At the end of Psycho, Norman Bates’ psychotic grin seems to turn directly towards the viewer. Yet the final deterioration of his mental health leaves us in doubt as to whether the gaze actually is intended for the viewer as a secret accomplice, or whether it is simply an empty gaze, which, in the isolation of madness, has been denuded of any communicative affinity. The You which the gaze of the character addresses is in Psycho as little embodied as the place of the enunciator. Both the source of the sender and that of the receiver remain precarious: the enunciator cannot be unconditionally equated with Hitchcock (as Bellour does), but nor is the concrete spectator the unambiguous addressee of Norman Bates’ last gaze.

Every form of enunciation is necessarily also an utterance addressed to an enunciatee, but this basic pragmatic embedding of enunciation was initially brushed aside by Metz’s conflation of sender and receiver. In the 1980s, the debate surrounding filmic enunciation underwent a pragmatic turn, which saw an increasing preoccupation with the linguistic roots of the concept. The Italian film theorist Francesco Casetti can be considered the main representative of this turn towards the historicization of theory. In his seminal book Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and its Spectator, the implications these debates had for psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology disappear in favor of a performative theory of enunciation, in whose center stands the concept of “deixis.”