precise sense. They do not speak to one another, nor do they construct community. Yet they are together, dwelling in the same subtractive nocturne. This mirrors Laruelle’s conception of the democracy of the Last Instance: a solidarity not of political agents, but of shared estrangement. Serra’s camera lingers not on action, but on the passive syntax of being-together-in-the-night. The sexual acts are not spectacular, they are exhausted, empty, prolonged without intention.What unites these bodies is not eros, but a common disenclosure from society, narrative, and spectacle.In this sense, the film models what Laruelle might call a vision-in-One: the refusal to separate bodies, scenes, or hierarchies. The libertines lie in the same mud as trees, cloth, dogs. Liberté is not a mise-en-scène but a non-scenography, where beings drift into visual neutrality.
Liberté is, ultimately, a film about the unmaking of the world through eros. It suggests that libertinage, taken to its limit, collapses not only the moral law but also the cinematic form. Serra’s subtraction is not iconoclastic, it is infra-formal. By draining his film of spectacle, he opens a space where non-presence appears as shared obscurity. In this nocturnal democracy, no face dominates, no climax erupts. What we are left with is a field of strangers, lying half-naked under trees, performing pleasure without intensity, without audience, and thus without world. Serra gives us the Baroque without ornament, libertinism without seduction, and cinema without drama. In so doing, Liberté becomes a rigorous experiment in generic eroticism, an art of dwelling in the subtraction of spectacle, and perhaps the closest contemporary cinematic expression of Laruelle’s vision of the unnameable human-in-person.
The Baroque, in Deleuze’s reading, is not merely a historical style but a metaphysical tension: a folding of the world into itself, where interiority becomes infinite through the creation of ever more layers of surface. In this baroque fold, the subject is neither erased nor centralized, but twisted, constantly deferred, doubled, and dressed in ornamental simulation. Libertinage, in its Baroque instantiations (Crébillon fils, La Mothe Le Vayer, and especially Laclos), inhabits this logic with perverse grace: desire unfolds not to reach truth, but to proliferate opacity; seduction is not a means to presence but a technology of withdrawal. The libertine becomes a tactician of folds, delaying the arrival of truth, of confession, of God.
Against this, Laruelle’s project enacts a more radical move: he subtracts even the fold. Non-philosophy does not fold Being, it suspends it. What is left is not the baroque chamber of mirrors but the generic flatness of the human-in-person, without reflection or height, an immanence that escapes seduction and command alike. Where Deleuze finds a metaphysical choreography of differences in the Baroque, Laruelle opts for a non-spectacular, non-Euclidean plain where presence is foreclosed not by mystery but by an axiomatic “non.” In this sense, the libertine strategy of veiling, when reframed by Laruelle’s thought, becomes not a technique of deception but a preparatory asceticism, clearing the field for the non-philosophical democracy of strangers.
The erotic baroque is thereby transmuted, its performative masks abandoned, its theatrical surfaces flattened into the last instance of immanence, where the human withdraws from spectacle, not into privacy or transcendence, but into a kind of collective unappearance.Here the “Liberte” is coming as a catharsis from any particular phenomenology, a decision to pass to the invisible self-made scenery, away from nature & humanity but so close to Homo Ludens anthropology.
Useful Bibliography
Laruelle, François. General Theory of Victims. Polity, 2015.
Laruelle, François. Principles of Non-Philosophy. Bloomsbury, 2013.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. City Lights, 1986.
Sade, Marquis de. The 120 Days of Sodom. Grove Press, 1966.
Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure. Vintage, 1990.
Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. Verso, 2007.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. Fordham University Press, 2008.
Serra, Albert. Liberté. 2019. (Film)
Albert SERRA (1975, Spain) is a Catalan artist and filmmaker, he holds a degree in Spanish Philology and Literary Theory from the University of Barcelona. He writes, directs and produces both films and plays. His films usually depict European myths and literature. In 2001, Serra co-founded the production company Andergraun Films. His film Honor de cavalleria (2006) was selected by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the ten best films of 2007. In 2013, a retrospective of Serra’s work was screened at the Centre Pompidou. For Història de la meva mort (2013), Serra was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2013. For La mort de Louis XIV, Serra received the Prix Jean Vigo in 2016. Liberté (2019) received the Un Certain Regard in Cannes Film Festival in 2019. Selected for IFFR 2023, Pacifiction (2022) was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2022.
Filmography: The Film Not the Village (2003), Honor de cavalleria/Honour of the Knights (2006), Super 8 (co-dir. 2006, short), Sant Pere de Rodes (2006, short), Rússia (2007, short), El cant dels ocells/Birdsong (2008), L’alto arrigo (2008, short), Baucà (2009, short), Lectura d’un poema (2010, short), Els noms de Crist/The Names of Christ (2011), 60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero (co-dir. 2011), El Senyor ha fet en mi meravelles/The Lord Has Worked Wonders in Me (2011), Cubalibre (2013, short), Història de la meva mort/Story of My Death (2013), La mort de Louis XIV/The Death of Louis XIV (2016), Roi Soleil (2018), Liberté/Freedom (2019), Tourment sur les îles/Pacification (2022), Tardes de soledad/Afternoons of Solitude (2024, doc)
