James Wan
L'evocazione - The conjuring

Something resurfaces in The Conjuring – L’evocazione, and it resurfaces in the way that it becomes depth, unlimited depth, an abyss that constantly displaces the surface, making it descend, that is, emerge: the discovery of the cellar, or depth that resurfaces, and the demonic presence, or superficial depth that brings everything back to the dark womb in which the final exorcism is performed. It is existence, and it is existence in the way that “man is the nothingness of a speck in the infinite universe, and he is at the same time the depth of a being who cannot know the universe, and who can reveal it within himself as known” (Jaspers). This means: not, as Markus Gabriel would have it, that the world cannot exist because it cannot be found in the world, but rather that precisely because it cannot be found in the world, the world exists, hence Reality is always already lost or, in more calmly Kantian terms, opened to a Transcendent in whose silence we must remain together with Wittgenstein; this Transcendent in The Conjuring is the demon, or what in Death Sentence was the principle of vengeance, and in Dead Silence Mary Shaw, and in Insidious the Golem who does not move from one world to another but pierces through both worlds, erasing, through the spacing of its passage, the inter-passable space. It's not the classic ghost story, in short, that emerges from the latest Wan film. It is, on the contrary, a story through ghosts, of a family that becomes a family, whose members' existences find the family’s own coexistence through the activity of the ghost-demon, and, moreover, of two families that become one family (the axiological perspective of the final scene, with the Warrens on the porch and the Perron family on the grass, clinging to themselves). Thus, if Heidegger answered with the particle “si” to the question “who?” posed on Dasein, now we know the answer to a question that even Heidegger does not ask: who asks the “who” question about Dasein? The demon. And the expressive power of the demon lies, as the movie's title suggests, not on its production but on its being produced, on its being conjured, therefore not on its action but on its manifestation, or rather being manifest, having someone (and no longer something, as in Insidious) to haunt and simultaneously someone to kill, who listens to it, that is, and we will thus have the serial network whereby mother-demon-daughter will mean exorcist-demon-possessed, according to a schematization of the sense whose circulation does not exclude the demon from the series but relegates it, once again, to the depths, ready to emerge (from the toy). In this way, only the body expresses existence, and obviously, we will define as possessed not the person who has the devil in their body but, more precisely, the devil that manifests in the body of a person, just as we will define schizophrenic the individual whose unconscious is free from the Super-Ego, where I and unconscious coincide and open up to the world. At this point, that is, earlier, Lorraine Warren enters the scene, the true protagonist of the film because she is the transfer between her husband Ed and the possessed Carolyn, a transfer through which Ed can perform the exorcism and, simultaneously (hand on the head, from above and in no soteriological way), a proper exorcism, but not in the sense of ex-orcismus, to draw out the demon, but in the deeper sense of ex-orkizein, which has nothing Catholic (the Lorraine couple are laypeople); indeed, the exorcistic operation finds its success not in the biblical breviary but in the emerging intimacy, not when Ed adjures the demon by commanding it, in God's name, to leave Carolyn's body but when his wife Lorraine brings out Carolyn's depth, her dearest memories (the trip to the sea), so that the exorcism is not an act against Satan but in favor of the person, an operation on the body of the possessed and not on the demon itself, per se phantasmatic. Wan shows this inefficacy of psychoanalytic theories after having acted psychologically, caring more about the mind (“Are the noises I hear, the specters I see real or are they in my mind?” is the question every character starts asking as the film progresses and the visions, of sound or image, grow thicker) than the body but ultimately finding in the body, in the epidermal surface (the inexplicable bruises), the true world on which to focus the cure, because it is the skin that Merleau-Ponty calls the Umwelt, the surrounding world, the world that surrounds our memory, our remembering, our affections, and our affects, and it is only through an operation on it that success is possible since only the Umwelt is operable, while memory and affections are but ineffable simulacra, which specify the skin in a one-way sense: “the sense is directly in (à même)” (Nancy). Here is the discovery of the Lacanian Other: it is us. Here is the sense of the pre-final image in which the Warrens look at the Perron family: it is specular. Here is the circulation of sense, the conjunction of the two series: a baton pass, the Demon who, having emerged from Carolyn's body, now dwells in the Warren household as before, before it did not reside in Carolyn's body but her unconscious, which indeed was Carolyn's emerging/body unconscious (hence schizophrenic but not Oedipal), dwelt in the Perron house. Thus the inevitability and fatality with which the viewer bitterly realizes that poor Lorraine will be Satan's next victim. And here, finally, is the misanthropic and Deleuzian sense of the film: that all good deeds will necessarily be punished.