The Limits of Control

“The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razor’s edge of ambivalence.”
—Hélène Cixous, Love of the wolf

To begin with a spoiler, Caniba concludes with a miracle—or at least this is how the film’s subject, the infamous Japanese cannibal Sagawa Issei, describes the sudden and unexpected wave of happiness that floods him as he is fed snacks and tucked in for a nap by a woman in a cosplay French maid’s outfit. As staged and performed for the cameras of Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab stalwarts Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, this scene amounts to a distorted self-exculpation from a man who had been driven to commit murder by his urge to consume women’s flesh. Now disabled and more fearful of his own death than penitent for the death he caused, Sagawa is rewarded for his participation in this exposé with a few earthly delights that arouse his desires and his dormant Catholic faith alike, as if those waters were drawn from the same poisoned well.

Ostentatiously refusing to judge their subject for his crime, Castaing-Taylor enjoy the film at its public screenings—is much more than pretense or showmanship: it forewarns their own uneasy relationship with their film’s negative capability. ’s sharpest provocations derive from its makers’ ambivalence, their unwillingness to succumb to those ethical impulses that would lead them to vilify their subject—even if this means partially submitting to that subject’s control over this latest self-construction of his public image, which he has been astutely managing (and profiting from) ever since transnational legal technicalities led to him walking away free five years after he murdered and partially consumed the body of his Sorbonne classmate Renée Hartevelt in 1981.