Hiroshima mon amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959)
In my reply to kvond’s and Meg’s comments on the Event, I alluded to a quote from Derrida’s Cinders, which I thought would be worth posting, especially since I can’t find any reference to it online and I don’t have the book handy to check it.
“At what temperature do words burst into flame?
Is language itself what remains of a burning?
Are cinders all that’s left from the ringing at the origin of words?”
Derrida’s reference point is the Holocaust, but it’s also the entry into language, which resonates with Lacan’s notion of a gap between the Real and the Symbolic. Following up on Meg’s suggestion of petrification and Pompeii as western civilization’s perhaps archetypal reference point for volcanic/traumatic cataclysmic events, what’s left behind, and what Herzog dwells on in the films I mentioned, is the signature of the Event (though, in the case of La Soufriere, it’s a non-Event). Rather like a nuclear explosion that leaves its radioactive shadow splayed across everything, the traumatic event leaves everything askew, haunted by a spectre, or ringing with an inaudible sound, the meaning of which we can’t make out. The vacated city, the empty landscape, the city frozen in time, with its illegible ciphers, the Event we can never come back to, yet which we perpetually circle around. If the human disappearance from this planet is genuinely thinkable, Herzog is one of its most evocative thinkers.
But sometimes reading these fragments can only be done in still shots, not in movement images. Unlike Deleuze’s time-image, which is always an image of movement, these might be something more like a geological frozen-time-image, which is always an image of movement stilled, of time passed, and, as Barthes put it in Camera Lucida, ultimately an image of (one’s own) death.
La Jetée (dir. Chris Marker, 1962)
For all that I value the vibrant materiality of process-relational and vibrant-materialist ontologies, I still turn to Derrida (and Buddhism) to remind us of the resonant emptiness at the heart of things. Derrida and his followers (Caputo, Mark Taylor) groped toward an ethic, a call, a claim on us from within that emptiness; but for a pretty reliable method for hearing that call, we could do worse than to turn to Nagarjuna and the Buddhists.
Well Adrian (as a spinozist, and you know I have to answer as a Spinozist on these blogs where everyone answers as a Continnentalist 🙂 ), the problem for me is in reading the “gap” or the “crossing-out” as fundamental to the structure of the message. This all lapses into a metaphysics of Presence (just because it is a critque of the metaphysics of Presence, it partakes in it as well).
When the space wells, let us say in the absence implied by an empty chair (hey, there is a person there who is crossed out somehow, how amazing), or the bag spinning (yes, beautiful reference) or the wind in grass, and there is this terrible tremor of desire in the very space, it is NOT just that language is being shown as insufficient, some kind of interpenetration of the Real (Lacanian trauma). It is as well the insufficiency of the notion of “gap” or “negation” too. Language is surpassed, but so is the so-called “structure” of the event. It is not, in my opinion, the case of a Hegelian reverse. Presence, crossed-out presence, the Event. It is that that entire dialectic itself is shown to be insuffient as a capture.
You say that in Nosferatu the Event is the Plague. Sure, nice guess (I mean this pleasantly), but surely you see that it is not Necessarily the Plague. It is an entire field of desire, the cutting of the finger, the eternity of Nosferatu’s waiting, the shadow of him on the wall. One does not NEED “the” Event (something that is to be crossed-out) in order to experience this immanence. Once you experience the immanence you realize that the assumpion of x, -x, (x) is an interpretive crutch, retroactively posited as necessary.
One needs to look at the filigree. Instead people keep looking at the Event, FOR the Event (the thing to be crossed out)…”hey, what is being crossed out now?” and sees nothing, does nothing but gape.
Herzog’s films are like this for me (and this is why a Derridean reading is a minimization). We can localize an event intellectually, but the call is to see the terror/beauty in every infinesmal second, smudging any sense of event.
I would want to add as well Adrian, knowing your sensitivity to questions of ecology, Why is it for many thinking ecologists have to trade in the “ens imaginationis” of the end of the world, the sky is falling, catastrophe is immanent (or has already happened)? I can see how ecologists find such imaginary relations are quite effective for mobilizing others (or really oneself), but it seems more than this. There is a genuine sense I get that in order to think about ecology in an ethical, authentic manner, one simply HAS to read the world in terms of endings. The appeal of eventology, and other negation philosophies seems to fit right in with this eschatological feature of ecological ethicism.
I mean this question sincerely, and only lightly as a criticism. Can we think about human ethics without STARTING with the Holocaust (or our own death-image), can we think about ecology without STARTING with exstinction and the end of the world?
These imaginary relations when seen as foundational (either logically or affectively) actually seem to mis-serve our ethical concern for what is right.
k: Those are great questions and I’ll do my best to do them some justice…
You write: “but surely you see that it is not Necessarily the Plague. It is an entire field of desire, the cutting of the finger, the eternity of Nosferatu’s waiting, the shadow of him on the wall. One does not NEED “the” Event (something that is to be crossed-out) in order to experience this immanence. Once you experience the immanence you realize that the assumpion of x, -x, (x) is an interpretive crutch, retroactively posited as necessary.”
ai: This is so beautifully put I wish I would have written it myself.
At the same time, I prefer to see it as another way of describing the same thing. Yes, “the call is to see the terror/beauty in every infinesmal second, smudging any sense of event.” And yes, also, that IS the Event, which continues to pulse through every second/inch/fragment/bit of things. The “crossed-out Presence” is intended not as an antithesis to the thesis (of Presence), but as pointing to the inability of the thesis/antithesis/synthesis to capture it. Of course we can point to the pointing and say “that, too, fails to capture it,” but the point of the pointing is in the pointing, or in what is being pointed at, which I think amounts to the same thing. We can call that the (crossed-out) Event or the shimmering immanence; the two emphasize something different, but they aren’t, to my mind, mutually exclusive.
I realize there’s a fairly extensive debate between Derrideans (and ontologists of lack or transcendence, which isn’t exactly the same thing) and Deleuzians (and presumably Spinozans and other immanentists, i.e. ontologists of abundance). And in that debate, a lot hinges on whether the world is self-sufficient or not. But it’s our world we’re describing, and our descriptions are always works in progress, and I wonder if that debate doesn’t needlessly turn a difference of emphasis into an irreconcilable dichotomy.
That may not be what you’re getting at, and maybe I’m being a bit muddle-headed with some of this, but that’s also why I’m attracted to films and other artistic renderings of these things – they get at what we’re talking about in a way that bypasses some of the pathways where logic would find contradictions.
Regarding ecology’s penchant for endings, its reliance on apocalypse as a ground for its own meaning (like Derrida’s reliance on the Holocaust, at least in the piece I was quoting from) – I think you’re absolutely right to be critical of that. At the same time, and here I’m again betraying a pragmatism (in the best, philosophical sense of the word, I hope), I think it’s an option, even dare I say a tool – an intepretive choice that isn’t the only one, and that doesn’t have to send us on a single path to its singular teleological destination.
You ask: “Can we think about human ethics without STARTING with the Holocaust (or our own death-image), can we think about ecology without STARTING with extinction and the end of the world?”
My answer: Yes, we can, and should, do that. That doesn’t mean that we can’t also start from these particular starting points (as we can from others). The Holocaust, and the possibility of extinction (human, or massive global), call on us to think, but so do all kinds of other things – all of which can constitute our (movable) starting points. I try to resist the temptation to identify a ‘foundation’ that’s separate from real possibilities (virtualities), or real events (actualities), and these two are emblematic – maybe paradigmatic – of very real actualities/potentialities in our recent memory or future projection. But there are many other possible starting points – such as the beauty of the mundane, the lightning bolt of the sublime, the flow of the relational/improvisational moment, etc., each of which could provide starting points for ecological art and thought as profound and moving as anything apocalyptic.
I don’t think Herzog wholly falls into the ‘eventological.’ His films have sardonic humor, irony, moments of compassion, but there is also something through his whole oeuvre that remains fascinated by a kind of apocalyptic Event, a kind of atheist’s moment of tribulation. It works because that’s never all that’s there. And because it’s never direct, and never consummated. It’s part of the texture of his films.
Thanks for your beautiful response Adrian. I see you trying to be as even-handed as possible to the points I am making, and you are right to identify the dispute between lack and abundance ontologies as being portioned to the position I am speaking about. But this is not just a territorial dispute (with ontology being cut up this way or that like Palestine).
Firstly, when you deny the “necessity” (and I think we mean the same thing, the logical necessity) of certain starting points or essentializations of lack/gap, etc., but then still summon up the philosophies that do appeal to just such necessities there is a bit of a dis-service. Yes, it is nice to try on the clothes of a Derridian or a Lacanian (okay, well, Lacan did kinda dress funny so maybe not so much), but when we call up these necessary descriptions we cannot help but bring with them the hegemony over discourse they imply. To put this another way, when you suggest that we NEED not start with catastrophe or the negation, but we can, I think we also have to work to understand just what happens when we do. When arguments of ecology DO start with fantasy screens of disaster are the investments that follow (the pleasures of such imaginings combined with generated alarm and fear), genuinely produce ecological thought? Or are these just ideological swings that actually reduce our ability to communicate and find agreement.
You know, a funny thing about the Right Wing denial of global warming (which positions those deniers as unscientific head-in-the-sandists) is that while the denial was factually wrong, it likely identified the exact surplus in fantasy/affective investment (the “enjoyment”) that helped organize the great and epic story. What the Right Wing was denying, I suggest, was the liberal intense desire to have an apocalypse of their own, some x that would help organize all their thoughts and actions. In this sense, precisely, apocalyptic thinking is a-ecological; it throws the investment into orbits that do not secure either agreements or sufficient actions (for instance, the tendency towards ideological addresses). I believe the same thing happens when we decide to START ethical thinking with the Holocaust, and worse, with the logical requirement of some sort of death-image. Imaginary projections indeed are socially serviceable, even irreplaceable, and indeed help organize us, but they are also quite destructive and divisive, they should be handled with care and auto-criticism. The last thing that should be done is philosophically entrench them into the metaphysical bed rock of our sense-making.
The biggest problem I have with Eventology (and crossing-out-ism) is that it leads to a very different sort of analysis for action and situation. It brings the eye (the ever floating eye of philosophies of Presence) to look outside upon the world FOR the “event”, either the coming event that we all have to make happen, or the terrible one that already occurred. As we survey the field we become habituated to the discovery of the presence or absence, we become sleuths of repression and suppression. Everything seems to consist of insides and outsides and the whole world becomes abstracted in the most curious and detached way. We become disembodied readers of a textual world, i.e. critics. What philosophies of abundance do is give us another kind of eye, an eye of the body. Critical of the fields of desire we START (not with some ghost of our non-self or some other conjured necessity), but with our own REAL place within the field of desire itself. Our place in history, in the mad network of connective relations that make of any situation an extension of our very bodies and imagination. This, by definition I would contend, is the locus of ecological (and therefore ethical) thinking. It is not that others (or our own subjecthoods)have suppressed and maginalized, crossing out the Event, but rather that as we exist we are positively engaged with the actualities of what is. This starting point gives us a very particular and very pragmatic vantage. We can effect change in the field BEGINNING with our minds, the way that we “see” and think and imagine. It is not the toggling of presence and absence in some kind of plus/minus game with catastrophe and death, it is about increasing our degree of power to act, and thereby the power to act of those we are connected to and depend upon. Action, the action of our own mental grasping of our REAL relations, is the place that we begin – and this is exactly where Eventology does not place us.
Ah, the Volcano that erupts with terrible fury, a spectacle of the Event crossed through…or, the Volcano that ripples through our representational systems, across our media fields, down our flight patterns and economic costs, populating our fantasy space of Nature, capturing our political and aesthetic will, a tsunami of affects and organizations deeply connecting our body and the bodies of others. The first becomes a disinterested theoretical object, the second an in-fabric reality of our proximity to volcanos, all the volcanos of our day.
As for pointing, when I sit on my porch with my wife in the bright sunlight as I did this afternoon and close my eyes and sigh, what is it that is being pointed at? What is doing the pointing? What is being crossed out? Where is the Event and its “structure”? Who even has sighed, and to whom/what? We can talk in those ways, those terms, but when we do I think we get a little bit lost.
k – I can only post a short reply right now, but I will be giving this more thought and hope to get back to you in greater depth, or in any case to continue the same dialogue in different registers/episodes/verses. The short of it is that I fully agree with you when I read your (extremely articulate and passionate) defense of philosophies of abundance. They are the ones I normally tend to favor. All the same, I’m a little resistant to consistency, to taking one path to get somewhere as opposed to beating around the bush, trying out different approaches, mapping them out and then twisting the maps to see how that entangles the territories too.
“Ah, the Volcano that erupts with terrible fury, a spectacle of the Event crossed through…or, the Volcano that ripples through our representational systems, across our media fields, down our flight patterns and economic costs, populating our fantasy space of Nature, capturing our political and aesthetic will, a tsunami of affects and organizations deeply connecting our body and the bodies of others. The first becomes a disinterested theoretical object, the second an in-fabric reality of our proximity to volcanos, all the volcanos of our day.”
Yes, absolutely, very well put! But need the first be disinterested and theoretical? Could it not be an admission of our own deepest complicity?
Adrian: “Yes, absolutely, very well put! But need the first be disinterested and theoretical? Could it not be an admission of our own deepest complicity?”
Kvond: The question itself is DEEPLY (I am wont to say, essentially) antropocentric, and from my perspective undermines genuine ecological thought. I will admit that there is poetic dimension to the crossed-out-event-volcano, but it still as an object, an aesthetic object, or, an aesthetico-theoretical object. If we want a non-essential and deeply entrenched historical and bodily embrace of our responsibility to the volcano, we cannot collapse ourselves into the very easy subject/object, presence/absence, event/non-event, self/other, self/world dichotomies that populate and fuel almost all of the Continental tradition.
Of course I am very interested in your longer thoughts on this. I agree with you that it is good to experiment and try on different paths, but sometimes paths are so well trodden, and so circular, to try them out is a bit of a mis-recognition.
I recall a long time ago telling someone who had a problem with marijuana. He thought, habitually, that it kept opening up new vistas. From the outside though he just kept repeating the same new “discovery”. I told him that listening to him was like listening to someone who lived in a two room house with no short term memory. He left one room and entered the other, afresh “Ah, another room!” He was convinced in must live in a mansion. Sometimes this is how I feel when I listen to people who play again and again with subject/object, x/y.