This text serves as an introduction to the first publication of an extensive new selection from Sergei Eisenstein's notebooks for a film of Capital (made “according to the script of K. Marx”): the Capital Diaries. While these texts have haunted the imaginations of historians, artists, and writers (from Guy Debord to Milica Tomic and Alexander Kluge) ever since short excerpts were first published in Russian in 1973 and English in October in 1976, this introduction presents a different and much broader selection, situating the experimental dimension of the notes between their main sources, Karl Marx's Das Kapital and James Joyce's Ulysses , as well as in the discursive framework of Viktor Shklovsky's theory of “defamilarization,” Nikolai Marr's “palaeontology of speech,” Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of “polyphony,” and Eisenstein's own conceptual and cinematic propositions, such as “intellectual attraction,” “ typage ,” and “inner monologue.” Furthermore, it traces the use value of images and collages in Eisenstein's diaries according to their potential to recirculate Marx's concepts and reveal cinema's participation in the entangled regimes of fascism and capitalism.

This introductory text unfolds and interprets some key elements from Eisenstein's Paris Diary, contextualizing his encounters and providing further details for understanding the filmmaker's fragmentary and sometimes cryptic diary as an autotheoretical practice. Written from the perspective of one immersed in the artistic and intellectual Paris of 1929 and 1930—as evidenced by Eisenstein's encounters with Colette, Tristan Tzara, Gertrude Stein, André Malraux, Filippo T. Marinetti, Abel Gance, Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Kiki de Montparnasse, Darius Milhaud, and others—the diary highlights the importance of his exchange with the avant-garde micro-cinematographer Jean Painlevé, as well as his theoretical and political kinship with the heterodox Surrealist group around the journal Documents. The introduction investigates the way in which Eisenstein's Paris Diary both documents daily events and serves as an ephemeral depository for the author's theoretical ideas on filmmaking and montage, seeing these in terms of such late works as Method , Montage , and Disney .

Mapping the encounters between Sergei Eisenstein and Georges Bataille in Paris in 1930, this essay reveals a new dimension of their respective approaches to materialism and the body, as explored, for instance, through a shared cannibalistic and visceral model of mimesis, one that operates below the visual or phenomenological qualities previously addressed by the discourse on the formless carried out by Georges Didi-Huberman, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Annette Michelson, among others. The present text argues for the existence of something it calls a visceral economy , pointing to a specific administration and distribution of affect as an aesthetic resource. It is precisely in granting the autonomous organological reactions of attraction and repulsion a function as collective operators of materialism that Bataille and Eisenstein would each formulate and experiment with elements of this visceral economy. While both authors considered sexuality to be a critical force of materialism, Bataille ultimately presumed an essentialized and binary understanding of gender difference that provided the ground for fantasies of excess and transgression. Against this heteronormative tendency, Eisenstein's research into the forces of materialism embraced a queer dialectics, or “bisexuality,” not as an opposition of genders but as a term for a gender-undifferentiated condition.