No. The rest of us feel and experience nothing as well. Everything IS mediated, removed, and intellectualized (which is but another form of mediation and removal). Human behavior is codified into market data. We're defined by cohabitation in bought houses rather than rented flats, the consumption of fine wine over everyday wine, status and envy in the workplace, and the selling of empty trinkets. Film is another obvious form of mediation, a mediation which de Van attempts to destroy as the character she portrays also discovers her body anew, as if for the first time. Maybe de Van is just showing us the lengths to which most of us have to go to cut through and actually have immediate access to our corporeal senses--not to feel pain, specifically, but merely to see what it is to feel and experience at all.
All the scenes surrounding her character's self-mutilation are important, if not more significant, than the mutilation itself. My sense as to why this escapes so many people's notice is that our sense of feeling and our immediacy of experience is just as dull and empty as those of the characters we see.
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