Trust in the World: A Philosophy of Film 9781138708785, 9781315201146

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Trust in the World

A fascinating and philosophically provocative exploration of cinema’s power to “restore belief in the world”, focusing not only on Deleuze’s account of modern cinema but drawing on Nancy and Cavell as well. —Robert Sinnerbrink, Macquarie University, Australia

This book examines the theory, originally raised in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of film, that cinema has the power to restore our trust in the world. Früchtl demonstrates that cinema does this in three main ways: by restoring our belief in the absurd, in the body and in a sceptical abstention from judging and acting. Cinema shares this ability with other arts, but what sets it apart in particular is that it evokes Modernity and its principle of subjectivity. This book further develops the idea of trust and cinema by synthesizing the philosophies of complementary thinkers such as Kant, Nancy, Agamben, Benjamin and Rancière. It concludes with examination of Cavell’s solution to the problem of scepticism and a synthesis of Kantian-aesthetic theory with Cavellian pragmatism. Originally published in German under the title Vertrauen in die Welt, this English-language translation features a new introduction that situates Früchtl’s work within contemporary analytical philosophy of film. It will be of interest to scholars working in continental aesthetics, philosophy of film and film theory. Josef Früchtl is Professor of Philosophy of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His major research interests are aesthetics, especially the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, theories of Modernity, critical theory and the philosophy of film. He is the author of The Impertinent Self: A Heroic History of Modernity (2009).

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87 Facts and Values The Ethics and Metaphysics of Normativity Edited by Giancarlo Marchetti and Sarin Marchetti 88 Aesthetic Disinterestedness Art, Experience, and the Self Thomas Hilgers 89 The Social Contexts of Intellectual Virtue Knowledge as a Team Achievement Adam Green 90 Reflective Equilibrium and the Principles of Logical Analysis Understanding the Laws of Logic Jaroslav Peregrin and Vladimír Svoboda 91 Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Downward Causation Edited by Michele Paolini Paoletti and Francesco Orilia 92 Using Words and Things Language and Philosophy of Technology Mark Coeckelbergh 93 Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration Edited by Chris W. Surprenant 94 Isn’t That Clever A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy Steven Gimbel 95 Trust in the World A Philosophy of Film Josef Früchtl

Trust in the World A Philosophy of Film Josef Früchtl Translated by Sarah L. Kirkby

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business “Vertrauen in die Welt” © Wilhelm Fink GmbH & Co. KG, Paderborn 2013 All rights reserved by and controlled through Wilhelm Fink GmbH & Co. KG, Paderborn This translation © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Josef Früchtl to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-70878-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-20114-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Evident Experience of Existence

vi 1

1 Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World

10

2 A Struggle Against Oneself: Cinema as Technology of the Self

26

3 The Evidence of Film and the Presence of the World: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Cinematic Ontology

42

4 Cinema as Human Art: Rescuing Aura in Gesture

57

5 Exhibiting or Presenting? Politics, Aesthetics, and Mysticism in Benjamin’s and Deleuze’s Concepts of Cinema 

66

6 Made and Yet True: On the Aesthetics of the Presence of the Hero

90

7 An Art of Gesture: Returning Narrative and Movement to Images

105

8 It Is as if We Could Trust: Fiction and Aesthetics of the Political

121

9 All You Need Is Love: Cavell and the Comedy of Remarriage

145

Literature Index of Concepts Index of Names

165 178 180

Acknowledgements

This book in its original German version was written in Amsterdam between 2007 and 2012. The English edition has been slightly modified and includes some additional passages, most prominently a new Chapter 4. The book is based around lectures of mine, some of which I have used as the basis for discussions on several occasions. I would like to thank Gertrud Koch and Christiane Voss for inviting me to a workshop in Berlin, Karen van den Berg and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht for inviting me to a workshop in Friedrichshafen on the shores of beautiful Lake Constance, Ludger Schwarte for inviting me to the National Center of Competence in Research “Iconic Criticism” in Basel (“Eikones”), and Kati Röttger for the great honour of an invitation to a keynote lecture at the major congress “Orbis Pictus— Theatrum Mundi” in Amsterdam. I would also like to thank Anneka Eschvan Kan, Stephan Packard and Philipp Schulte, who organised an outstanding congress in Giessen on “Thinking-Resisting-Reading the Political”, and Markus Gabriel, who brought together philosophers from Germany and the USA in Bonn to discuss “Philosophy, Film and Scepticism”. I especially owe thanks to the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie in Weimar, where I was permitted to spend a glorious summer as a fellow and, not least thanks to Lorenz Engell, to become acquainted with the intellectual eloquence of exuberance. If the Protestant and early capitalist saying that the devil finds works for idle hands were still to hold true, then this period of my life, despite also retaining my position as head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, would be seen as extremely productive, with almost exemplary idle hands being found much work. Nevertheless, all the conferences I attended made me very aware of what scientific discourse can be serious and yet jolly, full of conviction and yet relaxed. Responsibility for the ensuing publication is, of course, solely my own. Some of the chapters in this book are published in preliminary and usually heavily abridged English versions: Chapter 3: “The Evidence of Film and the Presence of the World: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Cinematic Ontology”, in: Leslie Kavanaugh (ed.): Chrono-Topologies: Hybrid Spatialities and Multiple Temporalities, Amsterdam: Rodopi 2010, pp. 193–201; Chapter 5:

Acknowledgements  vii “Exhibiting or Presenting? Politics, Aesthetics and Mysticism in Benjamin’s and Deleuze’s Concepts of Cinema”, in: Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics (ESA), Papers from the 2nd annual ESA conference in Udine 2010, Vol. 2/2010, pp. 143–160 (http://proceedings.eurosa.org); Chapter 6: “Made and Yet True. On the Aesthetics of the Presence of the Heroic”, in: Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics (ESA), Vol. 3, 2011, pp. 1–14 (http://proceedings.eurosa.org/?p=25); Chapter 8: “As If We Could Trust: Fiction and Aesthetics of the Political”, in: Anneka Esch-van Kan/ Stephan Packard/Philipp Schulte (eds.), Thinking-Resisting-Reading the Political, Zurich/Berlin: Diaphanes 2013, pp. 53–64; Chapter 9: “Trust in the World. Going to the Movies with Cavell, Wittgenstein, and Some Prior Philosophers”, in: Stefan Majetschak & Anja Weiberg (eds.): Aesthetics Today: Contemporary Approaches to the Aesthetics of Nature and of Art, Contributions to the 39th International Wittgenstein-Symposium, Berlin: De Gruyter 2017.

Introduction Evident Experience of Existence

Revised for the English Translation Edition Blow Up, the film by Michelangelo Antonioni, ends with a puzzling, dreamlike scene. After the protagonist has tried for quite a long time, in fact what is for him (a young, bored, yet artistically ambitious fashion photographer) a very long time, namely a whole day, to solve what seems to be a murder case—in the background of an enlargement, a blowup, of a photo he has happened to take of a pair of lovers in a park, he discovers a figure with a pistol next to a body, which is still lying there when he runs back to the place in question, although it disappears later on, as he is to realise—after he has tried in vain to solve the puzzle, then, he meets in the park a group of young people, all dressed as clowns, the same group he had met the day before at the beginning of the film, on a car journey through London. Two of the clowns are playing tennis, or at least are pretending to play. The others are watching, or at least are pretending to watch, turning their heads to the left, and then to the right, looking straight ahead for a (pretend) serve. The astonishing thing when you watch this film is that, although no ball can be seen flying backwards and forwards, a ball can be heard. When, during the pretend match, the ball flies out of the tennis court and lands near the photographer, they all turn to stare at him until, eventually, one of them gestures with his head as if to say, ‘Go on! Throw the ball back into the court, there’s a good fellow’. The young man hesitates at first, irritated, but then does what is expected of him and makes a pretend effort to throw the nonexistent ball back. He smiles, picks up his camera, his instrument of observation, from where he had laid it on the grass and walks away. Meanwhile the cinema camera adopts a bird’s eye view, distances itself and freezes. For a moment, the film seems to be conveying a message. Stop! It seems to be saying; stop the obsession with observation and the pursuit of objective truth! This route only brings us closer to the opposite model, the subjectivisticexpressivistic demeanour of art, of pointillist painting, which the blowup ultimately and increasingly comes to resemble. What we think we have seen, a corpus delicti, cannot be seen. It has dissolved into the grainy structure of the photo. Choose a practice instead, an intersubjectively shared course of

2 Introduction action, not forgetting that it is in part coloured, sometimes even governed, by the as-if principle. The latter means that tennis is played even though neither a racquet nor a ball is available. The final scene in the film can therefore be interpreted aesthetically, as an invitation to build upon that attitude of as-if, that attitude of fictionality which colours every course of action very slightly, and to crystallise it into a corresponding manner of living. But more is at stake here. What we actually have is an invitation to trust. Trust is a resource that is as fundamental as it is precarious. It is fundamental socially, especially in a moral, political, economic or psychological sense, but also in an ontological or existential sense. And it is equally precarious. At the time of writing this book, and before it, the lectures and essays upon which it is based, trust is frequently the subject of reports and commentaries, both in the newspapers and on television. In the autumn of 2007, a deregulated market economy dominated by capitalist financial policy presented us with pictures not seen in Europe for years: savers in a state of panic, storming their local (Northern Rock) banks. One year later, following the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers US-American investment bank, for whom in contrast to other major banks the slogan “too big to fail” no longer held true, institutionalised politics attempted to prevent the crisis from mushrooming—from a crisis of the banking system into a crisis of the fiscal system and ultimately into a crisis of the social system—by using “trust management, in which a loss of trust in agents at one level is or should be balanced out by guarantees from other agents at a higher level of trust”.1 Thus the banks are saved by the state, and small states are saved by large states. And, in accordance with the traditional pattern of loss socialisation, all of this is ultimately paid for by the masses, who (sometimes angrily, but nevertheless) pay their taxes as is expected of them. With this style of management, democratic parliamentary politics is extremely susceptible to lobbying by those seeking refuge. The merging of economic and political, private and public interests then very cleverly comes across as a matter of course. What follows is a prosaic fiasco, like the one staged by a German President who, in all seriousness and with the innocent air of the smallminded, thought that it was perfectly alright for a politician, indeed a representative of the common good free of party political alliance, to borrow money from his wealthy friends without detriment to the kudos of his office. At the same time, institutionalised politics undermines trust at the level of the constitutional state. The phenomenon of political terrorism, a phenomenon generating anxiety and thus the complete opposite of trust, encourages the establishment of a prevention state which principally views its citizens as suspicious objects in need of surveillance. The constitutional state, which has as one of the outstanding achievements the creation of social trust between strangers, treats its citizens with a general mistrust, consistently alienates them and is then nonplussed when they in turn feel estranged from the state. These developments make it blatantly clear that reciprocity and trust are the key concepts not only of a morality of long-term bonding but

Introduction  3 also within the specifying framework of mutuality, of short-term bonding in the marketplace, where goods are exchanged between strangers in the form of contract.2 Beginning with Thomas Hobbes, and later in the critique of Kantian universalism, trust initially played a role in works of political, moral and social philosophy. In contrast, its ontological-existential aspect was chiefly to emerge, albeit not always under the same name, in works of existentialism, pragmatism, phenomenology and existential ontology. Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” marked a shift in the discourse, namely from an ethical to a religious existence which cannot be substantiated according to the pattern of formal rationality—i.e. guided by rules and procedures. Friedrich Nietzsche approached this theme using the terms “affirmation of life” and amor fati. William James’s famous speech “The Will to Believe” (1896) was concerned with religious faith, but also with the status of “belief” in science (when scientists believe in the verification of a hypothesis) and individual psychology (when people believe, for example, in their own ability to achieve something and then, because of this, albeit not solely, they really do achieve their goals, so-called self-fulfilling beliefs or prophecies). Martin Heidegger dedicated himself in emphatic simplicity to the analysis of “reliability” (Verlässlichkeit) as a characteristic of “equipment” (Zeug), most famously in his analysis of shoes in a small painting by Vincent van Gogh. Maurice Merleau-Ponty stressed embodied perception, which enables us to believe in a world. And, finally, in his notes On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s pragmatism with a linguistic turn reminded us that a “language game”, including that of science, only functions “when one relies on something”, when one places one’s trust in something which, at least during the act of substantiation itself, cannot in turn require substantiation. The connection between the ontological-existential and epistemological interpretations of trust is obvious. But there is also a connection to the moral interpretation. When we cite “Lisbon”, the earthquake of 1755, or “Auschwitz”, the Nazi concentration camp, as epithets for the collapse of human, primarily moral trust in the world (the earthquake being viewed as divine—i.e. a natural catastrophe which is morally metaphysically permissible or even desirable), we are also employing an implicit definition of evil: evil is what shakes to the very foundations our trust in the world, not only our moral trust but also—and perhaps even primarily—our ontologicalexistential trust.3 Evil is the moral opposite of trust. Incidentally, for philosophy this has a less flattering consequence. It, too, is generally wont to shake to the very foundations our trust in the world, in our common conception of the world, which answers to the name of common sense or dogmatism. Based loosely on Hegel, philosophy not only, like all sciences, sheds doubt on what appears to be the case but also, and with its head held high, drives this process to the point of desperation, relativising it as a necessary condition for the possibility of good, of true knowledge. Evil thus becomes an element of philosophy itself.

4 Introduction Last but not least, Gilles Deleuze referred the theme of trust to the philosophy of film, with his theory that Modern cinema after World War II has the power “to restore our belief in the world”. This theory forms the starting point for my remarks, a point to which I shall repeatedly return. I would like to demonstrate the truth of this assumption, albeit in a historically specified and aesthetically more general sense. At the same time, I would like to show that Deleuze does not provide adequate substantiation for his theory. Film does indeed restore our belief in the world, but this is an achievement it shares with the other arts. What sets it apart is that it restores our belief not only in the world, but in Modernity. In order to substantiate both of these assumptions it is not necessary to bestow astonishing new honours on the metaphysics of Spinoza through to Nietzsche (the Nietzsche of eternal recurrence) and then Bergson; instead, it is totally sufficient to unite Kant, predominantly in his role as an aestheticist, with philosophical pragmatism. Philosophically speaking, before I go any further it is important to stress a premise which results from an interlacing of metaphysics, religion and politics. Cinema can, namely, only be seen from the point of view of restoring our belief in the world on the basis of Platonic idealism, Christian eschatology, Cartesian epistemology and, to employ the language of Dan Diner and Jürgen Habermas, the national socialist “rupture of civilisation”. The forms of perception, thought and action shaped by philosophical-religious systems cultivate basic forms of occidental world negation. The far-reaching experience of the national socialist war of annihilation ultimately lends world negation a sociopolitical bias. In this sense, the Western lifestyle has not cultivated, or at least not overly cultivated, a culture of trust. Art, particularly Modern art, also plays a role in the distrust of trust. It presents an existence which does not, to use a term favoured by Kant which will be repeated in this paper, “fit into the world”. Since Kleist, Modern life has far more resigned itself to the despairing ascertainment that there is “no help on earth”. As Adorno has expressed it using Hegelian terminology, Modern art is an art of negativity. In contrast, I would like to stress that I am concerned with the unreserved (in both senses of the word, that means in the sense of “without reserve” and “without backing”) ontological affirmation underlying all aesthetic experience and all art, including the most negative. Aesthetic experience, especially that triggered by art, is evident experience of existence, and thus also experience of evidence of a connection between (the things, creatures, events of) the world and the self which is having this experience. Or, to give it a different slant, whom this experience befalls. In Hegelian terms, but with a Kantian explication, evidence is a feeling of immediacy based on a dynamic of mediation, a movement which plays out between our various dimensions of experience, a playing which is to be understood not only metaphorically. The declaimed maxim “I sing what I see” (canto quello che vedo), with which Roberto Benigni starts his film La vita é bella, a comedy

Introduction  5 about Fascism and the extermination of Jews, is not frivolous or cynical. In ontological, factual terms, it simply means ‘I affirm what I experience’ I do not necessarily affirm it with regard to its (ethical and political) content, but I do with regard to its mere existence. The maxim should then really read, ‘I affirm that I experience; I sing that I see’. Aesthetic evidence as the result of movement in the dimensions of experience— the cognitive, the moral-practical (including the political), the everydaypractical and the sensory-affective dimensions—to a certain extent finds its preferred aesthetic field in film. The latter is an art form in which movement, image and seeing (videre) enter into an intrinsic connection. Up close, film provides an image of movement, that means an image set in motion which restores movement to a stationary image. To use a different term, this lends it the characteristic of a gestus, of gestures in a formal sense, which is nothing other than non-verbal communication based on the movement of images and the eyes. In their movement, the images point out something non-verbally and referentially, like physical movements, which can be set verbally and referentially ex post in a narrative (chronologically and causally ordered) structure. Instead of aesthetic evidence, it is also possible in this context to speak of aesthetic presence. Since the academic discussions regarding the quodditas, the pure that-ness of something, as opposed to its quidditas, its what-ness, the concept of presence has referred to that ‘preconceptual’ aspect, preceding every conceptual definition. In the terminology of existentialism, this is (human) existence, which precedes the essence; in the terminology of phenomenology and ontology this is something which is not given as a definite, but which in each case offers itself up as something to be defined. Presence refers to the actual and current, not (yet) defined. Once again, it is specific to film that the experience of presence is generated through the movement of images and perspectives, the movement of (camera) angles. In an optical sense the permanent change in perspective is its technique, in a cognitive sense its ideal, albeit in order to study not only world view pluralism but also gestural presence. In the case of film, presence can only be had as a gesture, as an unfolded indicative action, as an articulated yet not linguisticconceptual impartation. Film is therefore not merely, or not so much an ontological celebration of presence, but far more an aesthetic celebration of a tension-generating, hovering difference—between presence and its representation. There can be no cinema of pure evidence or presence. The tension between presence and representation, which film unfolds gesturally, ultimately reveals a weak primacy of practice. This tension may also display an equal, interdependent structure, to the extent that the experience of presence demands an articulation within a system of representation to even experience “the being” (of things and events), let alone speak about them, which only succeeds within a practical—i.e. social, cultural, linguistic, historical context. The phenomenon presenting itself, free of interpretation, is located as a necessary fiction beyond this context. At the same time, in the

6 Introduction words of John Dewey and Henri Bergson, it guides the processes of (verbal, symbolic and aesthetic) articulation along the path of intuition. Articulation processes are thus based on movement in opposing directions: in a real context into the practices (plural) of a culture, and in an ideal context back out again. But, precisely as practices, these practices are not characterised by clarity. Far more, they provide the context for the rules and criteria according to which we evaluate phenomena, in accordance with the holistic understanding, both hermeneutic and pragmatic. To this extent, following a practice means relying on evaluation criteria and rules which cannot be substantiated and established with certainty once and for all. A practice is characterised—and here we come full circle—by trust. Trust is at the same time fundamental and without guarantee. This is what constitutes its practical and theoretical attraction. Making this dichotomy experienceable is precisely what constitutes its aesthetical attraction. “As-if” is what makes this possible. Aesthetic experiences convey a feeling of trust in the world because they arouse in their tensely balanced relationship between sensory perceptions and concepts, exhausted almost to the point of conflict, the feeling of a peculiar agreement between dimensions of experience, inviting and tempting one to conclude an agreement between the self and the world. The interplay between perceptions, imaginations and interpretations or, in Kantian terms, between sensibility, imagination and understanding, leads to the evidence-laden fiction of an interplay between the subject of the experience and the world. Thus the practice of aesthetic experience reinforces that existential or ontological affirmation which we teach ourselves within different lifeworld contexts, especially upbringing processes in early childhood, while at the same time exposing it as a fiction. Trust in the world is thus no more, but also no less than an attitude of asif. Aesthetic experiences encourage us to behave as if we were able to trust in the world. That is their ontological achievement. And, in the light of the widespread occidental annihilation of trust in the world, this achievement should certainly not be discounted. I would like to add a special note for readers in the Anglo-Saxon world. There can be no doubt that the tradition I follow in this book is the one usually called ‘continental philosophy’. Everybody knows that the relationship between this tradition and that of analytic philosophy was, for quite some time, and unfortunately sometimes still is, oppositional, tense, even hostile. But, as one of the results emerging from the philosophical discussions of the past decades, we have been happy to learn that an intense exchange of thoughts between these traditions is a good—i.e. productive thing. It can lead to results that are some of the most fruitful of our age. To my mind, Stanley Cavell, one of the inspiring thinkers included in this book, stands for such a result. Nevertheless, European-continental philosophy remains my fundamental source here. There are certain reasons for this, and a brief summary of these reasons would come down to the following.

Introduction  7 Though the analytic and cognitivist paradigm in philosophy of film— represented by theorists like Noël Carroll, David Bordwell, Carl Plantinga, Berys Gaut—has developed sophisticated theories about the ontology of the (moving) image, about narrative, authorship, genre and affective consternation, they fail to do justice to the aesthetic dimension of movies, that is the pleasurable interplay of various sensuous qualities, imaginative power and disclosing thought.4 This failure also comes into play concerning the central subject of my book. The general thesis that film is a special medium constituting trust in the (Modern) world belongs, in my case, primarily to the field of ontology, but it is also connected to the fields of ethics and politics. The thesis that movement is a necessary feature, but also more than just a necessary feature; that it is a “superdeterminate” feature of the medium film remains within the small framework of a cinematic ontology. But it is also linked to the much wider framework of classical ontology and its question about ‘what there is’, about ‘being’. And it is linked, furthermore, to the framework of ethics and politics, to the question of what it means to lead a good life as a person and as a community. Thus the cinematic-ontological thesis corresponds with the thesis that film, like art per se, confirms our ontological or existential relationship to the world as a foundation for wishes, hopes and expectations of a good (collective) life. To the extent that the analytic and cognitivist approach does not provide the tools to establish such ontologicalexistential and ethical-political connections, I believe an element to be missing which to me seems to be very important for philosophy. In the following chapters, I shall begin by attempting to demonstrate how the assumption by Deleuze that it is the power of Modern cinema to restore our belief in the world, formulated at the outset of this book, can be grasped. According to my understanding, cinema can do this in three ways: by restoring our belief in the absurd, in the body and in a sceptical abstention from judging and acting. Or, to put it positively, by restoring phenomenologically pure perception (Chapter 1). Not for the last time in the course of my critique, I set a first counteraccent to this guiding assumption by detaching it from its metaphysical background and restricting it within the bounds of Modern theory. Accordingly, the belief which Modern cinema is able to restore is one in the Modern world, in the world of Modernity and its principle of subjectivity. To this extent, film proves to be a technology of the self (Chapter 2). At the end of this chapter, Jean-Luc Nancy provides new input with the help of the epistemological concept of evidence central to the present context. For Nancy the latter is embedded in the phenomenological-ontological tradition of showing (oneself). Using the example of the films by Abbas Kiarostami (taking no more than highlights) he illuminates this by emphasising the elements of sight, movement and the real. Accordingly, film is a “mobilisation” of sight in favour not of the what of being, but of the that. In order to counter this ontology of “presence”, I bring into play an aesthetic

8 Introduction position in this context which maintains the tension between presence and representation (Chapter 3). Since Kiarostami is the main example for Nancy’s considerations, I draw upon the film Close-Up to offer my own interpretation in a more elaborate way. The humanity of this cinema consists, namely, in rescuing the aura, presented in an art of gesture (Chapter 4). Epistemologically speaking, Deleuze’s film philosophy of a time picture places “the seer” in a privileged position. And in this point his philosophy once again oscillates between metaphysics, or indeed mysticism, and aesthetics. Since at the same time he links it to a social theoretical-political assumption, it is revealing to compare it in its entirety with Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay, still definitive today. This comparison ends harshly for Deleuze. But in political matters it does not pay to be too sensitive. While Benjamin, with Georg Simmel behind him and Michel Foucault beside him, updating him, welcomes film as the medium appropriate to Modernity for its “exhibition value”, Deleuze appears as the mixtum compositum of an anarchist re-establishing “cult value” in philosophy, and not just the philosophy of film either (Chapter 5). A pronounced case for the concept of presence, which Nancy employs explicitly, in the phenomenological tradition, and Deleuze employs implicitly, is also made by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Since he chooses to make it within the context of sport, I am happy to do the same, albeit in order to stress that an aesthetical experience of presence is different, as well as more, than (just) an experience of presence. Phenomena of aesthetic presence are made and yet true. In other words, they are real. And this seemingly paradoxical dichotomy can once again be explained epistemologically and ontologically with Kant, as having the status of “as-if” (Chapter 6). Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers serves next as a demonstrative example of the characteristic ability of film to relegate a picture spatially to movement and contextually to a storyline. Following on from Giorgio Agamben’s overwrought remarks about film as gesture, I present here the assumption that film is indirect, non-verbal communication, not only through the physical movements of the actors but also more specifically through movement of the pictures and the eyes. With the help of this assumption, a new plea can then be made to restrict the metaphysics underlying Deleuze’s philosophy of film to the as-if, in other words to fictionalise it, to aestheticise it. Grasping time as a picture, as Deleuze believes Modern film manages to do, is only possible with some highly metaphysical assumptions. I propose aestheticising them clearly and consistently, with the aid of Kant (Chapter 7). The theme of the next chapter is also fiction and aesthetics characterised by the as-if, but this time in a political context. Based on Jacques Rancière’s critique of the concept of consensus and his contrasting concept of an aesthetic community, the political has to be grasped as a sphere reliant on the modus operandi of the as-if, feigning something as real which is not (or not yet) real. The best way to connect this political conceptualisation to the

Introduction  9 aesthetic sphere is still Kant, however. He puts forward the assumption that experience is also aesthetic to the extent that it conveys to those having the experience evidence of ‘fitting into the world’. Aesthetically, we experience the world as if there were a reason for hope and trust. This assumption seems challenging under Modern conditions as described by contemporary sociology, yet also challenging under the normative ideal of a ‘radical democracy’. But if we also pursue Kant along the intersubjectivistic line of interpretation first drawn by Hannah Arendt, the connection between politics and aesthetics appears immune to the radicality of surpassing found in the philosophy of difference and dissent (Chapter 8). After the first chapter covered in detail the assumption that, for Modern film, restoring belief in the world means pursuing sceptical abstention from judgement and action, the last chapter permits the philosopher who is most authoritative in this context to have his say: Stanley Cavell. “To live in the face of doubt, eyes happily shut, would be to fall in love with the world”. This is the statement up for interpretation here. Ultimately we are left with the assumption that film is a kind of trust, of being in love with the world to the extent that, on the one hand, as presented in the second chapter, it achieves an “acknowledgement” of subjectivity and Modernity specifically as a medium of movement and, on the other hand, like art in general, it achieves an acknowledgement of the world—provided that the aesthetic feeling of fitting into the world, as envisaged by Kant, is a feeling or rather an attitude or even better a practice of trust. It is thus pragmatism underpinned by Kant which, disburdened by metaphysics, answers the question posed at the outset regarding whether and how film might be able to restore our belief or trust in the world (Chapter 9).

Notes 1 Jens Beckert & Wolfgang Streeck, “Die nächste Stufe der Finanzkrise”, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 Aug. 2011. 2 Cf. Dorien Pessers, “Vertrouwen van burgers is verkwanseld”, in: NRC Handelsblad, 23/24.9.2006; Pessers qualifies the sphere of market economic mutuality as that of mistrust; in contrast Kenneth Arrow, The Limits of Organization, New York: W.W. Norton & Company 1974, p. 23: “Trust is an important lubricant of a social system. It is extremely efficient; it saves a lot of trouble to have a fair degree of reliance on other people’s word”. 3 Cf. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004, p. 1 & 8–9; in his book On Evil (Yale University Press 2010) Terry Eagleton presents a theory which grasps evil primarily as a metaphysical phenomenon, as a phenomenon which aims at the elimination of being in its entirety (cf. p. 16). 4 Cf. also Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images, London: Bloomsbury 2011.

1 Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World

I dream things that never were and say, why not? (Bobby Kennedy/George B. Shaw)

They said, “You have a blue guitar, —You do not play things as they are”. The man replied, “Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar”. (Wallace Stevens, “Man with the blue guitar”)

Cinema and Catholicity Gilles Deleuze is one of those thinkers of whom it is impossible, even today, at the start of the 21st century, to say whether his effusions are quite simply nonsense or rather non-sense—i.e. a sense which we are as yet unable to comprehend. Michel Foucault once said of his esteemed compatriot, “Maybe one day we’ll see the century as Deleuzian”, a statement which Deleuze himself, however, took to be a “joke”, “meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everybody else livid”.1 Deleuze’s book about cinema is awash with curious sentences. One of them, to be found in the chapter Thought and Cinema, states: “There is a Catholic quality to cinema”.2 The similarity between the two areas of a Christian religion on the one hand, and a technical medium of mass entertainment on the other, obtrudes from both directions. As Deleuze rhetorically begins, “Is there not in Catholicism a grand mise-en-scène?” And is there not “but also, in the cinema, a cult?” He then proceeds to address the real problem: “The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world”. We no longer believe in this world, and this has really been the case since Plato developed his theory of forms, but especially since Christianity successfully established an ideology of two cultural worlds and Descartes epistemologically divided the whole of being into two substances, with the path of knowledge leading, if at all, only from the one substance, the ego-cogito, to the other, the res extensa. The Second World War, Deleuze suggests, that

Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World  11 devastation of the moral fabric of the Western world, is what laid this fundamental ontological loss of faith completely bare. In philosophical terms “the link between man and the world is broken”, then, at least since the mid-17th century and Descartes’s introduction of a dualistic ontology. Descartes himself can only bridge the division of being, of what is, into a thinking self which possesses an unshakeable certainty about its own existence and an extensive field of uncertain objects of thought by resorting to the authority of God. Even if it may be beyond doubt that I think (now, at this moment), and that as long as I am thinking I exist, this does not necessarily mean that I exist with a body of my own, that the material world exists and that there are mathematical, as well as logical laws. Only the religious authority of faith guarantees that the world— which means thinking and, for Descartes following scholastic philosophy, also means sensory perception of things and matters—will not disintegrate with every moment of cogitationes. Thus, in this context, Descartes, the meditating anti-scholastic, argues in scholastic tradition drawing upon God. Apparently, not even Deleuze can see another way out. In the postCartesian world, it has become impossible in philosophical and epistemological terms to maintain the existence of a link between man and the world. Instead, it “must become an object of belief”. After more than 350 years of epistemological theory followed by linguistic philosophy, “the impossible”, and here that means the unity of subject and object, the representation in signs or characters of what is to be signified, can “only be restored within a faith”. Here it is easy for Deleuze to refer to a philosophical tradition extending from Pascal and Hume via Kant and Fichte to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and beyond. All have been seemingly keen to “replace the model of knowledge with belief”. Of course, as should be stated straightaway, faith or belief can mean different things. Its import can be religious or epistemological. It is possible to have faith in divine revelations, but also to believe in certain prerequisites for our thoughts and actions. As far as cinema is concerned, in the final analysis Deleuze is clear. Here believing does not mean believing in “another world, or in a transformed world”, in a transmundane or even a utopian world. “It is simply believing in the body” and that means “reaching the body before discourses, before words, before things are named”. And that in turn ultimately means, or so my theory goes, reaching the body, all material of being, through vision and a linked form of emphatic thinking, ‘thinking while viewing’ or ‘viewing while thinking’, which has been very popular amongst philosophers since Plato’s ‘theory of forms’ and which, in the case of Deleuze, achieves the prediscursive in a blink of the eye—in both senses, that is as a moment in time and as a momentary view through the eye, an instantaneousness which also explains the haptic and shocking impact, the affective dimension of this perception. It is the cinema which comes after World War Two which allows this to happen, first the cinema of Orson Welles and then, however, very much that

12  Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World of 1950s Neorealism, 1960s Nouvelle Vague and 1970s West German film d’auteur. The achievement of this type of cinema, which Deleuze collectively describes as that of the “time-image”, consists in detaching the visual from “sensory-motor schema”, in not transforming visual stimulation into an action or a judgement, into a motor or mental reaction. “Restoring our belief in the world—this is the power of modern cinema”. Naturally, Deleuze does not allow himself to become obsessed with this anthem to Modern cinema without incorporating a repercussion, namely “illusion”. The ability of cinema to restore our faith in the idea that a world exists beyond ourselves, beyond us Modern and even Postmodern people, us grandchildren of Cartesian doubt, amounts to “cinematographic illusion”. One could just as easily say it amounts to the ability of cinema to provide a fiction. Fiction and illusion are the same thing.3 But the difference pales into insignificance in the light of how cinema, which provides us with a fiction and an illusion of a world, can still, and precisely as a result of this, restore our faith in the world.

Fiction, Truth and Their Modern Fundamentalisation The starting point for an understanding of fiction is its semantic relationship to the significant Greek concepts of poiesis and mimesis. Accordingly, the Latin term fictio can “in a broader sense” mean poiesis, in other words, the product of a creator, but “in a narrower sense” mimesis, in other words, imitation (or presentation), which in turn can indeed be original. The work of Ovid may be taken as “the real locus classicus”. The first book of his Metamorphoses begins with “a primaeval gesture”, fingere, the creation of a (beautifully formed) world from primordial formlessness. Karlheinz Stierle, whom I quote here, thus opposes Wolfgang Iser’s theory, a temporary endpoint in the long conceptual history of fiction. For Iser, working against an anthropological background, while the fictitious is a midway-concept located between the real and the imaginary, “helping the imaginary, the open, the unformed, to appear, at the beginning fiction stands as an act of forming”. God, who lends form to the chaos is a fictor—a “creator of worlds”.4 From the outset, this concept of poiesis correlates with that of mimesis, but it is a correlation which also entails restriction, in order to exclude an element from fiction which is otherwise difficult to extract from it— namely, deception and deceit. Once again Christianity brings about a decisive change, this time with its posit of truth and earnestness. Fiction is “denounced”.5 In the 18th century, with the ultimate repression of Christian religious influence on science and philosophy, it becomes possible, with reference to the concept of truth, to observe the crystallisation of a multiply diverse concept of fiction: on the basis, firstly, of an understanding of fiction as a created world or formed chaos, or in more general terms as a creation or forming, there emerges an understanding of fiction which, secondly, hides

Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World  13 its createdness and thus becomes a deception, as well as, thirdly, an understanding according to which fiction asserts itself in its own right beyond the alternative of true and false.6 This own right can assert itself within the framework of a scientific method or the framework of art, especially literature. In the one case, fiction can be interpreted as a hypothesis, as a statement which is principally capable of truth, but which is not (yet) deemed to be true. Or as a concept of reason in the Kantian sense, as an idea to which no experienced object and yet a potential object corresponds. It then serves as a heuristic fiction or as a ‘regulating principle’ of scientific thought. According to the terminology of linguistic analysis, in the case of (the art of) literature the rules of reference and denotation are suspended. In an illocutionary respect, the linguistic act of assertion also lacks the necessary ‘strength’, meaning that the “rules of sincerity (the speaker must believe that his pronouncement is true), of argumentation (the speaker must defend the truth of his pronouncement) and of consequence (the speaker must acknowledge the implications of his pronouncement) are nullified”.7 A statement, paradigmatically a metaphorical description, is in this case also deemed to be untrue, but it is deemed to be principally capable of being true, namely in Heideggerian terms as the opening up of a field of truth, as the introduction of new candidates for (literal) truth, leading to a change in our previous convictions.8 A fourth understanding of fiction is the result of combining the previous variants. It is that of self-reference, in which fiction as something created refers to itself, in other words does not attempt to conceal its createdness. In so doing, it can claim to be true, to be veridical or sincere. Not, of course, in the theoretical sense of the aforementioned speech act. A fiction which allows itself to be recognised as a fiction behaves truthfully towards its recipients. It does not pretend to them that an X is a Y, that the fictitious is real. But it can contain an assertion, can assert that it is more than a mere fiction, that it is nevertheless principally capable of being true. In the course of time, it can even turn out to be the (literal) truth. But until that time comes, its claim to truth remains a claim to veridicality which, as we must necessarily add, requires the experience of evidence in order to elicit the character of the pupated assertion. I shall return to this repeatedly.9 This approach, examining the concept of fiction for its ability to be true, is unsuitable in connection with Deleuze, however. Deleuze, in the tradition of Spinoza and Nietzsche, sees himself as a thinker who deals in forces, not claims to truth. He sets them up in mutual opposition although, as we have just seen, it is definitely compatible to talk of claims to truth and assertions while also talking of forces. “A thing has as many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it”.10 Thus writes Deleuze in his important book on Nietzsche. According to his interpretation, with the conceptuality of forces and the (metaphysical) theorem of the will to power, Nietzsche allows himself to be guided by a “Spinozist inspiration” (which Heidegger, challenging interpreter of Nietzsche, completely overlooks11). Spinoza

14  Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World attempts in “an extremely profound”—i.e. classical-metaphysical theory to prove that a body has “a capacity for being affected to correspond to every quantity of force”.12 Accordingly, force is not (so much) a capacity to affect others (bodies and thoughts), but to allow oneself to be affected. Formulaically: the more passive somebody or something is, the more active he, she or it can become, the more open to other things, the richer in experience, and therefore the more multifarious in producing relations, networks, areas of potential influence. In the following, this will be more thoroughly explored in the context of Deleuze’s conception of bodies and affect. Access to the concept of fiction through Deleuze is thus more likely to be achieved if the truth reference is placed in parentheses of power and force theory and the classical concept of mimesis reinstated. Mimesis can be understood in the Spinozan sense as an imitation of nature qua natura naturans. As ‘naturing’, endlessly producing, nature is then also a role model for art and its fictions. As fictions, we can also say that the products of art have an ambiguous status since they effectuate that something is experienced prima facie as real and true which is not real and true. To employ the terminology of Kant and prominent current philosophers of fictionality, they have the status of the ‘as if’. They let us believe in something and to this extent are, as I shall explain in more detail in the following, part of the structure of mimesis as make-believe.13 We are also led to Deleuze by another theory on the concept of fiction. I am guided by an assumption put forward by Odo Marquard in the footsteps of Hans Blumenberg. Accordingly, the concept of fiction is a component of that “trauma of eschatological annihilation of the world” against which philosophy struggles to think, maybe has to think “post Christum natum et mortuum”.14 However, it takes a long time before the concept of fiction can assume this function. Right up until late Modernity, according to Marquard, ficta are merely examples of irreality. Only with Nietzsche and Vaihinger’s philosophy of the as-if does “fundamentalisation” of the fictive begin, proceeding to establish itself prominently in the discourse theory of Jürgen Habermas and ‘contrafactual presuppositions’. According to Marquard, this trend towards fundamentalisation of the fictive comes from Biblical eschatology. In the Blumenberg sense, it is concerned with overcoming (world negation of) gnosis. It is concerned, we might also say, with the existentialist project, reconciling the silence of the world and the human need to find meaning. That is a major and far-reaching theory, of course. In philosophical epistemology, it can at least be reduced to a (somewhat) smaller format. In epistemological terms, Descartes is the great annihilator of the world, annihilator of trust in the world. This loss of trust is no longer the result, as in the late Mediaeval nominalism of someone like Wilhelm von Ockham, of a radical voluntaristic conception of God, of a potentia absoluta, which places (unjustified) will above (justifying) reason and can thus turn ‘what is’ into ‘nothingness’ from one moment to the next. The loss of trust is now the

Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World  15 result of a radical epistemological and ontological dualism. That link from the one substance to the other, from the res cogitans to the res extensa, from thinking to spatial objects, can only be guaranteed by a third substance, by God. Without him, the world crumbles every time it enters the thoughts of the subject. Without God’s help the subject can be certain of itself, but not of the world.15 This brings me back to my initial theory and reference to Deleuze, but also to a first answer regarding the Catholicity, faith or faiths of cinema. The fact that cinema can be seen as restoring our faith in the world at all is only possible as a result of Christian eschatology and Cartesian epistemology. These two cultures, the Christian and the Cartesian, laid the foundations for Western negation of the world. For Deleuze, cinema—like the philosophy of Spinoza, thinking of the one substance which one can call God or Nature, as well as the philosophy of Nietzsche—is a medium which affirms the world and being. Generally and normatively, and again using the language of Nietzsche, we need fictions. We need them as an antidote in that battle of cultures taking place within Western culture. Here Spinozism battles against Cartesianism, and pantheism against monotheism (and Nietzsche against everyone and everything). But how can we imagine this ontological affirmation in detail? And how is it possible within the medium of film? There are many answers to this. It will be impossible to decide which one comes closest to what Deleuze intended. More importantly, which one is the most convincing, in the sense of the power which cinema has to make us believe? And this answer cannot ultimately be provided as long as one remains within the immanence circle of Deleuzian thinking.

Belief in the Absurd A first response is the philosophy of the absurd. Restoration of faith in the world is the “impossible”, the “unthinkable”, the “absurd”, as Deleuze puts it in one of his justifications, which nevertheless needs to be thought.16 What proves simultaneously necessary and impossible, namely connection with the world in a post-Cartesian world, can either remain a paradox or be left up to faith. And the latter (faith) can actually emerge from the former (paradox). Western culture boasts extremely prominent evidence of this in the traditional Christian credo quia absurdum. Accordingly, the content of religious beliefs and theological statements cannot be proven through human reason. In this, the fathers of the church, Tertullian and Augustinus, are in agreement with the sceptical and despairing children of Modern Christianity toeing the Pascal and Kierkegaard line. Kierkegaard’s existentialism predominates as coming closest to what concerns Deleuze, for it is precisely the absurd which is the object of faith, and the absurd is nothing other than the paradox of the incomprehensible comprehended. But, of course, for Deleuze the atheistic existentialism of the 20th century remains in the background.

16  Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World The Cartesian starting point does lead Sartre and Camus, for their part, to draw a conclusion, though. Experience of the senselessness of the world results from the autonomy of the Modern subject, which in turn recognises only itself as constituting both the world and sense. The absurd then, for Camus, is the name given to affirmation of the polar tension existing between the human need for the world to make sense and the world itself, which remains alien.17 Against this background Deleuze reveals himself to be an atheistic existentialist who not only systematically permits the pure ‘that’ (i.e. that something is) to precede the conceptually defined ‘what’ (i.e. what something is), but who also affirms as an absurdity the fissure running between these two dimensions, parallel to the fissure between the self and the world, between subject and object. Two incidental remarks have to be made at this juncture. Firstly, to the extent that in psychoanalytical terms the cleft between self and world, concept and facticity means a “universal schizophrenia”,18 Deleuze once again takes the stage of the discourse as a ‘schizo’ theorist or propagandist. Affirming being as it is, making it into a single transformation matter, into a ‘machine’ coupling everything with everything, has been a well-known ‘schizo’ project since the Anti-Oedipus. The ‘schizo’, the matey version of the oedipalised schizophrenic, rehabilitated as functioning in a capitalistic sense, is, completely in line with Foucault, the real social outcast, at the same time imaginarily produced by the same society. It is a new version of the myth of the good wild one,19 a desired figure in keeping with 20th century capitalism: a figure desired by capitalism because it permanently crosses boundaries, and feared by capitalism because it also crosses its own boundaries. To take the psychoanalytical and metaphysical assumption underlying the Anti-Oedipus, it is a figure which still knows how to wish, not deforming the wish oedipally and dissociating it in the ‘order of the symbolic’. Thus far, at least, Deleuze and Guattari are more aware than their pupils of the ambivalence of their thinking with regard to capitalism. A second critical aside, this time with a derisory foundation, again comes from the Nietzsche corner and must necessarily embarrass an interpreter of Nietzsche as glowing as Deleuze: Many have no doubt attained to that humility which says: credo quia absurdum est and sacrificed their reason to it: but, so far as I know, no one has yet attained to that humility which says: credo quia absurdus sum, though it is only one step further.20 If someone becomes a believer by sacrificing reason, he should be honest enough to admit that it is his own reason which he has sacrificed; that it is not the world which is unreasonable or without reason, but he himself. Therefore, in this context belief means to acknowledge (recognise and accept) the world as an absurdity. Restoring faith in the world means affirming the irresolvable cleft between the self and the world.

Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World  17

Belief in the Body Another answer to what affirmation of the world could mean for Deleuze is provided by identification of ‘world’ and ‘body’. Belief means believing in the body, and body is the name (not the concept) for what we can grasp preconceptually. It is the name for the affective and instantaneous side of perception. Before I go into this in more detail, I should at least like to point out that Deleuze also emphasises the aspect of the body or the physical in connection with painting. In The Logic of Sensation he is fascinated by the paintings of Francis Bacon because Bacon exposes the body in several senses of the word: returning it to its existential nakedness, its spatiotemporal isolation, its cosmic loneliness, reducing it to its carnality, presenting it as a bundle of affects and exhibitionistically displaying it, denouncing it, embarrassing it. If one were to argue analogously for film, this would mean regaining belief in the world to the extent that film celebrates this exposure. When seeking to clarify the affective dimension of perception in Deleuze, it is first necessary to draw attention to the background found in the philosophy of Spinoza. Spinoza’s metaphysics of one substance, called God or Nature, extending in all directions implies that entities (bodies and thoughts) are both affected and affect others, in multiple ways. Affection means increasing or vice versa decreasing the potency or existential force (potentia agendi, vis existendi) of a body or spirit. Experiencing (sustaining) affects means experiencing changes to one’s own potency.21 Deleuze initially distinguishes between “perceptions” and “affections” on the one hand, and between “percepts and affects” on the other. The former indicate a reference and are thus (against the background of fundamental criticism of representation and ordering of the symbolic) to be forms in decline. They refer to an object (which causes perceptions and affections) and a subject (which ‘has’ perceptions and affections, for example upon smelling a piece of Gouda cheese). In contrast, percepts and affects exist “in themselves” and their “validity lies in themselves”.22 This sounds metaphysical in an outdated way. Deleuze also speaks, in the spirit of phenomenology, of a “pure being of sensations”,23 and that is astonishing, at least when we remember the impressive critique of precisely that purity practised by Hegel, Adorno and Derrida. But percepts and affects can also be grasped far less incriminatingly if interpreted against a background of aesthetics, for example Kant’s. Experiencing an affect and not only an affection, having a truly affective experience, then means cleansing oneself of everything “that adheres to our current and lived perceptions”.24 “Affect” is therefore the affection cleansed or liberated from its everyday description, liberated from what Deleuze in Platonic tradition contemptuously calls “opinion”. An affect is an affection described in an unusual and special manner. In the same way as Proust, a witness in the eyes of Deleuze and Guattari described the taste of a pastry in his famous

18  Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World madelaine moment. Kant calls this description of a sensation a “reflexive” judgement, one which does not subordinate the experience (of a particular object) to descriptive terms, but which vice versa attempts to create an adequate description of each individual experience. In this aesthetic meaning, the originally Spinozan concept of affect can then also be linked to that of force. The formula: ‘the more passive, the more active; the more receptive, the more effective’ requires fewer encumbered metaphysical premises in an aesthetic context than in the context of rationalistic system philosophy or latter-day vitalism. That is a crucial argument. For why should we solve a problem in a complex way when it could be done more simply? Nevertheless, the creation and discernment of affects and percepts is quite obviously not a privilege of film. Far more, it is valid for the arts in general. Restoring faith in the world through affective (instead of cognitive) perception is an aesthetic and not specifically a cineastic achievement.

Belief and Scepticism There remains a further, third interpretation of the quality of belief and affirmation of the world in cinema. Cinema, which Deleuze describes as that of the time-image, consists at its core in detaching vision from the so-called sensorimotor patterns—i.e. not leading visual stimulation into an action or judgement—into a motor or mental reaction. In philosophical terms, the achievement of this cinema, which Deleuze praises highly as Modern, accordingly consists in coaching us in the stance of the phenomenological epoché, as Husserl called it, and in scepticism. We learn to withhold our judgement and our action. I shall return later to Deleuze’s ponderous dependence on phenomenology.25 But how can we (re)gain faith in the world through scepticism of all things? Once again, several answers are possible. Firstly, it is revealing to observe the manner in which Deleuze interprets that sceptical philosopher to whom he dedicated his dissertation: David Hume. He even comments on the main lines of this interpretation himself, in a retrospective summary.26 He, too, assumes associationism to be the central element of Hume’s originality, but of course gives it his own idiosyncratic interpretation.27 He is enamoured by the theory of relations between sensations and ideas because relations are described as strictly exterior, and for him this means that we are dealing with a world “where the conjunction ‘and’ dethrones the interiority of the verb ‘is’ ”. Thinking in relations (in keeping with the principles of contiguity, similarity and causality) accordingly means linking things and circumstances which do not necessarily have to have an ‘interior’ connection. This is the great heritage of empiricism. “Thinking with et instead of est”.28 The world is a large ‘and’, through which everything can be linked to everything else without essentially being connected or having to remain connected. To this extent Modern cinema can thus restore our faith in the world because, on the basis of the torn inner

Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World  19 connection, it enables us to see quite plainly (or really to take to heart) the infinite connectibility of circumstances. The aspect of faith comes into play explicitly when Deleuze addresses the relation of causality. Since expressions such as ‘always’ and ‘necessary’ cannot attain their justification through the fact of experience, they express something “beyond what is given”. When people say that water necessarily boils at 100°C, they are really saying, “I believe, I await, I expect”. Faith in the sense of belief is to this extent the “the basis and principle of knowledge”. In this context faith amounts to ‘opinion’ or ‘conviction’. Its theological meaning has been completely sacrificed to the epistemological and cognitive meaning. In cognitive faith, in conviction building on experience (habit and experiment), Deleuze sees “the first act of modern scepticism”, in contrast to that of the Ancients. The second act then consists in weeding out “illegitimate beliefs” as those which do not permit any calculation of probabilities. But the crowning glory for Deleuze is the third act, which he sees as reaching completion in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: “the illegitimate beliefs in the World, the Self, and God appear as the horizon of every possible legitimate belief, or as the lowest degree of belief”. The metaphysical ideas of World, Self and God form the uncircumventable horizon of meaning for science and justified thinking and to this extent, albeit low, are themselves justified. If this theory is correct, then ultimately everything is the object of a belief, and then everything is “a question of the degrees of belief”.29 The question is thus also: which degree of belief does cinema impart? In order to answer this question, one has to return, secondly, to the concept of mimesis as make-believe. The degree of faith and conviction which is imparted by cinema, or so my corresponding theory goes, is a bipolar one: very high and at the same time very low. It oscillates between the two poles: ‘What film shows touches me as deeply as reality’ versus ‘It is only a film, not reality’. Of course, even in this context, some generalisation is necessary since the aforementioned bipolarity is not specific to film, but can be attributed to art in general. In this sense, Kendall Walton introduced the term makebelieve with reference to literary works, fine arts, theatre, film, opera and children’s games (children play at being cowboys and Indians, speak to their teddy-bears, etc.). Imagination is at the centre of all these fictions. Makebelieve is, more precisely, the use of props in imaginative activities. To this extent, works of art are just as much props as children’s toys: they are teddy bears, plastic guns, princesses’ dresses for adults (especially those who have remained children at heart). When approach works of art with receptivity, we deal with them as if they were props.30 In order to explain this bipolarity, this epistemic contrariness, it is a good idea to elaborate the structure of tension or suspension, and this is how my theory continues in this context. Aesthetic activity (which, it should be noted, involves more than imagination, more than just those notions which

20  Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World Walton attributes to it) suspends our belief and our disbelief in the world, presented to us in art and as art. Suspending both our belief and our disbelief means rendering both inoperative for a while, sometimes the one, sometimes the other. It means placing the two things in a relationship of mutual tension. And the term which has been used to denote this within the aesthetics discussion since Kant is that of playing. As is well known, Kant sees the characteristic of aesthetic judgement in positioning the two opposing cognitive powers of reason and imagination in, as he puts it, a harmonious, free, playful relationship to one another. Our ability to think in words and pictures is thus liberated from the dominance of one side or the other, whether of words or of pictures. For Kant, playing denotes a never-ending repetitive movement between a pair of opposites, which is free of coercion and thus full of enjoyment. Aesthetic harmony is nothing other than the unity of a contradiction (set in motion and revolving within itself). It means a principally balanced relationship between opposites which at any one time, however, is always unstable, a balance which can only be maintained dynamically. Aesthetic activity (especially that initiated by art) can restore our faith in the world. In Kant’s own words, it can show ‘that we fit into the world’ because in its structure of play, that is in its balanced relationship of sensuality and concept, or more precisely and once again refuting Walton in its balanced relationship of affection, imagination and cognition, it realises a dynamic and precarious harmony which permits (but no more) the conclusion of an equally dynamic-precarious harmony between the self and the world. I shall go into this in more detail in a later chapter.31 At this juncture, it is sufficient to establish that scepticism can restore our faith in the world to the extent that it is linked to the attitude of ‘doing-as-if’. The answer to Deleuze’s cineastic question would then be found at a more general, aesthetic level—not in cinematology, but in philosophy. This is also true of a third potential answer. Accordingly, ‘world’ is the term which corresponds to the autonomy of perception. In the break between movement-image and time-image which Deleuze describes, the often testified rupture (which is nevertheless incapable of erasing the impression of being a downright dialectical transition) is after all the change from an image status bound to narrative continuity and significance to one which sets the autonomy of the image free. Roberto Rossellini reveals the now autonomous optical and acoustic situation in film; Orson Welles reveals the ‘crystal-image’, an image transparent to itself which becomes its own infinitely interpretable (‘mirrored’) object. The self-referentiality introduced to the European discourse on aesthetics and poetics by early Romantic transcendental poetry and practised in the fine arts (with Manet and Impressionism) since the mid-19th century has now finally, following the Second World War, also come to dominate in film. Here Deleuze proves himself to be a typical modernistic aesthete, for whom the Modern in art acquires its autonomy from the old concept of

Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World  21 mimesis (inasmuch as this concept is gauged to imitation of nature as natura naturata) and beyond this in each type of art forming its singularity.32 In the art of Modernity, to use Foucault’s terminology in The Order of Things, the relationship between the self and the world is regulated neither via a third body (for example similarity) nor via the order of ideas or signs themselves, nor via idealistic subjectivity in its epistemological version, according to which subjectivity is the concept for a relationship to objects which is always also a relationship of the subject to itself. Only when subjectivity acquires an aesthetic version does a new, seemingly paradoxical or possibly dialectic relationship to the world emerge. It is then in turn the aesthetic dimension in which Deleuze can find a typified solution for his theoretical problems. The less the self squints at the world, so to speak, the less it emphasises the dimension of reference, the more it operates self-reference, the nearer the world becomes. Following on from Romantic poetology this is a thought which is fundamental to l’art pour l’art and dialectic philosophy, especially as expressed by Adorno. Perception is all the more world encompassing the more it circles around itself or, put more simply, the more it concentrates on itself. Aesthetic experience can to this extent stake a claim to truth by keeping its distance from other forms (common sense, morality, economics, politics, science, etc.) of experience (all the more so if these forms of experience are subject to a verdict of expiration). Deleuze is also ultimately part of this tradition insofar as his purist reinterpretation of affect means precisely such a subject-less and objectless perception, but which, as has already been said, in turn possesses a generally aesthetic and not a specifically cineastic quality. And last, but not least, there is a fourth answer. It stems from a philosopher who declared scepticism to be the central problem of philosophy and common sense: Stanley Cavell. When Deleuze, without any furtherreaching systematic intention, wrote that one has “to believe [. . .] in a link between man and the world, in love of life”,33 he gave a cue which inspired Cavell to write in the conditional tense the beautiful, equally romantic and existentialist “To live in the face of doubt, eyes happily shut, would be to fall in love with the world. For if there is a correct blindness, only love has it”.34 The significance which this sentence contains for cinema merits a whole new chapter. It will present a philosophy of cinema which does not demand redemption. Deleuze thinks under the complete influence of Christianity and Cartesianism. Therefore, he has to be and wants to be redeemed. With Cavell and all the other pragmatists, this grand gesture can be bidden farewell. Because, in line with the fundamental theory, we always have to rely on something, even if we do not know whether we can rely on it; because of the fact that in this sense we always have to believe in the world, film presents us, like every aesthetic experience, the world returned from the epistemological cleavage in the ambivalent mode of the as-if. Nothing more, as Deleuze the time metaphysicist would have it, but also nothing less.

22  Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World

Postscript: The Languages of Philosophy Philosophy is a multilingual affair. It does not just speak one language, and certainly not just with one voice.35 It moves between the languages of common sense, first-person narration, explicating science, politics, morality, religion and art, to name only the most important. It can speak in scientistic and poetic, political and moral, autobiographical and everyday tongues. And I believe that it needs these languages and ways of thinking in order to remain balanced. It needs the language of logical and scientific analysis, for example, in order to bring the necessary degree of clarity and certainty to our understanding of the world. This is particularly important for a philosophy interested in culture, for cultural studies, or cultural analysis as it is called in Amsterdam. Due to the fact that theory of this kind thwarts the established disciplines, it unfortunately all too quickly stylises itself as a smug stronghold of unorthodox thinking. Instead it should be remembered that even epistemological anarchists have to know what they are doing if they are to be more than mere dabblers, amateur artists and consumers in the global market of convictions. With theoretical self-reflection, one does know what one is doing. And cultural analysis requires this more than ever. But philosophy is more than sober clarification. Multilingual as it is, it can also borrow from literature and political rhetoric, for example. During his campaign for the presidential nomination in 1968, Bobby Kennedy often used a slightly modified quotation from George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not?”36 This quotation is also apt for philosophy. Philosophy attempts to see and describe things as they really are, and it questions why. But it also formulates speculative hypotheses, invents concepts, introduces metaphors, thinks in analogies and brings ideas into the world which not only enable things to be seen in a new way but also enable new things to be seen. ‘Why not? Why shouldn’t philosophy do this?’ To this, there are indeed some available answers, but to me they seem impoverished, emaciated and severe. Not to mention strategically unwise. Dual and multiple strategies have more chance of success under modern, contingent and pluralistic conditions. This is why speaking in several languages is a good idea. And this is also why—astonished, amused, confused, annoyed—I tune in to the language of Deleuze. It relates the dreams of visionaries, but, ultimately, I ask myself, why not?

Notes   1 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations. 1972–1990, trans. by Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press 1990, p. 4.   2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989, p. 171; regarding the following quotations cf. 171–173.

Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World  23   3 On the defence of illusion with regard to cinema, cf. Christiane Voss, Der Leihkörper: Erkenntnis und Ästhetik der Illusion, Munich: Fink 2013.   4 Karlheinz Stierle, “Fiktion”, in: Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, Dieter Schlenstedt, Burkhart Steinwachs, Friedrich Wolfzettel (eds), (eda.), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, Vol. 2: Dekadent bis Grotesk, Stuttgart: Metzler 2000, pp. 381; cf. also 410.   5 Stierle, “Fiktion”, loc.cit. p. 390.   6 Cf. Ibid., p. 410. Strangely, Stierle does not acknowledge the fourth, self-referential diversification.   7 Gottfried Gabriel, “Fiktion, literarische”, in: Jürgen Mittelstraß (ed.), Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie 1, Mannheim/Wien/Zürich: B.I.-Wissenschaftsverlag 1980, p. 649; cf. also Jürgen Mittelstraß, “Fiktion”, ibid., p. 648.  8 “There are three ways in which a new belief can be added to our previous beliefs”: perception, inference, and metaphor”. An example of the first way to change our convictions: “I open a door and see a friend doing something shocking”. An example of the second way: “If I realize . . . that my present beliefs entail the conclusion that my friend is a murderer, I shall have to either find some way to revise those beliefs, or else rethink my friendship”. An example of the third way: “The first time someone said ‘Love is the only law’ or ‘The earth moves around the sun’ the general response would have been ‘You must be speaking metaphorically’. But, a 100 or 1,000 years later, these sentences become candidates for literal truth”. To this extent, convictions are not to be changed exclusively through perception and logical conclusions. Cf. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as science, as metaphor, and as politics”, in: Richard Rorty (ed.), Essays on Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers Vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, p. 12.   9 This concept of fiction or appearance is rudimentarily elaborated by Kant, then systematically by Hegel, and subsequently by Adorno, but also within another tradition by Jakobson (Linguistics and Poetics, 1960) and Danto (The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 1981); on Kant cf. Critique of Judgment, § 51: “The poet . . . promises little and announces a mere play with ideas . . .”; on Hegel cf. for example his Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art: The “pure appearance of art has the advantage that it points through and beyond itself”, that it therefore “does not present itself as deceptive” (p. 9); on Adorno’s evidence theory of truth cf. Herbert Schnädelbach, “Dialektik als Vernunftkritik. Zur Konstruktion des Rationalen bei Adorno”, in: Ludwig van Friedeburg/Jürgen Habermas (eds.), Adorno-Konferenz 1983, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1983, pp. 72. With Marquard I shall later introduce a fifth concept of fiction or appearance, that of fundamentalisation. 10 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press 1983, p. 4. 11 Heidegger reads Nietzsche exclusively from the standpoint of Descartes and thus ascribes him to the ‘metaphysics of subjectivity’ (cf. Friedrich Balke, Gilles Deleuze, Frankfurt/New York: Campus 1998, p. 98. 12 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, loc. cit., p. 62. 13 If one does not interpret Deleuze’s cinematically reinstated belief in the world in the sense of the as-if, the only other real alternative is to interpret it romantically metaphysically, under a political sign. Then Deleuze does indeed come across as a “liberating-apocalyptic” and “redemptory” thinker who sees the political descending upon the realm of representation as a nameless, non-identifiable force, and who celebrates cinema as the avant-garde enforcer, as “a kind of Dionysic-mechanical original Communism” (Drehli Robnik, Film ohne Grund. Filmtheorie, Postpolitik und Dissens bei Jacques Rancière, Vienna/Berlin: Turia + Kant 2010, p. 53, 57, 58, cf. 61, 75).

24  Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World 14 Odo Marquard, “Kunst als Antifiktion—Versuch über den Weg der Wirklichkeit ins Fiktive”, in: Odo Marquard (ed.), Aesthetica und Anaesthetica. Philosophische Überlegungen, Paderborn: Schöningh 1989, p. 86f. 15 Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1988, pp. 168. Descartes’s God is also voluntaristic to the extent that his will is not determined, neither externally (by other—divine—forces) nor internally (by kindness or wisdom). God’s will is what permits the standards of truth and kindness to emerge, and is therefore not, as for Leibniz, defined by objective and universal reasons (cf. here Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Ethics: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006, p. 108). But Descartes translates God as an absolutely almighty God (who does not give mankind the certainty of not being a genius malignus) into the hypothesis of the genius malignus, in order then to prove the authority of the self-justification (cf. Blumenberg, loc.cit., p. 208). 16 Deleuze, The Time-Image, loc. cit., p. 170. The traditional response that the paradox of the unthinkable which needs to be thought is in fact the absurd is astonishingly ignored by Mirjam Schaub in her interpretation of the Deleuzian concept of faith, in which she is so intent on providing clarity. Cf. her book Gilles Deleuze im Kino: Das Sichtbare und das Sagbare, Munich: Fink 2003, pp. 264–265. 17 Cf. R. Fabian, Art. “Absurd”, in: Joachim Ritter (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Bd. 1: A-C, Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe 1971, p. 66 f., also for the Kierkegaard quotation. 18 Deleuze, The Time-Image, loc. cit., p. 172. 19 Cf. Manfred Frank, Was ist Neostrukturalismus? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1984, p. 419. 20 Quoted in Fabian, article “Absurd”, loc.cit. (it is a quotation from Daybreak, book 4, aph. 417). 21 Cf. Baruch de Spinoza, Die Ethik nach geometrischer Methode dargestellt, trans. with comments by Otto Baensch, Hamburg 1994, p. 110, 118, 223. 22 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. by Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson, London/New York: Verso 1994, p. 164. 23 Deleuze/Guattari, What Is Philosophy? loc. cit., p. 167. 24 Deleuze/Guattari, What Is Philosophy? loc. cit., p. 172; cf. Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, London/New York: Routledge 2002, p. 22. 25 Cf. here Ch. 5. 26 Gilles Deleuze, “Hume”, in: David Lapoujade (ed.), Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974), trans. by Michael Taormina, Semiotexte(e) 2004, pp. 162–169. 27 Deleuze once formulated his hermeneutic maxims in this vulgar manner: “I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous” (in: Negotiations 1972–1990, loc. cit., p. 6). 28 Gilles Deleuze, Dialoge, written with Claire Parnet, trans. in German by Bernd Schwibs, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1980, p. 64. 29 Deleuze, “Hume”, loc. cit., p. 166. 30 Cf. Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press 1990, pp. 11, esp. p. 67. 31 Cf. here Ch. 8. 32 Cf. here also Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, transl. by Emiliano Battista, Oxford/ New York: Berg 2006, p. 107–108. 33 Deleuze, The Time-Image, loc. cit. p. 170; see also: “If I ever stopped liking (loving) and admiring people and things (there aren’t a lot), I’d feel dead, deadened”

Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World  25 (Negotiations, loc.cit., p. 4). On his hermeneutics, the true form of reading, he says in the same place, it is “intensive” reading (p. 8), and this type of reading is also “reading with love” (p. 9). 34 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, New York: Oxford University Press 1982 (or. 1979), p. 431. 35 Cf. Josef Früchtl, “Die vielen Stimmen der Philosophie. Eine aktuelle Bestandsaufnahme”, in: Rüdiger Zill (ed.), Ganz Anders? Philosophie zwischen akademischem Jargon und Alltagssprache, Berlin: Parerga 2007, pp. 99–121; idem, Our Enlightened Barbarian Modernity and the Project of a Critical Theory of Culture, Inaugural Lecture, Amsterdam 2007, pp. 16. 36 “You see things; and you say: ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say: ‘Why not?’ ” (Back to Methusaleh, act I). For Shaw, however, these are words which the serpent speaks in Garden of Eden to Eve. This context is not viable for a politician. But by all means for a philosopher like Deleuze.

2 A Struggle Against Oneself Cinema as Technology of the Self

When Deleuze assigns cinema the power to restore faith in the world, he really means faith in “being”. In his book on cinema he is, of course, speaking in historical terms, against the background of the desperate experiences surrounding World War II, and yet the problem he addresses is a theological and philosophical one. The being which concerns Deleuze revolves around the three concepts of immanence, duration and affirmation, which he takes from Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche, the three philosophers he believes— only partly tongue-in-cheek—form a “Holy Trinity”.1 Being is without transcendence, knows no Platonic heaven or transcendent God, no divisions (into classes, types, etc.), and therefore also no hierarchies. It only knows various expressions of the One, of that all-encompassing substance which is not tangible, which instead can only be temporal, but not temporal in the usual sense (linear, infinitely divisible, infinitely stretched), but in the sense introduced to the discourse by Bergson as durée. This concept of time permits the idea that the entire past is refreshed at every moment, that it “virtually” exists. In combination with Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence, it also permits the even bulkier idea of stretching this virtual existence into the future dimension. It is then, however, eternal recurrence no longer of the same, but of the different; it is affirmation of being which is becoming. Thus, more or less, is the metaphysical framework for Deleuze’s theory of film in succinct terms. Film theorists coming after him are unwilling to acknowledge this philosophical framework in a determining function and understandably so since it entails the working off of some hefty metaphysical mortgages. Instead, it seems simpler to me to argue in favour of assuming that the faith which modern cinema is able to reinstate is a faith in the modern world, the world of Modernity and its principle of subjectivity.

Fight Club2 Shortly before the turn of the millennium, cinema acquainted us with an unprepossessing young man able to pack a punch. Jack, as he is called, belongs to a set of employees and consumers very familiar to us: a lad with IKEA furniture, Calvin Klein shirts, Donna Karan shoes and Armani ties,

A Struggle against Oneself  27 a “30-year-old boy” unable to find joy in his life. He takes hypochondriac refuge in psychosomatic illnesses, seeking all manner of advice and solace in various self-help groups, one day a skin cancer group, another day a tuberculosis group, the day after that a blood parasite group, etc. In all these groups he learns—to his astonishment and disbelief in equal measure—what so many of his generation have had to learn: that it is necessary to ‘get involved’ and then ‘let go’. And this is why in a testicular cancer group, a collection of men robbed of their testicles, robbed of their very manhood, he allows an obese hardrocker, whom he himself describes as a “big moosie with bitch tits”, to slobber all over him. His life changes when he discovers the pain which comes from physical violence. In sweaty fights with bare chests and bare knuckles, man against man, he can feel alive again: strong and active, and action provides meaning. He makes this discovery with the help of a go-getting rebel anarchist called Tylor. Tylor is his missing half, quite different from Jack and yet the same, as becomes increasingly clear. Tylor is gradually and ultimately revealed to be Jack’s alter ego, his other half, but also his alter ego in terms of clinical psychology—a schizophrenically separate self. Through him, Jack creates a second self for himself, everything which he has always wanted to be. And so in fist fights, in love (i.e. sex), and ultimately in terrorist attacks, he lives out his aggressive and murderous fantasies, projecting them onto another, onto Tylor, who in reality is the other half of himself. The sobering message here, of course, which philosophers have been teaching us since Hegel and psychologists since Nietzsche and Freud, is that all those men fighting against each other in dark alleyways and damp cellars are really fighting against themselves. Physical violence inflicted on others is directed at their own suffering, which has to be increased in order to create the experience of being alive. This type of masculinity has been well represented in cinema since World War II and the film noir, if not earlier. In this respect, Fight Club (1999)— the film referred to earlier—offers nothing new. What is new, however, is the positioning of this type of masculinity within a society dominated by therapists and feminists. Accordingly, a society which never tires of treating its own luxury ailments (sometimes also known as bellyaching), and which fills the patriarchal gap with women, brings forth an even more brutal type of masculine sadomasochistic interconnection. What is also new is the vehemence with which this interconnection blasts its way to the fore. Woe betide, so the writing on the Fight Club wall, woe betide a society, a culture, a way of life in which consumerism amalgamates as ‘lifestyle’ with therapeutic self-awareness and an absence of patriarchy! The result is a debacle. This new form of effete and feminised society will ultimately eradicate itself in a classically male, destructive act. A film such as Fight Club offers theorists of culture and society with a knowledge of psychology plenty of material with which to pursue their analyses. Philosophically it is also interesting because it condenses a theme

28  A Struggle against Oneself historically more spacious and factually more fundamental. This theme is the struggle of the self with and against itself. The self referred to here is that form of subjectivity crystallising conceptually with the start of Modernity, first rudimentarily in Descartes and then definitively in Kant. Generally speaking, subjectivity involves a unisex structure. To be sure, the form in which it has established itself to date historically, culturally and socially displays strong male coding. The masculinity celebrated in Fight Club is the late spawn of a model familiar to us for at least 200 years, which we refer to in its core as a bourgeois model. But the cultural changes wrought by feminism in the second half of the 20th century also mean that a female version of Fight Club is at least conceivable. A corresponding female figure entered the stage with mass symbolic impact in the guise of Lara Croft. Unlike its description by the rationalistic and idealistic philosophy responsible for coining the term, its disciples and subsequent interpreters, predominantly Nietzsche, have stressed an element which might be unmistakeably invested in subjectivity, but which it is loath to acknowledge due to its insolubility: namely the link between subjectivity and violence. Defined very basically, ‘violence’ means a destructive act which is physically, mentally or materially injurious, which involves force, and which yields victims, literally (people) or metaphorically (things).3 In the context of subjectivity, this victim is none other than subjectivity itself. In the history of ideas, this was clear as early as Plato. Since then we have been familiar with various formulations of that concept of self-control revolving around the (repressive, instrumental or integrative) dominance of reason over desire. However, here it is immediately apparent why a distinction must be made between violence and force; violence is always force, but force is not always violence. Applied to the concept of self-mastery, force can mean both repressive selfcontrol and non-repressive self-control.4 The latter meaning of the concept can be found in Hegel, at least according to his own self-conception. It is also Hegel who, in his Phenomenology of the Spirit, famously declares the concept of struggle to be key to the constitution of the subject, and thus also to the constitution of Modernity. Disciplining would be the right word in this context in terms of Nietzsche, Max Weber and Foucault. Ultimately, however, the question is, what right does film have to be seen as the fitting technology for this philosophically conceived subjectivity?

Subjectivity, Motion and Film Let us go back to the beginning. What is the meaning of subjectivity? The post-Kantian answer5: subjectivity is a determination of relationships. It refers to a relationship with the self, a relationship which a being enters into with itself and through which it becomes a self. More precisely, a being is a subject when it forms relationships not only with others, with objects and with other subjects but also with itself. This concept of subjectivity is distinct from a concept of the subject still defining for Descartes. As is well known, translation of the Greek hypokeimenon leads to one meaning of

A Struggle against Oneself  29 subjectum, ontologically that which is ‘underlying’, grammatically that to which predicates apply, and politically a person who is ‘subordinate’. It is true that Descartes introduced the subject-object paradigm of mentalism or philosophy of consciousness which was to lead the way in the subsequent period, and yet it was not until Kant and German Idealism that the subject became a being whose relationship to objects is grounded in the relationship to itself. What we call a self is nothing other than this (double) relationship. The philosophy of German Idealism explicated this structure. A person who says ‘I’ sees double. He or she sets up an equation which has ‘I’ on both sides. A person who says ‘I’ means I = I. The speaking ‘I’ defining itself as ‘I’ is not to be equated with the ‘I’ on one side of the equation or the ‘I’ on the other side. It is simultaneously the ‘I’ on one side and the ‘I’ on the other side. This ‘is’, this being, splits a unity, ‘I’, into a duality, I = I, which in turn, through the equation, produces a unity. In this sense, ‘I’ refers to itself. It is the name for a subject which refers to itself as an object. In referring to itself, a being is a subject which in one and the same act (referral) is also an object. ‘I’ only exists in this, or as this, referral. It is not a thing, a matter, an element within the referral, not a fixation at which one could point one’s finger, so to speak. Put another way, it isn’t an object. ‘I’ is what constitutively cannot be or become an object. It is no less than referral itself, infinite self-referral. And as such, from Hegel to Habermas, Charles Taylor, Lyotard or Foucault, it is also the (ambivalent) principle of Modernity. This brings me to film. For with infinite self-referral, referral to oneself that can never end, I have reached the tertium comparationis between subjectivity and film: motion. The self is pure motion, a kind of mental perpetuum mobile. Here the concept of motion is, of course, used in two different ways, on the one hand physically mathematically and on the other hand ontologically metaphysically. And yet the comparison is more obvious than the semantic difference seems to suggest. For as soon as we grasp the ontological-metaphysical concept of subjectivity as pure motion, we cannot help but try to imagine it.6 Replacing the concept of motion with another physical, and yet also ontological-metaphysical concept, one could also say the self is pure becoming. Motion, or becoming, is also, however, a key— albeit not the sole—peculiarity of film. Motion, as ascertained by the now legendary film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, is the first external phenomenon to be a “natural for the screen”. The first of the movements “which can be considered cinematic subjects par excellence” is for him the chase, in which a “revelling in speed” is displayed.7 The defining of film through motion, or more precisely instrumental-mechanical and perceived, objective-illusionary8 motion, can be observed more or less from the outset, however. The impetus which Henri Bergson provided by grasping the mechanism of thinking in pejorative intention as ‘cinematographic’ was especially momentous. As perception, cognition and language carve out moments in space, so to speak, in order then to reanimate them on the temporal axis through projection, so too the apparatus of film projection takes still images or photograms and sets them in motion. Accordingly, film

30  A Struggle against Oneself repeats a ‘natural’ illusion and is analogous to consciousness: consciousness is (like) a cinematic apparatus; to (in) both, motion appears as artificial, as something added to the motionless individual image. Gilles Deleuze maintained this analogy, but reversed its meaning. The image of film is motion, according to his theory. The relationship between motion and image is not external. In this sense, film conflicts with our natural, objective illusion. It rather serves to demonstrate, so the assumption continues, what is generally claimed by an adequate epistemology and metaphysics found in the teachings of Bergson and Spinoza, namely that images, perceptions, are not on the side of the subject and the consciousness, and are therefore in the company of the objects of this world.9 As is well known, Deleuze is an ambivalent source regarding the definition of film as movement, however. In a Hegelian figure of thought, his movementimage is revoked in the time-image. According to this broad assumption, Italian Neorealism in the late 1940s, French Nouvelle Vague in the late 1950s and German Autorenkino in the late 1960s translated the cinema of the movement-image, the cinema of more or less natural stories with a linear structure and a hidden camera, into a cinema of images with a direct presentation of time, no longer understanding time as linear, but as a Bergsonian (or Heideggerian) layering of the modal times present, past and future. In this theory, paradoxical since Augustine, time is a simultaneity of the three modal times, a parallel unity of past, present and future. If this theory that, firstly, Modern cinema after World War II reveals the true essence of cinema and, secondly, this essence consists in the instantaneous presentation of (a certain conception of) time, fails to convince, then once again there is good reason to view motion as the more attractive principle of film. Those trained in analytical thought will, in contrast, tend towards a far more cautious and appraising definition. Noël Carroll is a role model who springs to mind here.10 According to his starting point, film belongs to the class of moving images, and he seeks to define this class. This intention may at first appear strange and self-contradictory since in his works Carroll always advocates the assumption of an anti-essentialistic stance in response to the question: ‘What is cinema (actually)?’ But there Carroll directs his criticism most particularly at so-called medium essentialism, which claims that every art form possesses its own medium, and that the medium prescribes what is to be done with it. In contrast, a more modest approach assigns to film some essential, general characteristics. Carroll lists five: firstly, a film image, like a painted picture or a theatrical scene, is a detached display, a perspective removed from the body of the observer; the places shown in a painting or a film are not physically accessible for the observer (at that moment). Unlike a painting, however, a film, secondly, belongs to the class of things in which the impression of movement is possible at all times, in which the possibility of movement is technically always available. Employing the type/token distinction, it can, thirdly, be added that the tokens which reify individual performances of a work, for example Pulp Fiction, are generated in the case

A Struggle against Oneself  31 of film through templates and not, as in the case of theatre, through interpretations. Fourthly, each individual theatre performance is a work of art in its own right, whereas this is not the case with an individual film showing; the latter is far more a material template, which in turn is a token, the actualisation of a film type (for example Pulp Fiction). Finally and fifthly, a film image, like a painted picture, is two-dimensional. Carroll grasps these five features as necessary, but not the sole conditions of film. Following this line of argumentation, those small picture books known as flicker books, where you thumb the pages in order to create the effect of moving pictures, can be subsumed under the concept of film, as can a work of art which looks like a black rectangle but is actually a film in which nothing is visible. These are rather sophistic and idle examples from the point of view of a philosophy which, following Critique of Judgement or Philosophical Investigations, pleads for an understanding of definition based on the formation of exemplary or prototypical concepts. If, for the subsumption of certain elements into a class, not a bundle of features nor even a common feature is definitive, but instead a candidate best representing that class (for the class “crime”, an organised theft is more exemplary than the stealing of an apple; for the class “cup”, a small bowl-like drinking vessel of finest bone china with a handle is more prototypical than a plastic beaker), then for the class “film”, not only is a feature film more exemplary than a flicker book but also the element of movement provides a better definition than token-type variations. Moreover, Carroll himself expresses solely through his use of language the particular significance assigned to movement in the case of film (also in the case of video). A feature film is more than anything else a moving image. Everyday language aptly calls it a motion picture or moving picture. So let us stay with that: movement is what holds film together, if not at its innermost, then, ultimately, all in all. It might not serve as a sole criterion or absolute principle, but it is certainly more than just one necessary criterion among others. Firstly then, and somewhat trivially, it assumes a superdeterminate position, creating the impression, maybe not necessarily for the trained analyst but certainly for the lay observer, that it were more than merely a determining factor. Secondly, as I shall explain in more detail later, it can be argued that film is a gestic art form which translates (back) into movement what photographically and pictorially has been captured in a still image.11 Thirdly, movement, motion, action, is surely the determining criterion of popular film, in other words that type of film which essentially shapes our understanding of film overall.12

Film, Violence and Subjectivity This perspective also and finally facilitates the link to the dimension of violence. The critic Leslie Fiedler succinctly describes this link as follows: “Violence appears to me to be inseparable, simply from the concept of cinema

32  A Struggle against Oneself as the art of movement. A film without violence is an anomaly”. With reference to David Griffith’s Birth of a Nation he adds, “The most natural way to make a film is to make a film about a battle, a conflict”.13 The depiction of conflict and destruction is the best contentual expression of the central, formal aspect of film, motion. As mentioned earlier, for Kracauer a chase scene, visually accelerated time, is the object of film par excellence. It is the most natural way to make a film because motion (through space on a surface) corresponds to the very nature of film. The ontology of film (in perception, in being perceived) is movement, is the objective illusion of movement generated on a surface. There are different cinematographic ways to make movement graphic, to be sure: by shooting a physical body, a material substance, which changes its position in space within a fixed system of coordinates; in the extremes of slow and fast motion; or by changing the observer or camera perspective by means of a panning shot. The attention paid to types of movement, we can go on to claim in a second step, is not founded solely in evolutionary biology, but is also dependent on culture. For the Western culture of Modernity we can then, in a third step, claim that if the eye wishes to be entertained, if attention paid to movements is not to dwindle in the spectators, then the strategies named by Kracauer and Fiedler promise success: getting at least two physical bodies to move in relation to one another, either chasing after each other, or fighting against each other. These movements explode, so to speak, either by acceleration or by mutual attempt to render inoperative and, to this extent, they inflict violence. If we then add to the mix the fact that these movements are filmed not statically, but with a camera which is also moving, presentable in an extremely fast sequence of cuts; that in other words movements as the object of film and as the medium of film coincide, then it is actually possible to speak of a violence inherent to movement: it exerts a force on the objects and on the perceiving subject, in both cases more or less aiming at destruction. For a theoretical explication of the connection between film and violence, we can refer to authors such as Walter Benjamin, Paul Virilio and Marshall McLuhan. I would also briefly like to highlight an allusion made by Jean-Luc Nancy. At one point he speaks of the “mobilisation of the regard” (mobilisation du regard) in connection with cinema.14 By this he means that no other art form mobilises the regard as much as film does, that no other art form forces us—to the same degree—permanently, literally, to alter the direction of our gaze, and in so doing also to stay contemplatively and mentally in motion. This mobilisation is the reaction of the spectator to the movementladen structure of film. The word ‘mobilisation’ also has a military meaning, of course. Just as a nation adjusts to the demands of war and prepares its troops for operation, so too the regard adjusts to the demands of film. And these demands include the fact that film proceeds dictatorially, like no other art form except music. This dictatorial determination, it should be noted, is formal and not contentual; it is the perceptional sequence in which a

A Struggle against Oneself  33 film is received, not its interpretation, which is determined. Film forces the audience to take a look—a sequence of looks (like the sequence of sounds in music). One has no choice but to follow this sequence unless—an ever available option—one ‘drops out’ and ceases to look altogether, in an act of freedom which is part of the ‘game’ or ‘contract’ spectators enter into with a film, as with every work of art. What the spectator perceives (sees, hears, physically senses) is permanently in flux. As Benjamin says in his famous essay on The Work of Art, this is precisely what in its formal sense the “shock effect” of a film is based on, its “tactile” quality.15 In other words, this is precisely what the violent impact of film is based on, independently of its content and genre. Of course, these three arguments should not be overrated. Benjamin’s assumption is based on an impact which we now know from experience wears off with use. Nancy’s mobilisation du regard does not pay nearly enough attention to that possibility of ‘dropping out’ implicit in any game or contract. The quasi-military power of the cinema to mobilise, to manipulate the regard only functions within a framework in which the spectator assumes the second, equally important part. As much as film is determined by the moment of movement, as much as it thus corresponds to the structure of subjectivity as perpetual motion, and as much as it is ultimately and intrinsically bound to the moment of violence through that of movement, motion alone cannot determine the experience of cinema or, put another way: the cinematic dispositif. Far more, the latter involves the subject qua spectator—and in philosophical terms that means never being fixed, founded on the conceptual structure of perpetual motion—being able to presume a freedom not to be mobilised, either for a short time by closing his eyes, or decisively by leaving the cinema or pressing the stop button. Finally, my own description of movements which in their force strengthen, accelerate or hinder should not overlook the fact that at the same time the violence emanating from these movements is specifically dependent on other techniques of presentation (such as cutting and editing, static or moving camera work, etc.). There will always be a difference between a Hollywood action film, a hard-core splatter film and a film by Marguerite Duras or Theo Angelopoulos. Here I shall bring our thoughts back to the self. The structure of subjectivity is answerable, namely, to a comparably violent dynamic. In order to be a self, the self must remain in motion. It cannot help but to try to grasp itself. And it cannot help this because it has to constitute itself as a unity if it is to comprehend itself as a self at all, and this will never be more than an attempt because this unity is, and ultimately must remain, unachievable. Achievement would mean a standstill, and as soon as the motion within the self (= I) were to stand still, it would, following the paradigm of subject philosophy, no longer be a self. The self can, therefore, be compared to a dog which would like to catch its own tail, or to a dancer who would like to catch up with herself. And the cultural, technological and aesthetic medium

34  A Struggle against Oneself best suited to presenting this whirlwind of self-pursuit is film, ideally as a cartoon or using computer animation. In Hegelian terms, the contradiction which is the self—a seeking and a fleeing movement, the unity of a duality—expresses itself most strongly at the moment when one self meets another self. At this point, the struggle for recognition described in Phenomenology of Spirit begins.16 Recognition is the result of a struggle, a movement back and forth, in which each subject tries to grasp the other as an object and to destroy it in its autonomy; in other words, in which each subject tries in an external action to do what it has to do for internal reasons, namely to comprehend itself as the division I = I, to objectify and unify itself. The medium best able to present this complicated movement, outwards against others and inwards against the self, actually as movement—i.e. within a story and the spatiotemporal, physical actions it entails, is film—albeit with some strong competition from literature. Fight Club as a novel can also be exciting and to a degree convincing, but those scenes in the film in which Jack (Edward Norton) hits himself in the face, where autodestruction openly shows itself and no longer has to hide behind destructive acts against others, reveal the strengths of film as the medium of an idealistically conceived, Modern and violent subjectivity. In grasping itself via the principle of subjectivity—which it does by declaring autonomy, the judging of each individual subject, as the norm—Modernity also calls its own that contradiction inherent to the principle, namely coercion, fighting and violence. And since any attempt to overturn this contradiction has to be dynamic, cinema offers itself up as a suitable medium both technically and aesthetically. In its moving images, the subject of Modernity recognises itself in a telling, evident, shocking manner. In short: film is the aesthetic technology most appropriate to subjectivity as the principle of Modernity. Seen like this, film had to be invented in order for the principle of Modernity to look at and experience itself, in order for the subject to attain an adequate medium of graphic and sensual-affective self-reflection, of aesthetic self-reassurance and the violence intrinsic to the subject. Or, put another way, if film had not been invented, the children of Modernity would be without their most important mirror. Nowadays, this assumption inevitably leads to at least two questions. Firstly, whether film as an aesthetic-technological medium does not hark back to a conception of the self which, following the linguistic turn, either no longer stands up at all or only in a modified form. As is well known, German Idealism pursued Descartes’s mental representation model, according to which the word ‘I’ stands for a representation (repraesentatio), albeit a very special one, one which represents nothing (sensual), one to which we cannot refer directly, but only regressively analytically. From this, 20th century linguistic philosophy infers a procession from the substantivistic self to the personal pronoun ‘I’, analysing the use of this expression and concluding that this expression is “not a concept, not a proper noun, not a label for something (including a representation), but a singular term with an

A Struggle against Oneself  35 exclusively indexical function”. The meaning of the word ‘I’ is to be found not in the fact “that it denotes, but that it indicates”.17 This question can be answered in two ways. On the one hand, in subject philosophical terms the critique based on language philosophy does have to be taken seriously, and yet it is patently not capable of completely replacing the consciousness philosophy programme. The works of Manfred Frank stand for a critique of the critique. On the other hand, in film philosophical terms it should be emphasised that the limits of the mentalistic-idealistic conception of the self can also, and especially, be demonstrated using film, bringing its indexical character to the fore. As the following chapters will reveal in more detail, film does not primarily show something by pointing towards it in the manner of a sign, but by creating a presence—a sense which cannot be fully expressed in propositions. The showing itself does not fully merge into its apparent message, precisely because of its underlying movement (which is full of tension). To this extent, film shows in a sense which is not representation logical, but gestic. In the words of Kant, it indicates something, namely that those who refer to themselves by saying ‘I’ can also refer to the ‘world’ as something which is ‘fitting’ for them. The second question of what happens when film relinquishes its pronounced aesthetic-technological function to another medium, as is clearly emerging in the digital 21st century, can also be answered in two ways: either the new technological medium assumes in a modified form the function of film, the old medium, or the very establishment of a new medium is evidence that the principle of subjectivity, which was best expressed by the old medium, is in itself antiquated, and that a transition to a new principle has taken place, for example intersubjectivity or integration, as well as to a new epoch which has yet to be named. Film conforms to the development of modern art in general, so much is true. Art is modern to the extent that it bids farewell to the classisistic pose, static beauty and timeless form. Once again, it was Hegel who provided the first approach here, with his emphasis on the fleeting, ephemeral and hasty during the dissolution of the Christian-Romantic art form. But the first true spark came from Baudelaire (“La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable”), culminating with a celebration of the “belezza della velocita” in Marinetti’s “Manifesto del Futurismo”.18

Action! These deliberations are, of course, largely abstract, analogous and speculative. But if we differentiate the leading concepts, in my case the concepts of subjectivity, Modernity and film, in other words if we perform that test which is always required when scrutinising assumptions from the arts and cultural sciences, then they become more specific and more tangible. And then, in my opinion, it becomes possible to demonstrate plausibly that

36  A Struggle against Oneself certain film genres shape the philosophically showcased principle of Modernity, namely subjectivity, each in its own different way19: the western does this classically, with the hero as the founding figure; crime stories and thrillers do it romantically, with the criminal, preferably a maffioso, and the cop or the private detective as agonal, torn figures; the science fiction film does so postromantically, with the cyborg as the embodiment of the creative potency of the self; the comedy ridicules the classical, romantic and postromantic claims of the self; the melodrama, that counter model to the western and the crime story, addresses the subjectification of women or, more generally, of sensitive souls; and, finally, the action film, which absolutises the moment of movement, of that dynamised activity more or less inherently important to all of the aforementioned genres and which, as already hinted at, offers itself as a demonstrative candidate for my theory that film as such is the aesthetic medium most appropriate to Modernity and its principle of subjectivity. In more precise terms, my assumption would, therefore, have to be that the action film is the aesthetic medium most appropriate to Modernity.

Subjectivity and the Auditory Sense The Modern subject recognises itself sensually in the moving images of the cinema not only because they are images, however. Both historically and structurally, cinema privileges visual perception—cinema developed from photography and cannot possibly forego vision—but it is not reduced to it. Far more, and increasingly through the ages, it has come to rely on a specific synaesthetic recognition. Not all, but certainly several senses are at play: in addition to the visual, in particular the auditory and haptic senses. They, too, are specifically linked to the dimension of violence. And it is due to this specific synaesthesia that I referred earlier to graphic and sensualaffective self-reflection. Cinema endeavours to enable the self (the general, historical-apriori self within every individual) not only to watch itself but also to experience itself. Cinema provides the subject with a technology (a technical device) for generating self-affirming sensory states. An essential element of this self-experience is the auditory.20 The crystallisation of a hegemony of the visual in occidental thinking is an assumption which is partly due to the cultural scientific discussion in recent decades. This assumption is usually referred to in a negative context and rightly steers attention towards a dimension of Western culture with significant import. However, in this context we should not forget that this criticism is not actually directed at vision itself, but at a particular version of vision. All those highly regarded philosophical critics of ocularcentrism, with names like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein or Foucault, accompany their critiques of one dominant form of vision with alternative ideas regarding a different form. The critique is therefore by no means in toto.21 That said, there are some very good philosophical, anthropological and psychological

A Struggle against Oneself  37 arguments for attributing far more weight to the hearing, perceiving and indeed experiencing of sounds (voices, shouts, noises) than has been the case under the simple primacy of the visual to date. Against a philosophical background of, for example, Heidegger and Critical Theory opposing a bracketing of the sense of vision, of distancing observation and of instrumental action, the passive element of hearing, the recording and the receiving, the leaving of the other (thing, person) in its singularity, can be emphasised. Vice versa, a tendency towards bondage, towards submission inherent in this element is also well known. Anthropologically, we are reminded that it is the task of hearing to stabilise our body in space, to keep it upright, to enable it to have three-dimensional orientation and, especially, to experience an allround certainty concerning also those rooms, things and events which we cannot see, especially that going on behind our backs. While the eye seeks out and finds its prey, the ear listens out for that which preys on us. The ear is the organ of fear.22 Physiologically and psychologically, this orientation/stabilisation function can also be plausible. “We begin to hear before we are born, four-anda-half months after conception (. . .) Throughout the second four-and-a-half months, sound rules the solitary queen of our senses”.23 The psychoanalytical interpretation paradigm, also in conjunction with the experience of cinema, accordingly revolves around sound in analogy to the mother’s voice during pregnancy. But to draw from this the conclusion that sound should be assigned primacy in the cinema experience would be to overemphasise these more recent findings. Dolby sound systems have certainly had a huge impact on cinema, and directors like David Lynch have drawn their own technical-aesthetic consequences from this development and attempted to reverse the balance of power between picture and sound. Nevertheless, cinema without pictures is unimaginable, whereas cinema without sound is not. The assertion that violence and brutality in action films are conveyed “primarily” through sound24 also goes too far. Sometimes this assertion is true (the opening sequence of the war film Saving Private Ryan is a famous example). But there are also films, thrillers—The Birds, Target, The Blair Witch Project—which do away with sound as a harbinger of fear. Generally speaking, for “primarily” read “also” (violence is also conveyed through sound). And when it all gets too much, we are still far more likely to close our eyes than to cover our ears. This mention of action films brings me back to the conception of the self in German Idealism and the Romantics. We said that the action film seems to be the genre most suited to representing the dynamic structure of movement of the self. In the present context, stressing the level of sound and hearing in the cinema experience leads, philosophically speaking, to the question of how hearing and subjectivity might be linked.

38  A Struggle against Oneself The response of Jacques Derrida to this question, as we remember, was extremely critical. Accordingly, Western philosophical thinking in its entirety is arranged logo- and phonocentrically around (objective) reason, preferring the general over the specific, order over chaos and spoken over the written word—the voice over the pen. Husserl in particular, with his teaching of the ideal meaning set apart from linguistic expression, lends the voice a complicit proximity to idealisation. Speaking means to hear oneself, to realise oneself as a thinking self, without leaving any material trace. The self-hearing and speaking self is the perfect realisation of that self-thinking thought which German Idealism puts through the mill as reflection structure. At the same time, according to Derrida, it is an expression of metaphysical presence, for alongside the mental presence of the meant object, the mental presence of the meaning subject must also exist. During an act of designation, the subject must realise the meaning of the sign. And yet this presence of meaning, as Derrida has repeatedly stressed, is characterised by a difference, for every act of designation is determined by the prescribed rule systems of language. Pure presence is impossible.25 Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical approach to this theme is very similar to Derrida’s. He gently sounds out the meaning of words and, as stands to reason, especially French words, in this case the words entendre and écouter. The former, in English to hear, also means comprendre, to understand, to receive something said, whilst the latter, écouter, in English to listen, means perceiving a sound without (yet) understanding its meaning. More precisely, in his attempt to show what is specific about listening, Nancy is guided by the expression être à lécoute, to be all ears. The concept which creates the unity and the difference between the two words for auditory perception is that of reference. Hearing in the sense of comprendre heeds meanings, and meaning consists in referral, in a relationship to an object, or more precisely, according to Nancy, in a “totality of referrals: from a sign to a thing, from a state of things to a quality, from a subject to another subject or to itself, all simultaneously”. Listening in the sense of écouter heeds sound, but sound “is also made of referrals”: it spreads out in the space in which it resounds, while at the same time it resounds in the listening subject. This context of referral, this “space of a referral”, Nancy then defines “in a very general way” as “the space of a self, a subject. A self is nothing other than a form or function of a referral: a self is made of a relationship to self . . .”26 Completely in line with German Idealism, Nancy defines the subject as an infinite relationship to the self, as a referral of something (je, English I) to something (moi, English me), which only exists within this referral and which is nothing outside of it. The self, as the last argumentative step goes, is then, however, “precisely nothing available (substantial or subsistent) to which one can be ‘present’, but precisely the resonance of a return (renvoi)”. This presence is not a stable being, but like sound “a coming and a passing, an extending and a penetrating”.27 In parentheses, Nancy also hints at the

A Struggle against Oneself  39 moment of violence in hearing, “Visual presence is already there, available, before I see it, whereas sonorous presence arrives—it entails an attack, as musicians and acousticians say”.28 Nancy leaves it there. To elaborate, especially for the experience of cinema, it would probably be necessary to take recourse to the aforementioned anthropological and psychological assumptions. In his manner of argumentation, Nancy is, of course, notoriously vague and tends to use language associatively; he is more in love with word games than with substantial arguments. But he does permit a binding of the sensuality of auditory perception to the concept of the subject adopted by Idealism, without being frightened off by the cudgel of logocentrism. If one were to pursue his hints and develop them further, as well as unravel them, cinema could probably be described once more as the affect technology of the subject, as a technology which enables the modern subject in conflict with itself to have multifarious sensual experiences of the self.

Notes   1 Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, p. 26. May quotes Deleuze and Guattari (Spinoza is “the Christ among philosophers”), in order to conclude: “If Spinoza is the Christ among Deleuze’s philosophers, then Bergson is the Father, and Nietzsche the Holy Ghost”. (ibid.)   2 This film previously served as a minor example in my book Josef Früchtl, Das unverschämte Ich. Eine Heldengeschichte der Moderne, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2004, pp. 113; English version: The Impertinent Self: A Heroic History of Modernity, with Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009, but here without referring to that movie). I also refer to this book as a matter of course in the following assumption regarding Modernity as a struggle of the self with and against itself. (The English quotations are from IMDb website.)  3 Cf. Wilhelm Heitmeyer, “Gewalt”, in: Stefan Gosepath/Wilfried Hinsch/Beate Rössler (eds.), Handbuch der Politischen Philosophie und Sozialphilosophie, Vol. I, Berlin: De Gruyter 2008, pp. 421–425.  4 Cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.  5 Cf. Christoph Menke, “Subjektivität”, in: Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, Dieter Schlenstedt, Burkhart Steinwachs, Friedrich Wolfzettel (eds), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, Vol. 5, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 2003, pp. 734, with reference to Rudolf Rehn, “Subjekt/ Prädikat”, in: Joachim Ritter/Karlfried Gründer (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 10, Basel/Stuttgart 1998, pp. 433–437, and Brigitte Kible, “Subjekt”, in: Ritter/Gründer (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, loc.cit., pp. 373–383.   6 Or at least Kant cannot help it, in a passage where he compares motion as the “act of the subject” with motion of “an object in space”: “We cannot think of a line without drawing it in thought; we cannot think of a circle without describing it; we cannot represent the three dimensions of space at all without placing three lines perpendicular to each other at the same point; and we cannot even represent time without, in drawing a straight line . . ., attending merely to the action of the synthesis of the manifold . . .” (Critique of Pure Reason, B 154, p. 258).

40  A Struggle against Oneself   7 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, introd. by Miriam B. Hansen, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997, pp. 42–43.  8 Cf. the chapter “The Myth of Illusion” in Gregory Currie (ed.), Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995, pp. 19–47.   9 Cf. Oksana Bulgakowa, “Film/filmisch”, in: Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, Dieter Schlenstedt, Burkhart Steinwachs, Friedrich Wolfzettel (eds.), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, Vol. 2, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 2001, pp. 445; Gilles Deleuze, The Movement-Image. Cinema 1, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986, pp. 22, pp. 56. 10 Cf. Noël Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image”, in: Noël Carroll (ed.), Theorizing the Moving Image, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, pp. 49. 11 Cf. here Ch. 7. 12 Cf. Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment, 2nd edition, London/New York: Routledge 2002, p. 65 (Ch. 9: “Action!”). 13 Quoted in: Joe Hembus, Das Western-Lexikon, expanded new edition by B. Hembus, München: Heyne 1997, p. 642 (our transl.). 14 Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Évidence du film/The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami, Bruxelles: Gevaert Publisher 2001, p. 26 & 27. 15 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, in: Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Selected Writings, Vol. 3: 1935–1938, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, & Others, Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press 2002, p. 119. 16 Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977, pp. 111 (the famous chapter on “Lordship and Bondage”). 17 Herbert Schnädelbach, Was Philosophen wissen und was man von ihnen lernen kann, Munich: Beck 2012, p. 98 (our transl.). 18 Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I, trans. by T.M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988, pp. 597; at this point Hegel extols the genre painting of the later Dutchmen; Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, in: Claude Pichois (ed.), Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. 2, Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 1976, p. 695; Filippo T. Marinetti, Manifesto del futurismo, Milano: Mondadori 1973 (Or. 1909); Katharina Münchberg, “Der fliegende Pfeil—Paradigmen zu einer Poetik der Bewegung in der französischen Moderne”, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2010), pp. 69–90. 19 I attempted to demonstrate this for the genres of the western, the crime story and the science fiction film in The Impertinent Self: A Heroic History of Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009; on the melodrama cf. Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury. Anmerkungen zum Familienmelodram”, in: Christian Cargnelli & Michael Palm (eds.), Und immer wieder geht die Sonne auf: Texte zum melodramatischen Film, Vienna: PVS 1994, pp. 93–130 (Orig. Engl. publ. 1972); Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, Yale University Press 1979; ibid., “Melodrama, Body, Revolution”, in: Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, & Christine Gledhill (eds.), Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, London: British Film Inst 1994; Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears. The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1990; Hermann Kappelhoff, Matrix der Gefühle—Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit, Berlin: Vorwerk 8 2004. 20 On the haptic sense cf. Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener, Filmtheorie zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius 2008, pp. 137; cf. also Benjamin’s comments earlier on the tactile impact of film.

A Struggle against Oneself  41 21 Cf. Gary Shapiro, Archeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2003; on the more critical literature on this topic cf. David Michael Levin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, Berkeley: University of California Press 1993; ibid., The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment, Berkeley: University of California Press 1999; Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press 1993; Wolfgang Welsch, “Auf dem Weg zu einer Kultur des Hörens?”, in: ibid., Grenzgänge der Ästhetik, Stuttgart: Reclam 1996, esp. pp. 241. 22 Mirjam Schaub, Bilder aus dem Off: Zum philosophischen Stand der Kinotheorie, Weimar: VDG 2005, p. 76 (our transl.). 23 The film score composer Walter Murch, quoted in: Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press 1994, p. VII; on the psychoanalytical paradigm in the (especially feminist) cinema theory cf. Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener (eds.), Filmtheorie zur Einführung, loc.cit., pp. 180, 182. 24 Elsaesser & Hagener, Filmtheorie zur Einführung, loc.cit., p. 182. 25 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2011. 26 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. by Charlotte Mandell, New York: Fordham University Press 2007, p. 7–8. 27 Nancy, Listening, loc.cit., pp. 12–13. 28 Nancy, Listening, loc.cit., p. 14.

3 The Evidence of Film and the Presence of the World Jean-Luc Nancy’s Cinematic Ontology

The link which Nancy outlines between subjectivity, the acoustic sense and the experience of presence will not be pursued any further here. Instead I shall follow Nancy in his exploration of an epistemological concept which is marked by the visual sense and crucial to the experience of presence: the concept of evidence.

The Post-postmodern Film Since the 1980s, the term ‘Postmodern’ has stood for an articulatedly vague (sadly, often also a vaguely articulated) awareness that Modernity has reached its end. Very simplistically, in architecture Modernity meant a functionalistic manner of construction quite literally without embellishment and, in the manner of Adolf Loos, even declaring ornamentation to be a crime; in literature it meant the now classic authors Joyce, Kafka and Beckett, amongst others; in philosophy and ultimately in the arts and social sciences, it meant a foundation of theories on major concepts such as reason (and thus substantiation), meaning and emancipation. The term ‘Postmodern’ has also been willingly received by film. As in architecture, the idea here, too, is to play with all manner of styles, as well as to play with narrative patterns, as in literature, and especially to play with reality and fiction, an up-to-date twist on out-of-date Modernity. Postmodernistic narration is revealed in the last major philosophical theory of film to date (and there have been but few), namely that of Deleuze. It is immediately clear in the titles of his two volumes on cinema. The history of film leads from the “movement-image” to the “time-image”. And not only that. This transition is triggered by a “crisis”—its telos emerging as “necessary”. After the Second World War, Italian Neorealism introduces what then expands to become a general tendency: the presentation of “purely optical and acoustic” situations taking the place of “sensorymotor” situations; seeing (faltering without purpose) and perceiving taking the place of (purposeful) acting; life emerging in its “nakedness” (its “crudeness and brutality”, as Deleuze adds).1 If the sensory-motor system in human beings no longer functions, they lose their orientation; they no

The Evidence of Film  43 longer have a purpose and are no longer able to act. An analogy to this (and what would Deleuze be without his proliferate analogies?) is what happens in film subsequent to the Second World War. The time-image lends dominance to confusion, confusion between a subjective and an objective description of processes, between true and false, between the virtual and the prevailing, between the past, present and future. Time dominates as the dimension of the possible, the becoming, the changing. This confusion had already surfaced to a degree in the movement-image, but only with the timeimage does it become constitutive. Accordingly, the crisis of cinema necessarily leads to a cinematic dissolution of attuned differences. Regarding this reconstruction of cinematic history, the Hegelian background in which it aligns itself, the historicophilosophical pattern of a necessary development driven on by crisis, is initially surprising. Surprising for a philosopher who, like all decent Postmodernists, has been considered a declared anti-Hegelian since his book on Nietzsche. In his book on cinema, the father figure he disputes with, the “cinematographic Hegel”, is to be found in Eisenstein.2 It is a dispute which, to stay with the image, is a confrontation, however, two opposing figures turned towards and not away from each other. What is interesting in this context is Deleuze’s specific accentuation on the history of film. As in the other areas mentioned, in architecture, literature and philosophy, it is also true that in film the term ‘Postmodern’ is very catchy, but actually fails to satisfy. Deleuze himself avoids the word for good reason. His description of a post-Classical, decentred film dominated by time provides a more precise definition when accentuated in critical emulation of the philosopher who has to be the ultimate father figure of French philosophy: Descartes. Just as Descartes reduces being (which in his opinion always has to be being created by God) to two substances, namely the res cogitans and the res extensa, and in so doing fundamentally exacerbates the problem of how one is to get from the one to the other, from the ego-cogito to the world, so too has the connection in cinema between the human being and the world become broken since the mid-20th century. These two events occur for opposing reasons, however. While Cartesian-rationalistic philosophy comprehends the relationship between subject and world according to the model of a sharp, gnostic dualism and a classical episteme of representation, to use Foucault’s terminology, vice versa in time-dominated film this dualism disappears. But the effect for the subject is the same in both cases: it loses (its relationship to) the world. In this situation, film is seemingly left with just two possibilities: it can take the disappearance of the world and its classical film, in which the meaning was always crystal clear and either, in typically Modern fashion, lament it as a loss, as a forfeiture of meaning or, in typically Postmodern fashion, make it the object of an eternal game. It can thus permanently analyse the doubt surrounding (the relationship to) the world, either driving it on to the point of desperation or playfully, and as successfully as possible, turning it into something positive.3

44  The Evidence of Film Jean-Luc Nancy now appears to have added a further variation to this list. It should be noted at this juncture that Nancy’s essay on film is a casual endeavour and not a polished piece. In the tradition of the essay, it can be seen as an attempt to take individual observations and make the general seminal.4 He believes that, by emphasising the positive side of precisely this loss of a stable assignation of meaning, of this indistinguishability of distinctions, film has liberated itself from its post-Classical obsession with the disappearance of the world, not in a playfully hybrid, endlessly recombining and deconstructivisit sense, but in a phenomenological sense. A world which no longer has any meaning because the relationship between it and its subject is no longer guaranteed is meaningless in two senses of the word: it no longer has (a stable) meaning and it has no (stable) meaning yet. It is, therefore, also an entity which still has to find its meaning—still has to invent it. A world without (any) meaning would be a world in itself. It would be a tabula rasa, an empty page which offers itself up (to writing, to ascription of meaning), a space devoid (of meaning) which opens. It is such a meaningless world searching for meaning which film provides. This is unequivocally demonstrated, in Nancy’s opinion, by the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Kiarostami is “a privileged witness to all this, seeing that cinema renews itself, that is to say it again comes close to what it is, and yet always brings it back into play”5 This means that cinema has an essence which Kiarostami reveals afresh, albeit not without simultaneously—and hear we hear Hegel stir—putting this essence at stake (remettre en jeu). What wishes to be preserved has to keep proving itself, what wishes to remain the same has to have the courage to be able to lose itself. The central concept which is to underpin this postulation is already indicated in the title of his book on the topic—namely, evidence. Nancy wishes to demonstrate the Evidence of Film.

Evidence Like the meaning of any philosophical term, the meaning of ‘evidence’ depends on the epistemological positions assumed. The position adopted by Nancy is first and foremost clearly a definition of evidence as an objective form of truth finding and not merely a subjective form of truth acknowledgement. According to this fundamental and therefore also crudely philosophical distinction, evident is the ‘self-revelation’ of facts and not just the ‘sight’ of them or an ‘insight’ into them. Evidence is one of the criteria of truth, not just one of the pragmatic constituents of argumentation. Especially the phenomenology of Husserl has recourse to this first concept of evidence. Evidence involves something which (intentionally) refers to a consciousness, ‘directly’ or ‘beholding’ or ‘originally experiencing’ the present. In both cases, the objective and the subjective case, it is generally true with evidence, just as with the concept of intuition, that its opposite number is a

The Evidence of Film  45 discursive, conceptual, methodically ordered cognition.6 Nancy uses a wellknown metaphor for this. Evidence always comprises a blind spot within its very obviousness. . . . The blind spot does not deprive the eye of its sight: on the contrary, it makes an opening for a gaze and it presses upon it to look7 As a form of truth finding, the experience of evidence only makes a look, a perspective possible by first ‘giving’ what is to be experienced, making it into a ‘given’, presenting it. As a form of truth recognition, it leads to an ‘insight’, to the cognitive acknowledgement of a matter, but leaves in the dark the manner in which one obtains this insight. The method is its blind spot, which cannot be seen because it cannot be rendered the object of conceptual determination. In this second sense of truth recognition and argumentation theory, a piece of evidence can be performatively generated but not methodically proven.8 As has already been mentioned, as far as Nancy is concerned it is clear that his concept of evidence is dependent on the phenomenological-ontological tradition. It centres on something which “shows itself”, not something which refers (to something else) and thus has an indicative function. The phenomenological approach is antisemiotic. In this regard, what it calls epoché means a parenthesis of the referential and indicative function. One perceives something for the sake of its perceptibility, not because of what it might mean. One looks at things, one perceives them, simply “because one would like to know what they look like”, to know how they—perceptively—are. Then, and precisely then, is one interested in their “presence”.9 Heidegger, who in § 7 of his Being and Time defines the task of phenomenology from the standpoint of an analysis of self-revelation, permits himself a considerable indistinctness, as well as an emphatic overtone. This stems from the fact that he capitalises on a grammatical peculiarity of Ancient Greek which makes a threefold distinction in the “genus verbi”, entailing not only active and passive but also medium. The verb phainestai, which is the root of phainomenon, or phenomenon, means neither “show” in the active voice nor “be shown” in the passive voice, but “self-show” in the medium voice. One can thus reject the suggestion which rears its head in languages like German that the self-showing entity implies in its reflexive gesture a kind of subject, an anonymous subject, upon whose favour or mercy it depends as to whether the perceiving and recognising subject perceives it at all. Selfshowing is neither an activity nor a passivity.10 It amounts to nothing other than the perceptible equivalent to interest-free interest, namely an interest in what can be perceived. It is difficult to deny a link to the lack of interest found in Kantian aesthetics. For Kant this is contemplation for the sake of contemplation,11 for Husserl and Heidegger it is contemplation for the sake of what can be contemplated.

46  The Evidence of Film Within the Kantian tradition, however, a recognition of evidence is conceivable which might not be discursive, but which is conceptual and methodic, and this is “intuitive knowledge”.12 The latter explains an object in terms of its existence, in other words without creating any external prerequisite for the recognising (determining) term. Kant finds examples of this, under the guiding concept of purpose, in the sphere of the organic and the aesthetic. For example, when one creates the term ‘lancelet’ for a fish or gives an explanation for an activity (a ‘movement’) such as ‘the bird is collecting twigs because it is building a nest’, one subordinates the parts to be explained to a whole. At least in the fields of biology and aesthetics, there is accordingly a non-discursive, yet conceptual and methodic knowledge to be found. Of course, this requires further qualification, at least as far as Kant is concerned. Firstly, his analysis of aesthetic judgement (I shall leave out biology) also shows that here, on the one hand, there can be no talk of method; aesthetic judgements are excellent examples of why evidence can only be generated performatively; we “want to submit the object to our own eyes” and assume at the same time the “idea” of a “universal voice”, the “agreement of everyone”, and thus we expect confirmation of our own judgement “not from concepts, but from the agreement of others”13 “We solicit everyone else’s assent”, as Kant also says, attributing to our judgements “exemplary” validity.14 On the other hand, in an aesthetic context the concepts only vaguely act as an indicator. We are concerned here with knowledge, but a knowledge which cannot be definitively defined. If, in Kantian terms, one wishes to speak of an evidence of aesthetic judgement, then this is certainly different to that of the ‘I think’ kind. This would be the second qualification required with regard to Kant. In the synthetic original unity of apperception, “the manifold of representations in general”, I am only conscious, as Kant puts it, “that I am”.15 Thinking the thought ‘I think’ implies thinking merely in terms of thatness. In this sense, evidence restricts Kant to the thought that I am (thinking). Yet this thought remains, as Kant also ascertains, “altogether different from the knowledge of the thing by itself”. Kant therefore separates truth (knowledge) and evidence (certainty). Where there is evidence (in the thought that I am—thinking), no (objective, referring to an object) knowledge takes place; vice versa, knowledge lacks immediate or unconditional certainty.16 To return to Nancy, metaphorical thinking and gliding along chains of significants is a style well practised in Modern French philosophy. Nancy is no exception. His composition about film is an essay which is allowed to drift in a circular current of association, yet revealing three centres: the look, the movement and the real (world).

The Look, the Movement and the Real The look (regard), at least for those who think in French, is a particular “reference” (égard) to the world.17 Films, which cultivate this (out)look, “are here as eye openers”, are “the budding and opening of a look in the

The Evidence of Film  47 middle of ordinary turbulence”.18 With this celebration of the look and the gaze, Nancy is not alone among 20th century French philosophers, although he is somewhat on the periphery. Probably with the exception of MerleauPonty, there are few within his tradition who are not at least ambivalent in their attitude towards the postulation that seeing is a privileged mode of cognition. Generally speaking, his teachers and colleagues are united in their blackening of occidental ocular centrism.19 And that is also true of the most significant theorists of the look after Merleau-Ponty: Sartre and Lacan. Nancy’s book on the Evidence of Film comes across as completely unimpressed by this. This raises the question, of course, as to whether his stance is well founded. At least for his book on film, this question cannot be answered in the affirmative without a measure of reproach. Nancy favours etymological reasons for his stance. Returning to French, the look (le regard) is linked to “guarding” (la garde) and to “looking after” (prise en garde). The inspiration here in both form and content is Heidegger who, alongside Derrida and Bataille, has had the largest influence on Nancy. As Heidegger wrote in his Letter on Humanism, the human being has ‘to guard’ the truth of Being. The word ‘respect’, Nancy continues, is also linked to the look, this time in Latin; respectus means “looking back”, “rear view”. And yet, as Nancy also adds, it is not the look in itself, but the “rightful look” which entails respect for the observed real, and this look is in turn distinguished as “openly attending” (ouverture), as an openness for the observed, which knows no distinction between defining (active) and being defined (passive).20 The ontology of seeing therefore implies, not at all surprisingly, an ethics. Nancy thus puts the case vociferously for a look which, in Heideggerian terms, is ‘aletheic’. Heidegger himself, of course, not only famously criticised the occidental forgetting of time, the translation from theoria to contemplatio, the repression of hearing and binding (to being); he was also the philosopher of ‘circumspection’ (Umsicht) and ‘clearing’ (Lichtung), of a seeing which permits encounters and which at the same time unconceals and conceals.21 This ontological meaning of looking is pushed to the foreground by Nancy almost ceremonially, without any further justification. Those wishing to know more need to consult books such as Le sens du monde and Être singulier pluriel, in which Nancy explains the meaning of the concept of the world, also the political-global world, amongst other things by referring to Heidegger’s ‘there is’ (es gibt) analysis, of being as a giving entity—and thus with reference to what critics of philosophical language soberly refer to as an ‘existence operator’), one of the different meanings which the word ‘be’ can have which therefore must not be allowed to be made absolute. A second question remains, and this one cannot be answered by resorting to a different book, namely that of why film alone celebrates the look and not other art forms, in particular painting or photography. Nancy insists that film is the art form of the look, and that it can only be distinguished

48  The Evidence of Film from other art forms via this characteristic.22 His closer description shifts the emphasis to another characteristic of film, however, that of movement. Kiarostami’s work is certainly an excellent example of cinema which exudes calm, demands attention and grants its subject matter both space and time, thereby also affording it an opportunity to recede, like the “young girls behind their black veil”, a cinema which even a contemplative idler like Peter Handke can really appreciate. Handke also immediately sees that in the centre of Kiarostami’s films there are landscapes as well as streets and paths, detours which one has to take—the running hither and thither of the human beings.23 Nancy turns this into an ontological assumption. In an age in which art has become manifold, in which video, performance art, body art, installation art, etc., have joined the show, the arts themselves also sustain an “inner multiplicity”. This is true of “some” art forms at least, certainly of film, consisting as it does of images, music, speech and movement.24 For Nancy, movement, the kinetic in the cinematic, is the being of cinema (“l’être du cinema”). Of course, for an ontologist, especially for a contemporary of Deleuze, whom Nancy quotes in this context, movement is not taken to be the object of film, something it “represents”, but as something it presents, that it itself, ontologically speaking, is. “Being”, according to Nancy’s ontology of difference, “is not something; it is that something goes on”, it is, with its moments and events “that it continues  . . . that it discontinues continuously. Like the images of the film”.25 Film is—or to be more precise: in its own way—being, it is like being: continuous discontinuity or discontinuous continuity. For Nancy, then, being is characterised by a twofold quality, by continuity and discontinuity. Movement is “presence, which is really present”, which means, to stay true to the phenomenologicalontological comprehension, “coming before”, coming before any conceptual definition; it is something which is not given as defined, but first and foremost as something awaiting definition. Presence means that which is not (yet) defined as present. It is an “opening”, which is clearly not (only) meant to refer to space, but (also and especially) to time, an ouverture.26 What opens is a space full of possible meanings—a textual web which only takes shape with time and with various assignations of meaning. In the case of film and cinema, with its peephole atmosphere, the look is therefore an opening because it “mobilises” something,27 it makes something move, in a multitude of senses: the sequence of images (corresponding to the mechanical sequence created by the equipment); the changing sequence of views (dictated by different camera shots); the concomitant thoughts and emotions; the being “carried away”, “driven, lifted away” (emportement) is thus a necessary effect of cinema.28 In this sense, for Nancy, cinema has to be comprehended as the art form of the look, as the art of mobilising, as the mobilisation of the look (mobilisation du regard).29 And in this sense, one can agree with him. No other art form mobilises the look as much as film does, no other forces us so hard to keep changing our direction of gaze and to remain in contemplative (and mental) motion.

The Evidence of Film  49 It is due to the dimension of time that Nancy, in line with the entire Romantic tradition since the 19th century, defers the recognisability of presence issue, generally explained using evidence, to the specifically timerelated mode of suddenness. For him, too, the epistemology of presence is connected to the dimension of the moment. In this context, Nancy also prefers to argue etymologically. Evidentia, as he reminds us, came to Latin as a translation of the Greek term enargeia, referring amongst other things to the “powerful and instantaneous whiteness of lightning”. It means something which “can only be taken on the run, in flight (au vol), snapped and stolen”, a twofold meaning provided by the French language.30 Derrida’s criticism of Husserl’s privileging of the moment (in which objects come to awareness in their ideality) as complicitous with the Western metaphysics of presence therefore does not have the desired effect in Nancy’s case because, with the fleetingness of the moment, being permanently withdraws. Intensity as a mode of perception, and immediacy as a mode of cognition ultimately correspond to this time mode. Evidence is not “what makes sense”, but “what is striking” (ce qui frappe), and this “strike” (le coup) “gives a chance and an opportunity to meaning”.31 Sense and meaning are assignations which only become possible, which only open up, once entities are given, are ‘there’ in their meaninglessness, which at the same time is a freedom from meaning. This ‘there’ is, or in the language of Mediaeval philosophy quodditas, precedes as pure That, as pure facticity, as the existence of conceptual definition, and only changes into quidditas when it is defined in its being-what, in its essence. The generation of evidence ultimately serves to prove this prepredicative dimension. The force of evidence imposes and carries away something more than a truth (plus qu’une vérité): an existence. That is the make-up of the most famous and obvious piece of evidence in Western philosophy, Descartes’s, consisting in an ego sum.32 It should, of course, be noted here that the evidence of the ego sum is a specific one. The premise ‘I think’ is namely “self-evident”; that means it does not have to “be made evident through another sentence or through a special reflection”, as is the case, for example, in the sentence, ‘The author of the book Trust in the World thinks . . .’ In order to make this sentence evident, one first has to implement other knowledge, whereas an I, whenever it thinks, can immediately comprehend that it thinks (is thinking).33 From the specific evidence of the ego sum, where the being (of the thinking entity) directly follows from the thinking, it does not follow that being, or existence, follows from all evidence. Secondly, we should remember that even if the claim of existence is reliant on evidence, the latter is without epistemological value. The judgement of evidence does not contain a statement about anything because, being direct, it cannot refer to an object. This objection to the Cartesian cogito was formulated by Moritz Schlick.34

50  The Evidence of Film A sense which cannot be mastered is also what is meant by the third central term—namely what is real. Real is what has consistency (consistance) and resistance (résistance).35 ‘Consistency’ is not meant here, of course, in the logical sense, but once again in the literal (Latin) sense: real is what opposes the theoretical-conceptual and pragmatic-changing intentions of subjects as a restive entity. In this interpretation, it belongs to the basic stock of occidental philosophy, most recently influenced, as in the case of the look, by Lacan. It is understandable that Nancy here refers to him in the affirmative because ‘the real’ stands, like Kant’s thing-in-itself, for what proves to be resistant to all symbolisation. It is presumably this meaning which caused Nancy to speak regarding cinema of the ‘real’, and not of the ‘world’. The latter has a primarily intersubjectivistic meaning. Nancy’s interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of existence insists that that which Heidegger only hints at—being-there is, as being-in-the-world, essentially a being-with—must be taken seriously and not be allowed to be pushed half-heartedly back into a secondary function. For human beings, to exist means to coexist. Ontology and social theory cannot be separated here. ‘World’ is correspondingly not something which is external to existence, but that which we ‘have always’ shared. ‘World’ is another term for ‘coexistence’.36 But both terms, the thing-in-itself and the real, are, as we should not forget, “even more puzzling than God”, or more precisely that God “to whom we can ascribe particular qualities”.37 To this extent alone, Nancy’s ontology is also coloured by theology and metaphysics, and increasingly the more so he addresses a different conception of God—so to speak—and poetically revolves around his objectless object of philosophical desire. Even Nancy pays homage to the negative-theological fundamental figure of recent French philosophy who is in love with paradoxes, even he skilfully plays the whole range of amour foux, which cannot live with the metaphysics of the absolute, but cannot live without it either. But he is far less a happy prisoner of this system of thought than Derrida (who of course does not categorise himself as a negative theologian),38 or Adorno in the German context. Like Deleuze and Badiou, he searches for the positive, for ways out, for loopholes and gaps, and his names for these are ‘evidence’, ‘presence’ and ‘the real’ or ‘world’.

Some Unclarified Points In order for the positive to fulfil its function, it must of course be determined, at least sufficiently. Surrounding it in a fog in which the believers blunder about semiconceptually might make these people feel blessed (and the relevant circular discussion groups demonstrate this), but it disappoints those who crave more detail. In this context, I see several unclarified points in Nancy’s deliberations. First of all, to be fair, he should point out that determination of the essence of film as mobilisation of the look was not his own discovery. This honour

The Evidence of Film  51 goes to Erwin Panofsky who, in his essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures”, names as the two specific achievements of film the “dynamisation of space” and the corresponding “spatialisation of time”. Accordingly, the fixed place that a spectator assumes in his cinema seat should not hide the fact that, as an aesthetic spectator, unlike at the theatre, he is “constantly moving”, “his eye identifying with the lens of the camera”. And unlike on the theatre stage, “not only are bodies moving within space, but space itself is moving, approaching, receding, turning, dissolving and reforming”.39 The mobility of the look is one of space. In the context of film, seeing particularly means seeing and experiencing a permanently changing space which is bound to time. Film provides a mobile, picturesque experience of space, a mobile experience of space through pictures, the experience of a virtual mobile space.40 Secondly, there is an astonishing one-sidedness to Nancy’s definition of the essence of film. He comprehends ‘mobilisation’ of the look only in its literal sense. He ignores its military sense. And that is surprising in such a linguistically sensitive thinker. And yet this sense addresses an aspect undeniably central to film theory, namely that, with the exception of music, film proceeds more dictatorially than any other art form, imposing a look upon its recipients just as music imposes a sequence of sounds.41 Its alethic, beingpresenting and thus truth-unconcealing dimension is not to be separated from its concealing dimension, not only in the ontological-philosophical sense made famous by Heidegger but also in the crudely manipulative and thus political sense. One could, of course, place a different accent on this intricate context, but then with Adorno. Film would then be, alongside music, the exemplary medium for the tense equilibrium between passivity and activity in knowledge, for the subject is forced by the medium to leave its own intention and open itself to the intention-less.42 Ultimately, one would have to establish that one cannot have one without the other: no knowledge without the risk of manipulation. Nancy’s denial of the ambiguity behind the term mobilisation is in line with a third objection, or at least a third unclarified point. According to Nancy, evidence, “in the image’s strength”, also harbours “a shelter from the image’s ability to betray”.43 Nancy unfortunately leaves this as a peripheral comment, when on this point we would like to know so much more. The ‘ability of the image to betray’ consists in projecting something as being which is not. And the question is how evidence is to provide ‘shelter’ from that. For it can only lead to the experience that something is, not what it is. And yet in cases of betrayal, the what, the false or deceptive defining of an (undefined) given, is usually crucial. But even remaining at the level of pure presence, the problem of distinguishability is still there. Even the experience that something (undefined) is there can be doubtful, an experience expressed in the question: ‘Is there anything there (at all)?’ or in the statement: ‘There seems to be something here’. The ‘ability of the image to betray’ then consists in the fact that it arouses an appearance of presence.

52  The Evidence of Film The age-old question in this case is therefore whether and how to control appeals to evidence or, put another way: whether and how evidence can be distinguished from apparent evidence. Nancy does not even acknowledge this question. His only fleeting contact with it is when he, as already quoted, speaks of the ‘correct’ look, necessary in order to testify respect for the real. Fourthly, the relationship between presence and representation, between experience of evidence and articulation of sense, remains unclarified. Nancy’s ontology, influenced by Heidegger, leads us to expect a precedence of presence and evidence over secondary representation and sense. In fact, Nancy at one stage describes the relationship as one of tension and suspension, which can be interpreted as a relationship in which both sides have a mutual negative reference which overrides their one-sidedness, or put another way: a relationship in which their mutual reference might be negative, but it is also necessary, and through which they generate a tension (in both a structural and an emotional sense). Cinema “stretches and hangs between” (est tendu et suspendu) the world of presence and that of representation; it is (literally) stretched like the “screen” which Nancy (figuratively) observes to be a “sensitive membrane”, a skin mediating between two worlds, the presenting world and the representing world, doing so in such a way as to leave both in the balance.44 Seen in this way, cinema is not merely the ontological celebration of presence, but the aesthetic celebration of a tension-generating and suspended difference—between presence and its re-presentation. In this sense, Adorno and Derrida surely describe the evidence of the aesthetic (not only cineastic) experience more appropriately than Nancy. And this, of course, also has epistemological consequences. The most important would be that a pure, preconceptual, sense-free experience of evidence would have to be characterised as an empty structure, or more precisely that we might have to presuppose the presence of (objects and events within) the world, but that we cannot keep experience of them/it sense-free. The last unclarified point also concerns the status of the evidence experience. Nancy switches back and forth between an ontological and an aesthetic conception. Initially it is clear that evidence is aimed at proving the existence and presence of phenomena. But in his essay on film, Nancy explicates and develops this ontological understanding within an aesthetic context, rendering it unclear how these two levels relate to each other. Like every art form, film is a “reconfiguration of experience and therefore of the world”.45 Experiencing the world (having it presented) through film is a different matter from experiencing it through another art form or from the outside, beyond art altogether. But with Nancy, the dimensions of experience flow into one another. When, for example, he describes “the constants of the landscapes” in Kiarostami’s films as “alternating rhythmically in wide shots which sometimes stand still and sometimes seem to be fleeing from a fast car”, for him they are not “accompanying an action”, but “wide presences” (larges présences).46

The Evidence of Film  53 This levelling out of the differences inevitably leads, however, to an objection based on another conception of aesthetic experience inspired by Kant, Schiller and Dewey. Evidence, the power of conviction and persuasion within an aesthetic experience, on no account has to be due to an immediacy or a directness, but on the contrary can be due precisely to an interactive, even playful relationship. Accordingly, evidence is a feeling of immediacy, based on a dynamic of mediation, a movement which becomes attuned to our various dimensions of experience, an attunement which, following that of the Kantian tradition, is not only to be understood metaphorically, playing between more than two (experiential) dimensions, in other words revering no dualism as it can be established in Kant the aesthetician. Aesthetic experiences47 contain a cognitive dimension which especially emerges in an analysis of the work and the historical contextualisation; an ethical dimension which touches the moral-universal dimension, but in particular builds upon the capacity of the imagination (finding an answer to the question of how one wants to live, of who one wants to be, requires imagining oneself to be somewhere beyond the lived reality); and, finally, aesthetic experiences naturally contain a sensual dimension in two meanings of the word: receptive-presentative and hedonistic; one has to perceive things oneself, with one’s own senses, and to perceive them with a certain desire. Aesthetic evidence is accordingly an experience which is conceived not pre- but transdiscursively, traversing the various dimensions of experience and remaining beyond all discursive commitment. In the attempt to expound it discursively, it serves as a guide to the perception and experience of others and can thus, as an experience of evidence, itself become a rational motive for others. But it should be sufficiently clear that in the case of an aesthetic experience the presentist is only one dimension of several. To this extent, there cannot be a cinema of pure evidence or presence. In my book Ästhetische Erfahrung und moralisches Urteil, I presented this conception under the epithet integrative aesthetics, which I had borrowed from John Dewey. It is integrative in the transdiscursive sense mentioned earlier. With Dewey and against Schiller’s forced holistic tendency I would, however, like to emphasis that an aesthetic experience does share all the elements of other forms of experience (for Dewey these are scientific-cognitive, moral-practical and—somewhat vaguely—emotional experience), but it lends these elements a different weight, namely something which enables them to become dominant (not autocratic, it should be noted), and which does not enable the other forms of experience to become dominant: the purposelessness, the value of the experience, in other words the process of experiencing itself, in which every element and not only, or particularly, the last element counts, namely the result.48 In this context, Dewey’s pragmatism catches up with the traditions of Kant and German Idealism, which showcase in the European context what has congealed to a formula in popular Asian doctrines of salvation, namely that the journey is itself the destination.

54  The Evidence of Film Finally, I would like to raise a minor doubt concerning the ‘evidence machine’ named cinema or film. It is a doubt regarding whether film per se can present the world and rely on this ontological power. I would like to substantiate this by turning to Un long dimanche de fiançaille by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. This film is about a long-awaited reunion with a much-loved person, in other words an extremely affective experience of physical-personal presence. When the young wife, standing in a sun-drenched garden, eventually sees her husband again, whom she has traced down using detective work following the First World War, and whom she never once believed dead, the camera retreats almost hastily. Off-screen the voice of the narrator keeps repeating the same sentence: “Elle le regard, elle le regard”. This look belongs to her alone, not to us, the viewers. The camera has no images to convey this look, le regard in this emphatic, paradisically enchanting sense, this wordless and endless gazing. It is not suited to this type of presence, the presence of a happy ending. And Jeunet portrays the end of Un long dimanche de fiançailles as a happy one, even if it is only a reunion for the woman and for the man a first union because he can no longer remember. But he says the same words to her that he spoke at their very first meeting: “Ça vous fait mal?” Does it hurt when you walk? (She is limping slightly.) And we can take comfort in this as an indication that from his side the love story will recommence. Happiness, or the overwhelming experience of presence, is not describable and not depictable. What must be insisted upon is differentiation: ‘presence’ is not always ‘presence’; it is revealed in different forms, not all of which are suited to pictures and cinema.

Notes  1 Deleuze, The Time-Image, loc.cit., p. 3.   2 Deleuze, loc.cit., p. 210.   3 Cf. Laurent Kretschmar, “Is Cinema Renewing Itself?” in: Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 15, (July 2002).  4 Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Evidence du Film/The Evidence of Film, Bruxelles: Gevaert Publisher 2001, p. 9.  5 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, B.I.-Wissenschaftsverlag loc.cit., p. 13.  6 Cf. Jürgen Mittelstraß, Art. “Evidenz”, in: Jürgen Mittelstraß (ed.), Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, Vol. 1: A-G, Mannheim/Wien/ Zürich: B.I.-Wissenschaftsverlag 1980, pp. 609f.  7 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 13 & 19.   8 Wolfgang Stegmüller considers any attempt to solve the evidence problem argumentatively, whether it be positively or negatively, non-viable. “All arguments for evidence represent a vicious circle, and all arguments against it represent a selfcontradiction”. Arendt Kulenkampff comments: “Anybody wishing to answer positively the question of whether something can per se be evident by finding reasons to support this, has to presuppose achievement of the proof envisaged; and anybody wishing to answer negatively has to resort to evidence in order to refute it and in so doing contradicts himself”. (Article “Evidenz”, in: Hermann Krings, Hans Michael Baumgartner & Christoph Wild (eds.). Handbuch philosophischer Grundbegriffe, Vol. 2, Munich: Kösel 1973, p. 434; our trans.).

The Evidence of Film  55  9 Lambert Wiesing, “Zeigen, Verweisen und Präsentieren”, in: Karen van den Berg & Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (eds.), Politik des Zeigens, Munich: Fink 2010, p. 27 (our trans.). 10 Cf. Hilge Landwehr, “Zeigen, Sich-zeigen und Sehen-lassen: Evolutionstheoretische Untersuchungen zu geteilter Intentionalität in phänomenologischer Sicht”, in: van den Berg&Gumbrecht (eds.), Politik des Zeigens, loc.cit., p. 45. Admittedly, even Landwehr has difficulty explaining this complex medium status. 11 The pleasure in an aesthetic judgment is merely “contemplative” and contains an “inner causality”—namely, the state of “subjective purposiveness of a presentation” and “to keep [us in] the state of [having] the presentation itself and [to keep] the cognitive powers engaged [in their occupation] without any further aim. We linger in our contemplation of the beautiful because this contemplation reinforces and reproduces itself”. (Kant, Critique of Judgment, § Hackett Publishing Company: Indianapolis/Cambridge 12, p. 68). 12 Cf. Sebastian Rödl, “Die Wirklichkeit des Begriffs: Ästhetische Evidenz als Form begrifflicher Erkenntnis”, in: Ludger Schwarte (ed.), Bild-Performanz, Munich: Fink 2011, pp. 203–209. 13 Kant, Critique of Judgment, loc.cit, p. 59–60 (§ 8). 14 Kant, Critique of Judgment, loc.cit., p. 85–86 (§ 18 & 19). 15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. by Paul Guyer & Allan Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 259 (B 157). 16 Cf. Kulenkampff, “Evidenz”, loc.cit., p. 433, there, too, the Kant quotation from Critique of Pure Reason (B 158). 17 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 15 & 39. 18 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 17 & 23. 19 Cf. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press 1993. 20 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 39. 21 Cf. in summary Jay, Downcast Eyes, loc.cit, pp. 269. 22 Cf. Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 19. 23 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 39; cf. Peter Handke, “Die Geschichte von Hossein und Tahereh. Eine Annäherung an den iranischen Cineasten Abbas Kiarostami”, in: ibid, Mündliches und Schriftliches. Zu Büchern, Bildern und Filmen 1992–2002, Frankfurt/M. 2002, pp. 66. 24 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 23. 25 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 61. 26 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., pp. 29. 27 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 15. 28 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., pp. 51. 29 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 27. 30 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 33 & 61; cf. also p. 43; on the Romantic tradition cf. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Plötzlichkeit. Zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1981. 31 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 43. Intensity is also in Kant a mode of perception or feeling, the apprehension of which is not successive, but momentary (cf. ibid., Critique of Pure Reason, B 207 etc., pp. 290). 32 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 45. 33 Cf. Dominik Perler, René Descartes, Munich: Beck 1998, p. 143. 34 Cf. Kulenkampff, “Evidenz”, loc.cit., p. 432. 35 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 17; cf. p. 19, 39. 36 Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. by Robert D. Richardson & Anne O’Byrne, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000.

56  The Evidence of Film 37 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell 1990, p. 120. 38 Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Différance”, in: Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Allan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982, pp. 1–28. 39 Erwin Panofsky, “Stil und Medium im Film” (1947), in: Erwin Panofsky, Stil und Medium im Film & Die ideologischen Vorläufer des Rolls-Royce-Kühlers, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1999, p. 25. 40 Cf Martin Seel, “Thirteen Statements on the Picture”, in: ditto (ed.), Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. by John Farrell, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2005, pp. 182, with references not only to Panofsky but also Noël Carroll. 41 Cf. here Ch. 2: on the connection between film and violence. 42 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Fragment über Musik und Sprache”, in: Theodor W. Adorno (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 16: Musikalische Schriften I-III, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1978, pp. 254.; on film cf. Aph. 93: “Intention and Reproduction”, in: Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life; cf. here Josef Früchtl, “Tell Me Lies, and Show Me Invisible Images! Adorno’s Criticism on Film—Revisited”, in: Discipline Filosofiche, anno XXVI, numero 2, 2016: “Theodor W. Adorno: Truth and Dialectical Experience / Verità ed esperienza dialettica”, pp. 47–60; once again, Benjamin appears to be terminologically and epistemologically stimulating for Adorno in this context, cf. his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in: Gesammelte Schriften Vol. I.1, esp. p. 216.: “Truth is an intentionless existence made up of ideas. The proper attitude toward truth is, accordingly, not a belief in knowing but an immersion and disappearance into it. Truth is the death of intention”. 43 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 35. 44 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 57. 45 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 21. 46 Nancy, The Evidence of Film, loc.cit., p. 57. 47 Cf. Josef Früchtl, Ästhetische Erfahrung und moralisches Urteil: Eine Rehabilitierung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1996, pp. 92, pp. 102. 48 Cf. John Dewey, Art as Experience, New York: Perigee Books 1980, p. 36–37, 55.

4 Cinema as Human Art Rescuing Aura in Gesture

Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up Recalling the films of Abbas Kiarostami the term “humanism” may cross our mind with a gentle obtrusiveness. Quite without pathos, of course, but also without embarrassment. It may touch us, in metaphorical terms, like a warm summer breeze. Indeed, with reference to Kiarostami’s film title The Wind Will Carry Us,1 this could be expressed even more poetically: the humanism carries us, like a warm and pleasant warm wind in the Summertime. This is astonishing for philosophers born in the 1950s, since we were forced to hear, in the 1960s, from Louis Althusser and others that Marx could only analyse capitalism in the way he did because he abandoned the humanism of his early works, this is astonishing for a philosopher of my generation. At the same time, we were told by Michel Foucault that human beings and the humanism guiding them are only the effect of discourse and disciplinary technique. Following on from this, at the end of the 20th century, a dazzling posthumanism took root from various schools of scientific thought.2 Philosophically, the latter originates from Martin Heidegger’s famous Letter on Humanism from 1946 which, in a general mistrust of all ‘-isms’, formulates a particular mistrust of the concept of humanism. Heidegger sees it as an integral part of the perfidious Western conception of metaphysics which undeviatingly addresses being, and in so doing forgets. Certainly, he also holds fast to the special status of man: that type of being which Heidegger describes as “ek-sistence”, as having an open attitude to whatever shows itself, only appertains to man. But, as a consequence of this, “what is essential is not man but Being” that shows itself.3 We are thus concerned with a non-metaphysical humanism which, according to one of the formulations now famous from Heidegger’s Letter, makes man the “shepherd of Being”, makes men those where “Being comes to language” in the way that they let themselves “be claimed again by Being”. That is humanism “in an extreme sense” or, as Heidegger also says, “A curious kind of humanism”.4 On Heidegger’s part this is to an extent, as is well known, a reaction to the no less famous Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul

58  Cinema as Human Art Sartre, also from 1946, in which Sartre concentrates existentialism into the formula: l’existence précède l’essence, existence precedes essence. Designing and producing an object necessitates that its essence, in the sense of the totality of its features, first be determined before it can be materialised. Since, in the case of man, the same thing could only be claimed if a God of creation were presupposed, here we may assume that the essence of man has not been determined. Far more, man is what he has made himself into.5 Existentialism is, therefore, an empty humanism, so to speak, one not filled or determined contentually or conceptually—a humanism which is inwardly permanently specifying itself. In addition to these two positions, the explicitly humanist and the posthumanist, philosophy does of course have a third position to offer, specifically the philosophy following on from the Second World War. Its most famous representative is probably Theodor W. Adorno. Like his opponent Heidegger, he expressly accentuates linguistic expression, expression which clings to things mimetically, but for him this implies a thinking towards man in a psychoanalytic, and in that sense also naturalistic way. Here humanism grasps itself as somatic materialism. Man, in his (social) humiliation and his (physical and mental) vulnerablity, forms the undercurrent of an ethical and political utopia. For Adorno humanity means “the power of nature to remember its own as infirm”. Precisely because the Dialectics of Enlightenment turned this definition into a formula, the word “infirm” must be emphasised here. The power to consider oneself as nature means to consider oneself infirm. As Alfred Schmidt once did, taking up the early works of Marx, Adorno can indeed in this sense be esteemed as a “philosopher of real humanism”.6 Turning now to Kiarostami’s Close-Up as exemplary of a cinema of humanity, it is not the philosophers named earlier who are the primary guide, however. Some of what I touched upon in connection with Adorno, Sartre and Heidegger can certainly also be found in Kiarostami. But the heading of this chapter refers to a term which gained huge significance through the studies of Modernity and, in particular, of film by Walter Benjamin: the concept of aura. This concept might seem to many to have already been interpreted ad nauseam, and yet I cannot help returning to it once more in the light of a film by Kiarostami. The humanity of this cinema, or so it appears to me, namely consists in rescuing the aura, presented in an art of gesture. Close-Up begins with a scene which is strongly evocative of the gestic character of the entire film. It is an arrest; but very different from the arrest scenes familiar to us from movies made in Hollywood or TV police dramas. Three men, two of them policemen, the third a reporter, get into a taxi. Like the driver, the cinema audience wonders why the police do not have any police vehicles at their disposal. It also seems strange that a reporter is to witness this act of executive power. But since we are in Teheran, we assume with routine nonchalance—“when in Rome . . .”—a certain generosity regarding the way regulations apply to Iranian colleagues. The reporter is

Cinema as Human Art  59 sat next to the driver, and his constant stream of chatter gives us our first information about what is going on. It transpires that they are on their way to arrest a conman who is pretending to be Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a famous and real-life Iranian filmmaker (albeit not famous enough for the taxi driver to have heard of him, who freely admits to having no interest in films). The conman is staying with a family which he has duped, amongst other things, with a promise to give them a role in his latest film. But nobody knows what the real intentions of the conman are. The reporter is hoping this story will offer him a “once-in-a-lifetime-story”, a front page in the style of Italian investigative journalist Orianna Fallaci, his greatest role model. This strange carload of people sometimes has to stop and ask the way, but eventually they find the right house at the end of a cul-de-sac (which the reporter initially finds strange: a once-in-a-lifetime, story-taking place in a cul-de-sac?). The reporter rings the doorbell and then disappears inside the house with the two policemen. Surprisingly, the camera does not follow them. We, the audience, are left outside with the taxi driver, feeling like dogs tied up outside a butcher’s shop below a friendly sign saying, “Sorry, no dogs allowed”. So instead, we watch the taxi driver as he turns his car around, switches off the engine and gets out to stretch his legs. Above his head, an aeroplane tears through the clear blue sky. The taxi driver walks past a large pile of autumn leaves which also contains newspaper and discarded roses. He picks them up and then kicks a bright green aerosol can. It rolls noisily down the road. We watch him like this for nearly 30 seconds, which in a film can seem to take ages. And then what appears to be the action starts. The policemen come out of the house with the offender, whom we can hardly see. They drive him back to the police station, while the reporter suddenly realises he needs a portable tape recorder and so goes to ask at the neighbouring houses. When at last he is given one—seemingly normal practice in Teheran—he runs down the street and kicks the same aerosol can, hard. The camera waits for a moment, as if wishing to see where the can will roll to this time. Only now does the film title appear: Close-Up. The opening scene, which has run for about ten minutes, has come to an end. What constitutes gesture in this scene?7 In a narrower sense, gesture means any physical expressive movement performed with the hands, arms or head; in other words, a movement of the body with a communicative intention. In a broader sense, all (intended and non-intended) physical movements could be counted as gestures, including facial expressions, mental ticks, nervous movements, even religious and ritual actions (the primary function of which is not communicative, but to demonstrate community). As an element of different art forms, gesture is presented by actors on the stage, in theatres, operas or films, and in a residual manner also by painters who present exemplary referential gestures, for example the extended arm with the pointing finger. And as pure art, so to speak, gesture is ultimately to be found in mime and dance. Mime is based entirely on gesture and facial expression while, as an aesthetic event accompanied by music, dance exhibits physical

60  Cinema as Human Art movement in space: ‘See how beautiful I am in my movement!’ What can be used as a means of communication, namely physical movement, itself becomes the end. If gesture is indirect (non-verbal, physically expressive) communication, then aesthetic gesture is indirect communication of the second degree: non-verbal, non-medial, expressive and autonomous. Transferring this definition to film, gesture is non-verbal communication involving moving images and looks, and it becomes aesthetic to the degree it presents itself as an end in its own right. Film shows things not primarily by showing them off (representing them), but by showing them up, pointing at them, a gesture, while at the same time pointing at itself, an aesthetic gesture.8 Close-Up reveals its dramatic principle in its first scene. It is that of the non-dramatic, which is not the same thing as the (merely) undramatic or everyday. In a downright deconstructivistic manner, the film eliminates all drama. We view a scene which promises to be dramatic—an arrest carried out by armed officers—but which unfolds without drama, en passant. Kiarostami plays on the expectations of the audience, disappointing them. He dangles the bait of drama and then retracts it. Instead of portraying action, he shows a series of trivial events. Instead of constructing an arc of suspense, he suspends the suspense. It is as if he wished to present a feature film in which nothing features.9 But a feature film in which nothing features is a contradiction in terms. And it is precisely within this contradiction that Kiarostami is already moving in the opening scene. Moving means that he presents the movement of this contradiction by showing a dramatic course of events in which everything unfolds non-dramatically: no rush, no pathos, no symbolism. We might momentarily ask ourselves as viewers whether the trivial, parenthetical scene outside the house serves as a symbol of what is happening inside the house. Is it a symbol of the fate of the arrested man, maybe even of the human race itself? The answer, at least for now, has to be a sober ‘no’. The scene is what it is. It has no so-called deeper meaning. Searching for depth of meaning in Kiarostami’s films is a waste of time.10 The dramatic and the undramatic, the extraordinary and the ordinary, are interwoven until they become indistinguishable, in other words until the problem of distinguishability becomes irrelevant. At some point, it simply ceases to be important whether what we are dealing with is intended or unintended, artistically created or coincidental, feature film or documentary. Undoubtedly, the first scene has something to present, namely an arrest, but it presents it so oddly, so non-dramatically, so intent on negating the dramatic, that it appears uninterested in what is presented, and only interested in how it is presented. Like a gesture, it points to what it is presenting. In this way, it achieves proximity and distance simultaneously. We see not only what is shown but also and always the showing. To this extent, like mime and even more so like dance, film says, ‘See how beautiful I am to look at in my movement!’ This is particularly true of the miniature scene with the rolling aerosol can. This, too, should be comprehended as a gesture. And the gesture refers

Cinema as Human Art  61 to looking itself, to the temporally elongated process of watching: ‘See how strange I am to look at in my movement!’ Only later, at the end of the film, can we, the audience, lend this scene a maybe not deeper, but certainly more extensive meaning, putting it into the context of what by then we have learnt from Hossein Sabzian, the conman, about him. Sabzian speaks again and again of the suffering which characterises his life, the life of a man who is both unemployed and divorced, who is not respected or even noticed by the people around him. It is a suffering from not being ‘seen’.11 He clings to the con of being a famous film director for as long as possible, for the simple reason that it brings him what he is otherwise denied: respect and acknowledgement. At the end of the film, we are able from our viewpoint to compare poor Sabzian with the aerosol can kicked carelessly around at the beginning of the film. And if the works of Bob Dylan are familiar to us, we can even sing to Sabzian the song “Like a Rolling Stone”: “How does it feel?/How does it feel?/To be without a home/Like a complete unknown/ Like a rolling stone?” If, in a manner similar to dance and mime, Kiarostami’s cinema guides our attention towards the gestural aspects of a scene, the comparison is lacking in one essential element, at least as far as dance is concerned, namely emotion. The tango is said to be “a sad thought which can be danced”. The waltz is a felicific circling into the future, the thrill of movement sashaying in triple time. Swing or LindyHop (do the bounce!) is a leap which tests the feeling of being well grounded in the world. Kiarostami’s cinema thus approaches a form of art—dance and music—from which he then distances himself in the extreme. Where is the emotion in this type of cinema? Kiarostami uses music very sparsely. In Close-Up, it is not introduced until the end, and then for the first and only time. In moral human terms, this closing scene is moving; cineastically it is very ambivalent: equally autocratic and respectful, totally serious and yet subtly ironic. When Sabzian, the conman, leaves prison, the man he had previously pretended to be, the film director Makhmalbaf, is waiting for him. He is so surprised that he bursts into tears. Orchestrator Kiarostami and his camera crew remain unobtrusively in the background. The scene has a certain voyeuristic aspect. It could be a reality TV show entitled I Forgive You or The Day I Met My Hero. The director—and thus the viewer—is witnessing a very private event. And this makes us feel awkward. Here reality is portrayed, a social reality equal in the eyes of God, intended to generate a pedagogical effect in a morally dubious person, as well as an aesthetic effect in the audience, in other words an affective and—in a multiple sense—appreciative effect. Then Kiarostami employs a surprising trick to take the sting out of this awkward situation. Suddenly the tape recorder stops working. This final scene has been commented from the beginning by a voiceover. We hear the director tell the cameraman that Makhmalbaf is not positioned correctly, but that it is impossible to film the scene again; and we hear that they seem to have a loose connection and that the sound equipment is rather old at the very

62  Cinema as Human Art moment when the microphone stops working. And so we hear a part of the conversation between Makhmalbaf and Sabzian, but not much. We drive along behind them, them on a moped and us in a car with a cracked windscreen. The route leads back to the address of the family conned by Sabzian. The scene is to end in reconciliation. The failure of the sound equipment to record properly, with its crackling irritating and maybe even annoying the audience, now comes into its own, morally and ironically. The privacy of the two protagonists in the final scene, initially robbed by the film, has now been returned to them, and it is hard to tell whether this was a consciously introduced trick or whether it occurred by chance. What can definitely be said is that the whole thing has a mischievous quality about it. In this context, the soundtrack begins, carried first by a muted and sad clarinet melody, a melody which to European ears sounds like something from an Italian folksong,12 followed by violins. It is the same music that Kiarostami used in his film The Traveller (1974), a film expressly referred to in Close-Up by conman Sabzian when he says that to some degree he is like the boy in The Traveller who wishes more than anything else in the world to see a football match in Teheran. He scrapes together the money he needs for the coach trip, some of it by charging for photos he seemingly takes of children with an old camera which he has found by chance (and which contains no film). When he finally arrives in Teheran and manages to secure an overpriced seat in the stadium, he is so exhausted that he falls asleep and does not wake up until the match is well over.13 Music is a thought which can be felt and, in principle, danced; it is a mental movement through time, to which one can also move physically— structured by emotion—through space. Correspondingly, a film by Kiarostami is a thought which touches, and which can be visually perceived. He generates proximity through the touch, ambiguity through the visual perception, whilst maintaining distance through the act of watching and sometimes the act of hearing. This is Kiarostami’s way of restoring aura to film and preserving the dignity of human beings. This description might seem particularly surprising in the context of a film entitled Close-Up. A close-up shot provides proximity to a character, the well-known theory being that the character’s emotional interior then becomes easier to understand as the physiognomy, the non-verbal facial expressions, permit psychological, almost instantaneous analysis of the character from our condensed experience. Conversely, it also makes it easier for us as the audience to identify with the character. This is why Deleuze categorises the close-up as a—literal or figurative—face, as an “affectionimage”. He draws, of all people, on Ingmar Bergman here, the director who sees the singularity of film in the way it approaches the human face, as a guarantor for the face being extinguished. The fear also to be found under the burning lens of Bergman’s interest transforms, namely, the visible badge of the human being, its face, into something inhuman.14 Kiarostami’s cinema provides a third option, however. “You are my audience”, Sabzian says to Kiarostami when he gives his permission for the court

Cinema as Human Art  63 case to be filmed. This can mean, on the one hand, that he is aware of the fact that from now on he will be performing and that he enjoys the idea of being an actor. In this respect his smile is very telling when, towards the end of the film, he admits that he would like to play himself and Kiarostami points out that this is precisely what he is already doing in the film currently being made. On the other hand, “You are my audience” can also be taken in the sense which Kiarostami explains to Sabzian, namely that he should comprehend the camera pointed at him in close-up format as a means to an end, as help to express what is complicated and difficult to describe. The cinema audience is thus given the role of being the real judge. And the punchline turns out to be that the audience cannot assume this role because the film—under Kiarostami’s direction—does not, strictly speaking, give it anything to judge, anything to condemn. The stance assumed is that of a sceptical and humane refusal to permit judgement. The court proceedings shown in the film do end with a mild sentence, but the film as a whole refuses to be judged at all. Benjamin uses the term aura to describe a specific relationship of proximity and distance to a perceived object. Taking up an aphorism by Karl Kraus—“The more closely you look at a word, the more distantly it looks back”—he speaks enthusiastically in this context of a “Platonic love of language”.15 The same can also be applied to Kiarostami. His Platonic love of film consists in cineastically rebalancing the intricate relationship between proximity and distance over and over again. This makes his cinema human art, and humanity gesture. For no humanism really ‘carries’. Like a metaphor, it belongs in a realm located between fields: between reality and fiction, between the everyday world and art, between proximity and distance. One can only refer to humanism like we do in gesture. Close-Up and other films by Kiarostami exemplify such gesture without pathos, as if only showing life, keenly suggested by another of his film titles: Life, and Nothing More . . . (1992). And yet a film, the result of montage, cannot show just life and nothing more because the director and film crew have control over it. But Kiarostami pulls back this control as far as possible, as if the fiction generated showed life and nothing more. The fiction located in the perspective of the as-if solves the contradiction of the film showing something real and at the same time something constructed. And this perspective is successful if we as the audience are no longer sensible of this contradiction. And Close-Up is a success.

Notes   1 This film was first shown in 1999. It takes its title from a poem of the same name by the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad.   2 Cf. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1999; Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modernity: Crossings, Energetics, and Ethics, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2001; id., Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2010; Karen Barad,

64  Cinema as Human Art “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding How Matter Comes to Matter”, in: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Spring 2003), pp. 801–831.  3 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, in: Basic Writings, revised and extended edition, trans. by D.F. Krell, London/New York: Routledge 1993, p. 237.   4 Heidegger, loc.cit., p. 245 & 248; on language see p. 217 & 223.   5 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Der Existentialismus ist ein Humanismus”, in: Jean-Paul Sartre (ed.), Der Existentialismus ist ein Humanismus und andere philosophische Essays, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben. Philosophische Schriften 4, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 2000, pp. 145–192, cf. here pp. 148.   6 Alfred Schmidt, “Adorno—ein Philosoph des realen Humanismus”, in: Alfred Schmidt (ed.), Kritische Theorie—Humanismus—Aufklärung, Stuttgart: Reclam 1981, pp. 27; on the Adorno citation regarding humanity, cf. p. 47 (our translation).   7 For the following see at length chapter 7.   8 Even an action film can be gestic in this sense. The impact of a film like United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006) depends on the presentation of brutal contingency, naked existence, a Being which can still only be envisioned deictically. The Being shown in this film—as also shown by Kiarostami in quite a different way—is simply ‘there’. In the case of United 93, this Being is explicit in the way that it is always explicit, namely as something incomprehensible which one somehow has to come to grips with (cf. Josef Früchtl, “Brutale Kontingenz. Der Schrecken von United 93”, in: Jochen Schuff/Martin Seel (eds.), Erzählungen und Gegenerzählungen: Terror und Krieg im Kino des 21. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main/ New York: Campus 2016, pp. 145–158). Philosophical phenomenology respects such Being. In this respect, Jean-Luc Nancy’s interpretation of Kiarostami is appropriate.   9 In an interview Kiarostami once said: “I was constantly hunting for scenes in which there was ‘nothing happening’ ” (quoted in: Alberto Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, trans. from the Spanish by Belinda Coombes, SAQI: London 2005, p. 89); cf. also the quotation by critic Gilberto Perez: “We are kept in suspension but not exactly in suspense” (p. 88); cf. also Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa & Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, University of Illionis Press 2003, pp. 55f. Here the interpretation directed at Deleuze by Laura Mulvey is very fitting: accordingly, Kiarostami reminds us of the “time-image” cinema which emerged from the ruins of the Second World War and initially took shape in Italian neorealism and the director Roberto Rossellini, whom Kiarostami has expressly said he admires (cf. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books 2006, p. 130, footnote. 5). In the language of André Bazin, a long take—in which cinematic times and real time are identical— creates time for thinking within the flow of a film. The audience is then called upon to become (more) active (pp. 130, 141). 10 Not even Taste of Cherry (1997) offers this depth, despite the fact that with its plot—an elderly man wishes to take his own life and searches for another man prepared to bury him—and its narrative form—movement and searching in the form of a car journey on which the main character meets three possible candidates for the job of burying him— this film comes very close to the symbolic level of the existential and the metaphysical as defined by death. However, those who are not familiar with Iranian culture will miss the extent to which metaphors, symbols, allegories and proverbs stemming from it are woven into the films of Kiarostami and other Iranian directors, and this should not be forgotten (cf. Saeed-Vafa & Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, loc.cit., pp. 57).

Cinema as Human Art  65 11 Cf. Axel Honneth, “Unsichtbarkeit. Über die moralische Epistemologie von ‘Anerkennung’ ”, in: Axel Honneth (ed.), Unsichtbarkeit. Stationen einer Theorie der Intersubjektivität, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2003, pp. 10–27; here Honneth stresses the degree to which expressive communication using gesture and mime is fundamental to the acknowledgement or ‘visualisation’ of persons; the literary starting point for this is Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952). 12 This music was in fact composed by Kambiz Roushanavan. 13 Cf. Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, loc.cit., pp. 84 & 90; cf. also: “like a real god, he (Kiarostami, J.F.) creates reality and makes Sabzian’s dream come true”, namely to meet the real Makhmalbaf, his great role model (p. 89). The trick with the broken microphone serves “to respect the privacy of the meeting” (p. 90). 14 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, The Movement-Image: Cinema 1, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986, pp. 87, especially p. 99–100. 15 Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus”, in: Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (eds.), Selected Writings, Vol. 2, part 2: 1931–1934, trans. by Rodney Livingstone & others, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press 2005, p. 453.

5 Exhibiting or Presenting? Politics, Aesthetics, and Mysticism in Benjamin’s and Deleuze’s Concepts of Cinema

On the basis of Bergson’s dualistic epistemological theory, in which intuition confronts analysis and metaphysics confronts science, the cinema of Deleuze looks out for the “time-image” and grants the “seer” a privileged place. In political terms, he causes a Modern approach marked by the French Revolution to shift. Since the much-lauded revolutionary populace no longer exists in socio-theoretical terms, it can no longer show itself, not even (on the screen) in the cinema. At best, as Deleuze would put it, it is coming. He therefore turns his gaze, following an ancient tradition,1 from social theory to ontology, from philosophy of history to philosophy of nature and life,2 and locates the corresponding epistemological subject, the “seer”, as oscillating between aesthetics and mysticism. In contrast, in his famous “Work of Art” essay, Walter Benjamin chose to locate politics at the centre of a Modern aesthetics. He contrasts the persistence of Romantic art-philosophical concepts with a brisk politicisation of perception, which is trained by city experience, in the terminology of Georg Simmel, and which cultivates its adequate artistic medium in film. It is also Simmel who provides sociological backing for Benjamin’s term “exhibition value”: individuals have, for the sake of their individualism, both a right and a necessity to be exhibited in Modern society; universal equality demands visual differentiation. Using Foucault’s concept of the dispositif, it is possible at the same time to draw attention to the ambivalence of this social visualisation and refine Benjamin’s Hegelian-Marxist thought pattern. From this perspective, and in a polemic undertone, we can say that Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema establishes a pseudorevolutionary return to “cult value”. If Benjamin is concerned with showing in the sense of egalitarian-democratic displaying, Deleuze is concerned with showing in the sense of phenomenological-ontological being seen and making obvious.

Cultural History of Perception and Dispositif From the beginning, indeed from the very first page of Benjamin’s essay “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, its main focus is politics.3 Benjamin allows the fundamental conceptuality and epistemological

Exhibiting or Presenting?  67 interest to be dictated by theorist Karl Marx, concerning himself with the “conditions of production” in a society whose “dialectic” is no less noticeable in the “superstructure” than in the economy. In other words, he concerns himself with discussion of a relationship which has re-entered the spotlight since the writings of Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, and Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, both published in 1923 and both with a clear emphasis on revolutionary awareness, on the ‘subjective factor’. Against this background, Benjamin attributes his “theses” the value of a “weapon”, and the battle at his time has a concrete and current opponent, even enemy, in Fascism. His “Work of Art” essay is thus politically geared in two senses: short-term politically and theory-strategically, but undoubtedly with the emphasis on the latter. Benjamin’s ambition is geared towards a theory of art within the framework of Historical Materialism, and the latter grasps itself as a theory bound to a particular, namely emancipatory interest. With Korsch and Lukács, Benjamin revives the primacy of politics, and this means not only the predominance of subjectiverevolutionary and institutionally organised acting over economics but also the (relative) political determination of every theory from the arts, social sciences and cultural sciences; accordingly, theory might not be dependent on politics, but neither is it independent of politics. In Hegelian terms, the primacy of politics is not directly apparent in theory. Benjamin stresses this point with particular focus on theorists with Hegelian expertise and those clustered tightly around Max Horkheimer. In a letter to Horkheimer, he is quick to point out that his “Work of Art” essay intends to “avoid any unmediated relationship to politics”.4 This good intention could not be upheld, particularly not when subjected to the stern gaze of Adorno. All the more helpful it could then be today to exchange the vocabulary of Hegel for that of Foucault. What Benjamin would then be trying to do in his “Work of Art” essay would be an analysis of art and particular types of art under the guiding concept of the dispositif. After Benjamin has presented a short historical description of artistic reproduction techniques in the first section of his essay, and has made an early introduction to the central concept of the aura in the second section, he proceeds in the third section to generate a perception-theoretical and historico-cultural framework. He opens this section with the remark that over long periods of history the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.5 This is clearly an implicit reference to Marx and an explicit one to the Vienna School of Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff. Nowadays, most people are unaware that “Alois Riegl was perhaps the most important theoretician of art history in Europe in the period around 1900”.6His term Kunstwollen intended to express that art, like all human volition, is not only directed at shaping man’s relationship to the world but also regulates man’s relationship to the sensory appearance of things. It is therefore possible to draw conclusions from the art of a particular epoch about the general perception of this epoch. By introducing

68  Exhibiting or Presenting? such a mediating concept between different spheres—art on the one hand and everyday perception on the other—it is possible to circumvent what Benjamin and Critical Theory with all its Hegelian training strive to avoid at all costs, namely unmediated relationships, especially to politics. Foucault’s concept of the dispositif fulfils the same function. It is difficult to define it as a concept and not just as a word. At the same time, it is precisely its inaccuracy which seems to make it so successful, an inaccuracy which goes beyond that conceded to a knowledge-mobilising hypothesis.7 Foucault introduces it in his book The Will to Knowledge in order to lend more concrete contours to the complex of power and knowledge therein exposed, and does so in the context of producing subjectivity, which accordingly occurs with the aid of technologies and physical techniques. Dispositifs are links generated for strategic power-based reasons, and this means: an entangling of discourses (scientific, philosophical, moral, etc. statements) and (institutional) practices (in the sense of legislative, judiciary and administrative measures). In more general terms, this means links between knowledge and power; in other words, two axes of investigation central to the Foucauldian terrain in order to explain processes more fully on the third axis of investigation—namely subjectivity. The epistemic structures previously described by Foucault in his The Order of Things determine ways of seeing and speaking—i.e. forms of perception and verbalising. In contrast to these structures, it is firstly no longer simply a question of discourses, but secondly a question of producing subjectivity, and thirdly no longer a question of historical aprioris. It is not the condition of the historically eruptive possibility of a way of perceiving and speaking at all which is key, but the condition of the concrete possibility of a way of perceiving and speaking, the condition of linking a certain way of acting and a certain way of speaking which is historically and culturally concrete in each case. As Foucault says in functionalistic vocabulary, a dispositif facilitates connections between discourse and, for example, sexuality. To use the related mechanistic vocabulary, it is an “apparatus”, a complex connecting or coupling mechanism.8 In his “Work of Art” essay, Benjamin introduces a dispositif-theoretical or, in his own words, perception-theoretical and historico-cultural framework in order to substantiate the assumption that, in the age of technical reproducibility of works of art, the aura of these works decays. He always defines aura in categories of space and time. In the second section of his essay, it is the “presence in time and space” of a work of art, “its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”. Here Benjamin adopts the empiristic version of the individuation principle: what distinguishes two objects identical in appearance is their different locations in the space they occupy at the same time. Two pens on a desk, identical in shape, colour and material, are two different pens because they are next to each other, because they assume different positions in space at the same time. In the third section, Benjamin surprisingly takes nature as his level of illustration, defining aura as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may

Exhibiting or Presenting?  69 be”. Here, too, there is an interconnection of space and time characterised as a phenomenon for the perceiver who follows and temporally unites it. The assumption that aura decays can then be explained as the effect of a change in perception which is societally induced: the aura of a work of art decays with the latter’s reproducibility, yet this reproducibility corresponds to the “desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly”. Benjamin’s evidence for this is provided by “picture magazines and newsreels”. The desire of the masses can be explained by the emergence of a “sense of the universal equality of things”.9 Benjamin does not examine how this egalitarian sense emerged, presumably because for him the answer is obvious. I shall return to this point later.

Cult Value and Exhibition Value First of all, though, let us turn to the pair of terms which Benjamin introduces in his next step and which polarise my considerations: “cult value” and “exhibition value”. Aura consists in a kind of cross-fade, a semantic overlapping of spatial and non-spatial distance and closeness. It is, as described in the first version of The Work of Art essay, a “strange tissue of space and time”10 Tissue, an intricate web, means a fabric, as fine and tough as if woven by the threads of a spider, glittering in the light and invisible in the dark. “Web of lies”, in English as in German, constitutes a distinctive and poetic linking of words. As Benjamin says in one of his notes, this definition represents nothing but the formulation of the cult value of the work of art in categories of space and time perception. Distance is the opposite of closeness. The essentially distant object is the unapproachable one. Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult value.11 However close to the observer a cult object might be in the spatial sense, it remains distant in a symbolic sense, understood as a symbol, as an object laden with meaning. Benjamin links this semantic cross-fade of the closenessdistance concepts with the historico-cultural argument that art, firstly, “originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind”, and that, secondly, this ritual function still remains in secular times (beginning with the Renaissance); the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, which is a “theology of art”, makes this very evident.12 There is now considerable evidence for the assumption that art assumed a religious status with the age of Romanticism. Here Benjamin can refer to Hegel, whose famous statement—”We are beyond the stage of reverence for works of art as divine and objects deserving our worship”—contains a clear anti-Romantic barb.13 Art in its cultic and ritual function accordingly emphasises the element of aura, of symbolic unapproachability, of semantic distance and divine reverence, but in its political function—in this context,

70  Exhibiting or Presenting? Benjamin introduces the alternative “based on ritual” versus “based on politics”—art emphasises its “exhibition value”, and this means plain and simply, at least to start with, that it is not enough for works of art merely to be “present”; they have to be “seen”.14 Visibility is the first criterion for distinguishing art based on politics. Since this visibility is all the greater, the closer the objects are to the observer, spatial proximity is a specification of this criterion. Benjamin’s rhetorical trick, motivated—it must be said—by a Communist hope, is to conclude from spatial closeness a so-called human closeness. Accordingly, art based on politics is not unapproachable for human beings. Such art, it may be said, is not intimidating, has no aureole of being something higher and more special, instead challenging the observer to meet it head-on, to use a modern expression, and that involves dealing with it in some way, doing something with it, interacting with it somehow. The concept of “parasocial interaction” can be used here: somebody “feigns” a social relationship to somebody else “in order to establish one at all”. This is fiction with real consequences. Parasocial interaction uses as the as-if structure inherent in all action. Since action is never completely calculable, since uncertainties will always remain, it first has to feign being successful in order then really to become successful. All agents have to act as if their actions were calculable; otherwise, they would never act.15 Benjamin, it is true, differentiates exhibition value with varying degrees (“A panel painting can be exhibited more easily than the mosaic or fresco which preceded it”) and relativises his assumption that over the course of history exhibition value gradually displaces cult value (“a certain oscillation between these two polar modes of reception can be demonstrated for each work of art”, while technically reproducible art, for example photography, is also familiar with the cult value and aura of a “human face”). Yet he is fundamentally convinced that the “emphasis” of these two values has changed historically.16 The present—or, to take the Baudelaire studies Benjamin: Modernity—is characterised by a preponderance of exhibition value—i.e. a strong weighting of visuality and (parasocial) interaction.

Georg Simmel and the Struggle for Visibility For this theoretical assumption surrounding Modernity, Benjamin could draw upon a sociologist with an academic uniqueness at his time, particularly regarding his philosophico-cultural competence, enabling him to become a role model for a whole generation of intellectuals, not least Benjamin himself. I am talking about Georg Simmel.17 In his now classic essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” from 1903, Simmel justifies the social function of visuality as the result of a highly ambivalent Modernity. Modernity, namely, permits individuals to unfold their individuality on the basis of both a universal, formal equality and the anonymous lifestyle of the city, while at the same time impeding this individual unfolding process

Exhibiting or Presenting?  71 precisely because, in principle and especially within the framework of the city lifestyle, anyone can unfold. At this point, Simmel makes reference to a relational definition he himself introduced, namely between “quantitative” and “qualitative” individualism. The former emerged with Christian religion, especially that of the Reformation, and then progressed with 18th century Enlightenment and ultimately 19th century socialism; the latter emerged with Goethe, Romanticism and Nietzsche, although it was partly also immanent in aristocratic interpretations of Antiquity and the personalities portrayed by Shakespeare and Rembrandt.18 If the former stresses the ways in which one human being is equal to all other human beings, the latter stresses the ways in which one human being differs from all other human beings. Qualitative individualism does not presuppose quantitative individualism either historically or systematically: in a society of aristocrats and slave drivers, the representatives of inequality attribute value to their particular status. If, however, individualism is quantitatively realised in principle, as with the French Revolution, qualitative individualism is never long in following and then becomes an undeniable problem of mass society. This “sense of the universal equality of things”, which Benjamin names as the reason behind that desire of the masses to bring things closer and destroy their aura, is therefore the product of a long historical and episodic development. And, in turn, this sense produces an aestheticdeauratising, cultic-detabooing, political-monopolising mass desire. In Modernity directed towards political egalitarianism, “striving for the most individual forms of personal existence”, to use Simmel’s words, increases. And this individual existence, or differentiation, is primarily achieved at the level of appearance, perception, aisthesis, visibility. Modernity, which emerged from a fight for fundamental rights, is now reason to fight for social and ethical visibility, fought at the perceptive-aesthetic level. Visualisation is its agenda. Differences must be made visible, or they do not exist. A foundation of political and legal equality means that they can only occur in everyday practices and culture. They must, and can only, show themselves aesthetically. Accordingly, individuals revere “the specifically metropolitan extravagances of self-distantiation, of caprice, of fastidiousness”.19 And the dialectic masterpiece of extravagance is that behaviour which Simmel calls “blasé”. A blasé attitude is, firstly, a refusal to react to the “rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves” of the metropolis and, secondly, a “subjective reflection to a complete money economy”. Those who are blasé will no longer react to the ever different and new. Just as money expresses all qualitative differences between things in purely quantitative terms and thus becomes a “frightful leveller”, those with a blasé attitude are also levellers, “renouncing” any response to the “content and form” of things.20 A blasé attitude means consciously refusing to perceive differences. And from Simmel’s point of view this is the very pinnacle of a culture of difference, of qualitative individuality.

72  Exhibiting or Presenting? Accordingly, Modernity fulfils the political programme of the assertion of freedom and equality, of qualitative and quantitative individuality, by establishing a culture or everyday aesthetic of exhibiting (oneself), of showing (oneself)—one could add: of staging (oneself). It reinforces a set of problems arising from a philosophical-anthropological point of view, from Hannah Arendt’s point of view, whenever we have “people acting and speaking together, [. . .] living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be”. The corresponding “space of appearance” therefore exists to the extent that there are relationships of interaction, and formations of groups.21 Here, being visible is not only a matter for the individual in a qualitative and especially aesthetic sense, but far more a social and moral matter. Somebody socially declassed might stand in the middle of a crowd of people, a church or marketplace—‘but he will not be seen’.22 Concerning the aesthetics of exhibiting and showing oneself in Simmel’s sense, today we see the ambivalences, the positive and negative potentials of this process, much more clearly than Benjamin could,23 and yet he was able to outline sufficiently clearly the fundamental meaning of such a reversion. When visualisation and—I have not addressed this in any detail—(parasocial) interactivity become centres of gravity within a society, an understanding of aesthetics becomes established which departs from any religious or bourgeois cultic meaning and relies on a meaning which is political in an additional sense, namely pragmatic. The politics of showing here consist in presenting that which shows itself as part of a problem-solving context.

Cinema as a Dispositif The exemplary field for which Benjamin elaborates this is cinema. To repeat some key phrases, cinema is an apparatus which steps between the audience and the performers. On the one hand, this forces the performers to impact without the help of their aura (the latter being bound to the here and now, in other words to the physical presence of the actors within the same ontological space-time continuum as the audience), on the other hand it invites the audience to adopt an attitude of examination and semi-professional discourse. Any person in the audience can “lay claim to being filmed” should he so wish, in other words become a performer, even if only as an extra.24 The exhibition value of film therefore also brings about the exhibition value of each individual. This bold assumption must of course be taken in context, namely in the context of that combative-expectant image of the Soviet Union painted by so many intellectuals of the 1920s, including Benjamin. In particular, it must be taken against the background of 1920s films, in Soviet cinema but also those of Fritz Lang and King Vidor, which were bent on portraying the proletariat masses. In this regard, Eisenstein and Kracauer take their places beside Benjamin as the leading theorists. But against the backdrop of Simmel’s cultural philosophy, it has to be said, Benjamin’s assumption ceases to appear as bold. The claim to being filmed is just one

Exhibiting or Presenting?  73 variant of the claim inevitably emerging under politico-legal conditions of equality, the claim to visible difference.25 As we are aware, Benjamin then adds further determinants aimed to characterise cinema as the exemplary location and apparative system of a modern, politico-pragmatic, solution-oriented aesthetics. Put a different way, he describes cinema as a dispositif, as a technical-aesthetic medium which impacts perception and therefore also thinking and acting, in short the production of subjectivity, as a technical and transcendental apparatus (conditioning the possibility of perception and action) which links everydaypractical perception and action, for example the social struggle for visibility and self-portrayal, with discourses about art, culture, philosophy, etc.26 Translated back into Hegelian-Marxist language: cinema is a miniature system of societal mediation. Of course, this reconstruction also helps to stress an ambivalence of which Simmel is unaware. In describing cinema as a dispositif which serves as a switching point between the social struggle for visibility and corresponding theories of democracy, it is important to remain conscious of that dimension described by Foucault as the panopticon. According to him,27 Modern human beings subjectify themselves by internalising the look of others. But that means exposing themselves to a look which is no longer localisable, which is ever-present, which they cannot return. Reciprocity is constitutively ruled out in a society requiring description as a “panoptic machine”.28 The human beings in a modern egalitarian society have to fight for visibility for the sake of their individuality. At the same time, this very society runs the risk of undermining this fight under the spotlight of internalised monitoring—i.e. permanent observation—and thus turning it into a caricature. Only by bringing Simmel and Foucault together in the form of Benjamin does it become possible to avoid the extremes of naive liberalism and nightmarish totalitarianism.

Ontology and Intuition: Spinoza, Bergson and Dewey If, from this perspective, we now turn our attention to the most successful current philosophy of film, namely that of Gilles Deleuze, politics immediately obtrudes as a massively conjunctive element. The popular success of Deleuze unmistakeably issues from a critique of capitalism which may be ambivalent, but is nevertheless vehement in its rhetoric. With Anti-Oedipus— subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia—a figure enters the cultural stage whom Deleuze and Guattari lovingly call the ‘Schizo’. The Schizo is a friendly version of the oedipalised schizophrenic, rehabilitated to function capitalistically, who in Foucault’s words is really abandoned by society, yet at the same time, imaginarily produced by it. He is a new edition of the ‘noble savage’ myth29 and the figure of desire appropriate to 20th century capitalism: a figure desired by capitalism because it is one which permanently exceeds boundaries, and feared by it because it also exceeds its own

74  Exhibiting or Presenting? boundaries. It is a figure, and this is the basic psychoanalytical and metaphysical assumption of Anti-Oedipus, who still knows how to wish, who does not oedipally deform wishes and dissociate them in the distorting order of the symbolic. The reception of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus presages the Wirkungsgeschichte (effective history) of Deleuze. It creates a thinker, as has since been monotonously repeated, who radically defends the heterogenous and the different, who defends an ethics of the ability to be different, a politics of anarchic diversity and an ontology of movement. In more recent philosophical history, Deleuze is of course not the only Frenchman to whom these attributions apply. A conspicuous difference is marked by the element termed earlier as ‘ontology of movement’. The bone of contention is the fact that Deleuze devises an ontology at all.30 Here the term ontology is fundamentally meant not in the sense of linguistic analysis, but in the Heideggerian sense; as an examination not of what is, but of (the sense of) being. Bound by the conditions imposed by a critique of ontology and metaphysics driven by Heidegger (and Nietzsche), Deleuze can of course only seize upon this term affirmatively because he changes its meaning. Firstly, ontology is then a theoretical space filled not by discoveries, but by inventions. It is concerned not with discovering the essence of fundamental entities, but with the construction of basic conditions oscillating between scientific explanation (science) and literary description (fiction). Methodically, this ontology emerges with a weak claim, but, as will be shown, it has a strong, emphatic claim as regards content. Secondly, and closely connected to the first point, it means a reversal of the ratio between identity and difference, between what is identifiable and thus being, and what cannot be identified. Philosophy as an ontology understood in this sense has to do with the non-identifiable. Deleuze’s positive term for this is ‘the virtual’. What can be identified is only an update of what is (truthfully, namely virtually). The political effect of this ontology consists in being able to declare change a matter of principle. The desire for political change is not a castle in the sky because the condition underlying the possibility of change is to be found in being itself. Something else is only possible because what is (positive or actual) is not everything. Accordingly, history is a materialisation of time in which not everything can happen, and yet far more can happen than we are currently able to say. It is not the place for a Postmodern anything goes or for a metaphysical everything goes (all the time), but for a one never knows (what goes). So try it!31 Of course, this Deleuzean self-conception instils massive doubts, given prominence by, for example, Alain Badiou. The Clamour of Being (La clameur de l’Etre) is the title of his book on Deleuze, playing on the latter’s philosophical description of self (‘a single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same ocean for all the drops, a single Clamour of Being for all beings’). Badiou accordingly sees Deleuze’s “fundamental concern” not in the anarchistic “liberation of the multiple”, but in the “folding”, the artificial replication of thinking about a “new concept

Exhibiting or Presenting?  75 of the One”. Deleuze is concerned with something very old, albeit in a new guise: with a new “metaphysics of the One”.32 And the two pioneering philosophers whom Deleuze requires to back this up are Spinoza and Bergson. Spinoza provides an ontology of change, infinitely being different, with, firstly, the guiding concept of (expressive) immanence. If difference does not mean the distinction between two identities, since this would make difference subordinate to identity, and if it does not mean the negation of an identity either, since this would only be a negative concept of difference; if instead it means the reason for all being, that is all identities, distinctions and negations, then being can, according to its substance, only be one. In the history of philosophy, however, this metaphysical theory is represented by Spinoza. There is only one substance—Spinoza calls it God or Nature (“deus sive natura”)—and it is univocal, expressing itself in attributes and modes. All expressions remain within a sphere of immanence; there is no transcendence, and predominantly not that between God and all things created by Him, nor that between his modern substitute, the Cartesian egocogito, and material things. Secondly, Spinoza provides this Deleuzean ontology with the corresponding epistemological keyword, namely scientia intuitiva. To recall, Spinoza distinguishes three types of knowledge in his Ethics which he categorises “like a Platonist, in a theory of stepwise advancing knowledge”33: sensually evoked, unordered and, therefore, confused knowledge, based on a physical affection, referring to individual things as an opinion (opinio) or a figment of the imagination (imaginatio); rational knowledge, namely knowledge ordered according to generally known concepts and principles, which recognises the common attributes of things; and, finally, intuitive knowledge, which recognises the essence of the individual. This is what may be described as the highest type of knowledge, uniting the other two, referring both to an individual thing (res) like sensual knowledge, but also to universality like rational knowledge. But two things remain unclear. Firstly, whether only this third type of knowledge facilitates adequate recognition of particular things, or whether the second type does as well.34 And, secondly, whether the third type is concerned with recognition of “the individual essence of a single thing” or recognition of “the essence of an individual”.35 In the first case, recognition refers to an individual thing in its universality and in a seeming paradox manages to recognise the individual. In the second case the human spirit recognises in an individual the aspect of the eternal, the divine; he recognises sub specie aeternitatis and (as Nadler would add, simultaneously) as amor Dei intellectualis. Of all the types of knowledge which Spinoza presents, the intuitive is the most challenging in its (controversial) interpretation. Agreement exists that it is difficult to specify the definition of this form of cognition. It can be understood more religiously and mystically or more rationalistically. And this ambiguity returns with Deleuze. In order to demonstrate this, we would certainly need to turn in appropriate detail to Deleuze’s second informant with regard to ontology, namely

76  Exhibiting or Presenting? Bergson. This not least because Bergson stresses intuition as a method of a philosophy referring to that form of being which cannot be described in clear scientific terms and an analytical style. According to Bergson, this is the real being, movement, and as such can only be grasped intuitively. Intuition means the graphic-imaginative grasping of an object or a “whole” (du tout); ultimately, the grasping of “what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible” (qu’il a d’unique et par conséquent d’inexprimable). It is the prerequisite of all analysis inasmuch as it first provides the latter with the object. What is epistemologically termed “the Given” arises from intuition. The train of thought always leads from intuition to analysis, from the whole to the individual, and not vice versa. Without a whole, we would have no idea what to do, practically and literally, with the individual parts. Individual analyses can only be correctly linked by a graphic imagination.36 Bergson is not completely clear about whether this type of knowledge and its corresponding manner of thinking, metaphysics, inherently possesses systematic primacy over the analytical and definitional type of knowledge of science, but a tendency in this respect is clear. It is also noticeable that he repeatedly cites examples from the field of art as evidence for the intuitive type of knowledge.37 And these ambiguities also resurface with Deleuze: is intuition a philosophical-metaphysical or far more an aesthetic type of knowledge? Does it complement scientific analysis, whether partially or on equal terms, or is it superior to it? It is unclear whether Deleuze would really like to be free of this ambiguity. But what is certain is that he could save himself a great deal of theoretical trouble if he were to follow the argumentational line of aesthetics more than he does de facto. He could adopt a second line of argumentation to his own more sustainable advantage, namely that of pragmatism. Richard Rorty once also described it in connection with Spinoza. Here, as is so often the case with Rorty, his idea is as simple as it is attractive. If, namely, we think of nature as God or of God as nature, then we not only see ourselves confronted with a renewed confirmation of the old metaphysical assumption that the order of things is identical with that of ideas, but we also have “two equally valid ways of describing the universe”. God or Nature “could be viewed with equal adequacy under the attribute of extension and under the attribute of thought”. But that implies that the Kantian question of whether either description “has anything to do with things as they are in themselves—things as undescribed” also has validity.38 Thus, following this pragmatic line of argumentation Deleuze would be able to rid himself of a number of theoretical and epistemological worries. For the same reason, it will be conceptually helpful in the present context to point out that another author explicitly addresses the concept of intuition in Bergson, acknowledging one of the agreements between vitalism and pragmatism. I am referring to John Dewey and his essay “Qualitative Thought” from 1930. Deleuze himself only refers to such agreements indirectly, for example when he praises the “English and Americans” for their

Exhibiting or Presenting?  77 empiristic-experimental focus “on conjunctions and relations“, instead of on what is. To this extent, the philosophical motto is “substitute the AND for IS”.39 For pragmatists and vitalists, it is less interesting what something is, and far more so what it can be linked to and what can be done with it. This is, of course, also true of theories. They are instruments which require examination in order to ascertain whether, or more precisely: under what circumstances, they work. The exuberant use of connective metaphors from the Anti-Oedipus also has to be read with this sober background in mind. If one speaks about quality in philosophical terms, it is necessary, as Dewey says at the start of his essay, to grapple in particular with classical logic, according to which qualitative determinations are assigned to objects either attributively or classificatorily. The proposition, ‘The red Indian is stoical’, is then interpreted either as signifying that the Indian in question is characterised by the property of stoicism in addition to that of redness, or that he belongs to the class of stoical objects. But Dewey insists on the ordinary interpretation of the proposition, according to which the indigenous American was “permeated throughout” by a certain quality, namely the stoical. Theoretically, he is thereby insisting upon an “integral” perspective.40 In this intention, he initially distinguishes between “object” and “situation”. Whereas logical formulations deal with objects (“red Indian”, “stoical”), which semantically can be seen as independent, the meaning of a situation has an “implicit” character which cannot be “made explicit”. A good illustration of this is provided (repeatedly in his text) by a work of art. Here “the quality of the whole permeates, affects, and controls every detail”.41 Quality is accordingly a holistic characteristic which determines all other characteristics of an entity. In psychological terms, qualitative unity is “felt rather than thought”. Saying, “I have a feeling or impression that so and so is the case is to note that the quality in question is not yet resolved into determinate terms and relations”. One has already drawn a conclusion without knowing the reasons. This manner of thinking carried by feelings is not only something which takes place in everyday routines or in art. “All thought in every subject begins with just such an unanalyzed whole”. And with this assertion, Dewey paraphrases the achievement which Bergson attributes to intuition. It thus comes as no surprise that the pragmatist in this context expressly refers to the vitalist. “To my mind, Bergson’s contention that intuition precedes conception and goes deeper is correct”. It is true that Dewey immediately adds that there is “nothing mystical” about this fact, and that it does not signify that “there are two modes of knowledge”, one intuitive appropriate to the metaphysical, and one analytical, appropriate to the physical.42 Intuition and analysis together form knowledge. Analysis makes explicit with arguments what intuition has already deduced implicitly. Admittedly, one aspect needs to be taken into account which Dewey ignores. The relationship between implicit and explicit is not to be understood as if explication were only to make explicit what is inexplicitly already given, as if it were only to reproduce it in a ratio of one-to-one. Far

78  Exhibiting or Presenting? more, explication has a retrospective force. It is always also constitutive for what is being explicated. The relationship of constitution between implicit and explicit is therefore a mutual one.43 For Dewey, the clasp holding these dualistic conceptual pairs of implicit and explicit, intuition and analysis together is “experience”. If one refers to this term with foundational intention, then in post-Kantian philosophy one is rapidly confronted with the objection that one is thereby also using as a support the epistemologically non-viable conception of a “given”. Wilfried Sellars declares it a “myth”, while Donald Davidson, in his famous essay “On The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, criticises the dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content, concept and sense data, to which one commits oneself with talk of the Given. In turn, Dewey criticises this manner of speech, but holds onto the concept. Given, in this context, “signifies only that the quality immediately exists, or is brutely there”, that it “is first directly and unreflectively experienced or had”44 Quality is thus an attribute which is linked to the plain existence of an entity and is experienced in a (still) indefinite form. And this experience is necessary because we otherwise (implicitly) would have no reason nor could (explicitly) state one in order to formulate a statement about an experience which, as a statement, connects two predications. If we say this chocolate tastes sweet, then the subject-predicate form suggests that we are dealing with two independent entities, the chocolate and the sweetness. But the question of why the one entity is attributed to the other, and not subjectively as a learning step in an individual’s biography, but objectively cannot be answered until we grasp this connection as a propositional differentiation or “articulation” of an underlying (qualitative) experience.45 The difficulties which arise in this context are, as Dewey also remarks, self-induced by the attributive theory and the subject-predicate structure of the sentence. Linguistically speaking, the pragmatist consistently proves to be the advocate of the verb. To say that a thing is sweet means “that it will sweeten” some other object, say coffee, or a batter of milk and eggs. To say that something is red means that it “reddens”, “either in the sense of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red”. Saying that a dog is vicious, is “a way of setting forth what he is likely to do, namely to snarl and bite”.46 In other words, experience is the tense relationship between subjective, sensual undergoing and intersubjective, usually linguistic significance. It has a sensual-semantic or “somatic-semantic dual character”.47 Neither side can exist in the process of knowledge without the other. The one forms “the background, the point of departure, and the regulative principle of all thinking”,48 while the other lends thought certainty and complexity. Kant’s famous dictum about views and concepts leads to the formulation: sensualsomatic experiences without articulation are blind or “dumb”.49 Articulations without sensual-somatic experiences are indifferent, meaningful in the sense of semantics, yet meaningless in the sense of relevance. It is the sensual-somatic layer of experience interwoven with everyday occurrences which determines what is relevant for human beings and thus significant.

Exhibiting or Presenting?  79 Although experience is the result of a contrary relation between sensuality and conceptuality, this polarity does not imply a strict parity. As Dewey establishes with Bergson, intuition not only precedes grasping (temporally) but also goes deeper (logically systematically). It takes precedence not only temporally but also conceptually. For without it articulation would not know which direction it has to take in order to connect subject and predicate. To take examples from Bergson: the artist who has made some sketches of Paris can arrange them correctly because he has seen Paris and has an intuition regarding the whole. The scrambled letters of a poem can only be arranged correctly if one knows the poem as a whole.50 Synthesis must precede analysis, and without circularity, this is only conceivable if synthesis has the status of a felt, implicit knowledge which requires explication, the latter vice versa constituting and changing the knowledge by specifying it. To return to Deleuze, it must first be ascertained that the significance which he attributes to the concept of intuition is anything but clear. This can be no other way for a philosopher who identifies clarity with conceptual categorisation and the claim to representation of the non-conceptual, and who on the other hand celebrates in the name of difference a thinking in conjunctions and crossings of boundaries. A concept such as that of difference or intuition therefore itself must have more of a pointing, gestural, indicating and suggesting character. Following Badiou’s interpretation, intuitive thinking, for Deleuze, as for philosophical tradition, is “without mediation”, “without categories”, and yet does not, other than in this tradition, occur at a single moment, is therefore a “complex construction” and the “most profound” of all the Bergson-Deleuze ideas.51 In Foucauldian terminology, Badiou suggests calling it a “thinking of the external”, an “external thinking” and summarising it by the term “fold”—the “folding” of the One.52 Deleuze has written an entire book about this concept and the philosopher he considers to be its highest authority, namely Leibniz. Nevertheless, with regard to the concept he also casts a positive light on Spinoza. In the latter, the concept has the same meaning as “expression”. The one substance which expresses itself in the plurality, or more appropriately here: the diversity of attributes and modes, folds and unfolds itself—not like a flower which obeys a comparatively restrictive organic pattern, but like Japanese origami with endless variations.53 The movement of the folding intuitively attempts to express the endless flow of being which cannot (solely) be expressed in the categorisations of concepts. It stakes a metaphysical claim. Being in its endless difference, in its constitutive non-identity, expresses itself in thought itself. Deleuze makes this claim repeatedly clear, but the epistemological and linguistic-philosophical implications far less clear. In a different book, he calls the place where being and thinking, or being and speaking, meet “sense”. This meeting cannot, of course, have the significance of a denotation because the latter is subject to the identifying logic of representation which has to be rejected, and to the correspondence theory of truth. Nevertheless, linguistic articulation, as Deleuze also says, occurs in propositions.

80  Exhibiting or Presenting? Therefore, sense must also express itself in propositions. And yet, according to Deleuze, it is to be an attribute not of the proposition, but of the thing to which it refers. The argument which Deleuze uses as support here comes from hermeneutics and, closer to home for him, is familiar to the structuralistic linguistic theory of de Saussure. It runs as follows: sense is not reducible to the propositions expressing it, but far more emerges literally and metaphorically between them, in the difference of the propositions and terms. Ultimately, however, Deleuze also refers in this context, which is concerned with the Logic of Sense, as the book title states, to the special logic of paradox, meanderingly giving voice to the conviction that we have no concepts for grasping the relationship between language and materiality.54 To resume, the intention behind introducing the term ‘fold’, both ontologically and epistemologically, is initially thoroughly understandable because it contains an anti-idealistic, heteropathic and centrifugal approach. Thinking is then not a “projection of the internal”, but an “internalisation of the external”: “I do not meet myself in the external, but find the other in myself”. But this relationship between internal and external, between thinking/speaking and being, involves far more for Deleuze. Quoting Foucault, Deleuze says it is always a case of showing “how the other, the distant, is both the proximate and the same”.55 Vice versa, one can add that the proximate, the internal self, equally needs to be seen as something distant, as an other. Deleuze may sometimes speak the reflected language of the aesthetician, who does not deceive himself about the as-if status, the deceptively genuine character of his certainties. In such contexts, he then says it is “as though” there were an opening, a gap, an ontological fold referring being and thinking to one another.56 But the fundamental tone of his philosophy is far less reticent and relativising. Far more, intuitive thinking and the ontology of difference cultivate the aura of the being. They provide the framework for a celebration of cult value in philosophy. While Benjamin emphasises the democratic exhibition value, (individual) visuality and (parasocial) interaction, Deleuze weaves a web from near and far, in which something shows itself that at the same time does not show itself. This is a context in which Heidegger’s influence comes to the fore, the Heidegger of Being and Time and the destruction of the thinking tradition, as well as the Heidegger of the alethic conception of truth. The simultaneously revealing and concealing quality of truth, showing itself and covering itself, in other words the ontology of becoming, is to bring about the destruction of a false ontology. Of course, Deleuze can in turn only help himself gesturally to the phenomenological method of showing. Like phenomenology, he is interested in a showing which refers to something without acting as a sign, and which is thus aimed at the creation of presence. For Deleuze this means aimed at a sense which has to express itself in propositions, but which does not lose itself in them. And yet he himself can only show this showing. The text, the entirety of the propositions, thus becomes a gesture both grand and vague.

Exhibiting or Presenting?  81

The Cinema of the Seers The criticisms of Deleuze’s ontology and epistemology can easily also hold true for his philosophy of cinema. According to Deleuze, Modern cinema, which emerged following the Second World War with Italian Neorealism, French nouvelle vague and West German Autorenkino (auteur cinema), introduces a “sensory-motor break”. Plot and judgement are no longer key. This break turns the human being into “a seer” (un voyant), who sees himself confronted by “something unthinkable in thought”, in other words the so-called external. In epistemological terms, this means nothing other than the Kantian thing-in-itself which we have to assume and yet can never observe; in terms of the philosophy of language and science, it means that which lies beyond the established symbolic forms, paradigms, epistemic structures accessing the world and lending meaning.57 This makes cinema not only a place of empirical and aesthetic seeing, but also, true to the ambiguity of this verb and Deleuze’s metaphysical conception of thinking, a place of the visionary. This visual-visionary upgrading of cinema conspicuously falls in with the downgrading of its political, mass cultural, democratic-revolutionary status. After Fascism, Stalinism and the USA (a menage á trois also a standard for Heidegger and Horkheimer/Adorno) shattered our belief in the masses as a true subject and in the conforming classical cinema from Eisenstein to John Ford, Modern political cinema can only be viable if it shows “that the people no longer exist, or not yet  . . . the people are missing”.58 This assumption requires a social theory as backing, of course, in this case, a negativistic one which, similarly to Foucault’s panoptic society, contracts to reveal a “society of control” whose power structure has become infinitely flexible and creative, and in which, true to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Gattopardo, everything therefore permanently changes in order that everything may remain the same.59 Strangely, in this respect Deleuze would be happy to ignore any finer ambivalences. Sociologists such as Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens would have far more to offer. Specifically concerning the theory of cinema, it is certainly possible to interpret Deleuze to the effect that the be all and end all for Modern film cannot be to represent the people, but to create (invent, bring about) the people with every story it tells.60 What remains conspicuous, however, is the parallel between the negativism of social theory and the affirmation of cineastic seeing which covers the whole breadth of the meaning of seeing, from the contemplative, to the voyeuristic, to the visionary. Deleuze certainly conceives of this seeing in an aesthetic, or philosophically in a Kantian-aesthetic way. For example, he interprets the Critique of Judgement by linking it to Rimbaud’s poetry of the future.61 The “disorganisation of all the senses” which Rimbaud strives for accordingly stands parallel to the no longer deterministically organised ratio of the cognitive faculty which Kant highlights as a specific feature of aesthetic judgement.

82  Exhibiting or Presenting? More than for the beautiful, this for Deleuze is true for the sublime because it brings the cognitive faculties “into play” in such a way as to make them fight with and against each other “like wrestlers”. This fighting game admittedly also applies, as Deleuze concedes only half-heartedly, to the aesthetic in general, in other words to the beautiful. In the aesthetic context, each cognitive faculty “make[s] the one go beyond the limits of the other”. Accordingly, the “great discovery” of the Critique of Judgement is the “emancipation of dissonance”, the “discordant accord”. In a formal sense of argumentational logic, consent and dissent are not simply opponents for Deleuze. His philosophy of difference recognises the element of unity in this context, too, and not only in that of Spinoza’s metaphysics of the one. It is noteworthy that at the aforementioned point Deleuze quotes Rimbaud incompletely. For Rimbaud, deregulation of all senses means an aesthetic achievement through which one becomes precisely what Deleuze praises in his cinema book: a seer. “Il s’agit d’arriver à l’inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens”. “Je dis qu’ il faut etre voyant, se faire voyant. Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et rausonné derèglement de tous les sens”.62 But Deleuze does not remain within this aesthetic context. He brings his book about Bergson, begun with a chapter on intuition, to a close with a plea for intuition. In this context it is not so much the philosophers who can become the masters of this vivid-imaginative thinking, but once again the artists and—for the first time—the mystics. It is a strange, solemn, poetic plea which seems to leave the relationship between philosophical and mystic intuition open. Bergson strives for intuition as a method, that much is clear. Whether or not Deleuze strives for it with this intention in mind is extremely doubtful. If he does, then it would be good to find out more about this method; if he does not, then we need to ask what distinguishes an intuition without method from art and mysticism. Deleuze would also have to specify in more detail his understanding mysticism. Emulating fellow Frenchman Michel de Certeau, he could comprehend it as a phenomenon of “heterology” directed at what language is unable to command and at what is only to be found in language in traces. Mystic speaking is therefore close to literary and especially poetic speaking.63 One could also define mysticism as a “transformation of self-awareness”, of one’s own wishing and wanting.64 Accordingly, the self no longer understands itself, at least no longer centrally as I in want of something. It can indeed relativise or negate its volition, can achieve a mysticism of moderate or complete renouncement and world denial. The universe into which the mystic withdraws is always one, is always the world in its unity. This in turn can of course be seen in two different ways: as one in which everything manifold disappears and with which we seek to become one in a unio mystica, or as the many in its unity, which converts the egocentric view to an altercentric one. In conjunction with Deleuze, it is also interesting to observe that in aesthetics there is a feeling which corresponds to that of the mystic,

Exhibiting or Presenting?  83 namely the feeling of the sublime, in which the self confronts an incomparable greatness and utter power.65 As a philosopher, and Deleuze does concede this, he can only observe the mystic “from the outside”.66 He could only cross this boundary by giving up being a philosopher himself, a thinker in the emphatic sense. And yet for him this boundary is not an absolute one. As a philosopher, he would obviously like to secure the maximum of intuition and certainty for which the mystic stands. As a philosopher he would therefore also like to see himself from the outside, from the side of the mystic, in other words as a mystic. Deleuze thus oscillates between the assumption that mysticism lies beyond what is accountable philosophically and the assumption that mysticism is the ideal towards which philosophy should strive. He himself would presumably view this oscillating as inevitable in conjunction with a thinking which has to elude rationalistic-analytical-definitional determinations. Correspondingly, it is possible to point out that Deleuze stands on neither this side nor that side of the boundary between philosophy and mysticism, but merely moves along it, describing it only theoretically, if at all, and then with the help of paradoxical logic.67 Such logic certainly has a long tradition in European and Asian cultures. In Protestant theology, it even represents the central figure of thought, from Luther to Kierkegaard to Barth. Its place within rhetoric, within public debate, has also been defining from the very beginning. Renaissance and Baroque, Enlightenment and Romanticism all honour it heuristically, with differing emphases.68 Nietzsche brings it to a new peak as a literaryrhetorical technique. In Adorno, the theological and the literary lines come together, similarly also in Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze. In Luhmann, the paradox is, in contrast, relevant in the sober and artificial vocabulary of sociological science. One can generally doubt whether the logic of the paradox operating on the borderline between mysticism and philosophy can do justice to its logical claim and question whether it would not merely like with this proud title to ennoble fundamental ambiguities. One may, especially from a pragmatic point of view, hint that the as-if structure of action, which characterises in a special way the parasocial interaction already underlined, really does provide a possible solution for paradoxes. Instead of changing indecisively between philosophy and mysticism, between more or less substantiable knowledge and unsubstantiable insight based only on subjective experience, one has as a philosopher accordingly to assure oneself of those good reasons why, and especially in which way, fictions—uncertain yet trustworthy or believable assumptions—are constitutive for thinking and acting. Deleuze actually plays to this defusing view,69 being interested in the concept of belief especially for politico-practical reasons. Every action is essentially a venture, mostly of course only a small one. But there are situations which require exceptional acting. These are situations for heroes. As a socio-theoretical

84  Exhibiting or Presenting? negativist, Deleuze is convinced that this acting is due. But a strong belief (in something) is required in order to perform it. The relationship between epistemological and social theory once again becomes problematic at this point. The elitism linked to an intuitionistic and coquettishly mystical epistemological theory does not, for the present, really suit the anarchism advocated by Deleuze. In emulation of Max Stirner, the radical anarchist contests justification of all regulation of the individual and leaves all social coexistence to the spontaneous and voluntary acts of individuals.70 This and the privilege of knowledge, as mysticism must grant, are incompatible. Privilege distinguishes a few who, through this privilege, assume an elevated, maybe even sublime status. An anarchist could still insist, however, that it is not rational, argumentative beliefs which are key, but merely the contingency and constellation of situations in which, sometimes and for whatever reasons, an association with others arises, and sometimes not. Those subjective experiences which are called mystical may not lay claim to any privilege to this extent, for, generally speaking, it is only ever a case of linking something to something else, one belief to another, for the purpose of creating the new. The fact that insights refuse to be argumentatively confirmable then conforms, even, to social non-regulability and practical spontaneity. The burdensome consequences which would ensue as a result of this belief, however, would still be dubious enough to motivate a critical theorist, a theorist of rationality with anarchic streak, to avoid them and leave them aside, on the political left side, so to speak.

Notes   1 Odo Marquard provides a theoretical reconstruction of this context in his essay “Kant und die Wende zur Ästhetik” (in: ibid., Aesthetica und Anaesthetica, loc. cit., pp. 21–34). Accordingly, aesthetics comes into play when neither scientific nor historical thinking prove productive, and is closely connected to natural philosophy (cf. pp. 24, 32).   2 Deleuze is obviously positioning himself in the Nietzschean-Bergsonian tradition of vitalism. What is less familiar is his interest in a philosophy of nature (Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. by Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press 1995, p. 155).  3 Regarding the following quotations cf. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (third version), in: Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and Others, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press 2003, p. 251–252.  4 Letter to Horkheimer from 16th October 1935, quoted in: Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I.3: Abhandlungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1974, p. 983 (our trans.).   5 Cf. Benjamin, “The Work of Art . . .” (third version), loc.cit., p. 255.  6 Michael W. Jennings, “The Production, Reproduction, and Reception of the Work of Art”, in: Michael W. Jennings et. al. (eds.), The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media: Walter Benjamin, Harvard University Press 2008, p. 9 (“Alois Riegl was perhaps the most important theoretician of art history in Europe in the period around 1900”).

Exhibiting or Presenting?  85  7 Unlike Foucault, Giorgio Agamben greatly extends the list of dispositifs. He believes it also to contain the “fountain pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarette, shipping, computer, mobile phone, and—why not—even language itself, possibly the oldest dispositif of all, which a primate allowed itself thousands of years ago . . . to be captured by all too easily” (Was ist ein Dispositiv? Zürich/Berlin: Diaphanes 2008, p. 26; our trans.)   8 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books 1990, p. 23.   9 Benjamin, “The Work of Art . . .” (third version), loc.cit., p. 255–256; cf. regarding the first definition of aura p. 253. In the age of the internet, the cultural history of perception naturally requires expansion. Once again, we face the idea of the original becoming softened, in this case the idea of the correct quotation. The “Copy-Paste-Syndrome” consists in compiling texts such as seminar essays and school talks, sometimes even doctoral theses, from internet articles, for example Wikipedia entries, which in turn have been copied from various books, often without citing these books as sources. 10 Benjamin, “The Work of Art . . .” (second version), loc.cit., p. 104. 11 Benjamin, “The Work of Art . . .” (third version), loc.cit., p. 256, footnote 11. 12 Benjamin, “The Work of Art . . .” (third version), loc.cit., p. 256. 13 Quoted in: Benjamin, “The Work of Art . . .” (third version), loc.cit. p. 257, footnote 15. Benjamin seems to have adopted the expression “theology of art” from Victor Cousin, cf. Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit: Kommentar von Detlev Schöttker, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2007, p. 140f. Cousin can be called the first Hegelian of France. He seems to be responsible, beside Théophile Gautier, for coining the expression l’art pour l’art. On Romantic “art religion”, this too a term of Hegel’s, and on expressivism as a religion, cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1989, pp. 347. 14 Benjamin, “The Work of Art . . .” (third version), loc.cit., p. 257. 15 Cf. Harald Wenzel, Die Abenteuer der Kommunikation: Echtzeitmassenmedien und der Handlungsraum der Hochmoderne, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft 2001, p. 20; cf. p. 11–12. I shall return to this concept in more detail in Chapter 8. 16 Benjamin, “The Work of Art . . .” (third version), loc.cit., p. 257, footnote 15, & p. 258. 17 Cf. Benjamin’s letter to Adorno from 23.2.1939, in which he reacts to Adorno’s critique of the well-known letter from 10.11.1938 which also concerns Simmel. Like the latter, Benjamin interrelated in an “unmediated” way “individual coincidental characteristics” from the field of the superstructure to characteristics of economic substructure. To this, Benjamin responds with, amongst other things, a question: “Should it Not Be Time to Respect Him (Simmel, J.F.) as One of the Forefathers of Cultural Bolshevism?” Adorno/Benjamin: Correspondence 1928– 1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp 1994, pp. 405 & 367; cf. Klaus Lichtblau, Georg Simmel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1997, pp. 11., esp. p. 13 & 17; Jürgen Habermas, “Georg Simmel über Philosophie und Kultur”, in: Jürgen Habermas, Texte und Kontexte, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1991, pp. 157ff. Incidentally, Benjamin’s definition of aura had a forerunner in Simmel’s description of art as a tensely exciting relationship between closeness and distance. In Simmel’s vitalist-metaphysics-based aesthetics, on the one hand art brings us reality (“in its actual and innermost sense”), on the other hand it distances us in a sphere of “unmediated-ness”, it “places a veil between us and it, like the fine blueish haze which engulfs distant mountains” (Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, Gesamtausgabe, Vol 6, ed. D. P. Frisby & K. Chr. Köhnke, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1989, pp. 658–659. Our trans.).

86  Exhibiting or Presenting? 18 Cf. Georg Simmel, “Die beiden Formen des Individualismus”, in: Georg Simmel (ed.), Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, Vol. I, Gesamtausgabe Vol. 7, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995, pp. 49 & 52. 19 George Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, Blackwell Publishing (www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/bpl_images/content_store/sample_ chapter/0631225137/bridge.pdf), p. 18; cf. Markus Schroer, Das Individuum der Gesellschaft: Synchrone und diachrone Theorieperspektiven, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2001, p. 308. 20 Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, loc.cit., p. 14. 21 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edition, with an introd. by Margaret Canovan, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 1998, pp. 199–200. 22 Hannah Arendt, Über die Revolution, München: Pieper 1974, p. 87, quoting John Adams and—in the German edition—Brecht (“Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht”/“You don’t see those in the shadow”); cf. also Axel Honneth, similarly fundamental, “Unsichtbarkeit: Über die moralische Epistemologie von ‚Anerkennung’ ”, in: Axel Honneth (ed.), Unsichtbarkeit: Stationen einer Theorie der Intersubjektivität, Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp 2003, pp. 10–28. 23 Cf. Josef Früchtl & Jörg Zimmermann, “Ästhetik der Inszenierung. Dimensionen eines gesellschaftlichen, individuellen und kulturellen Phänomens”, in: ead. (eds.), Ästhetik der Inszenierung, Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp 2001, pp. 9–47. 24 Benjamin, “The Work of Art . . . ” (third version), loc.cit, p. 262. 25 The claim to appearing on reality TV or a casting show also fits in here, even if it distorts Benjamin’s revolutionary and Simmel’s individualistic concerns to the point of embarrassment. Cf. here Bernhard Pörksen & Wolfgang Krischke, Die Casting-Gesellschaft: Die Sucht nach Aufmerksamkeit und das Tribunal der Medien, Cologne: Herbert von Halem Verlag 2010 (abridged version in FAZ 25.8.2010). 26 In the 1970s, Jean-Louis Baudry brought fame to the assumption that cinema can be a dispositif. For him, however, the theoretical framework was determined by psychoanalysis, by Freud’s theory of dreams as the fulfilment of wishes, and by Lacan’s buzzword ‘mirror stage’ (which has had many heuristic consequences in cultural science essays, from the perspective of a toddler psychology which works empirically yet has no grip on reality; cf. here Martin Dornes, Die emotionale Welt des Kindes, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2000, pp. 217) Correspondingly, Baudry’s general assumption is “that the cinematographic dispositif determines an artificial state of regression” (“Das Dispositiv: Metapsychologische Betrachtungen des Realitätseindrucks”, 1975, printed in: Claus Pias, Joseph Vogl, Lorenz Engell, Oliver Fahle & Britta Neitzel (eds.), Kursbuch Medienkultur: Die maßgeblichen Theorien von Brecht bis Baudrillard, Stuttgart 2004, p. 399; our trans). Plato’s cave analogy can be transferred to the situation in which a cinema audience finds itself, sitting ‘spellbound’ (paralysed and fascinated) in a dark room and believing the projected images to be real. The bottom line is a narcisstic regression. Like (nearly) every psychoanalytically based aesthetic theory, the dispositif or apparatus theory has the great weakness that the content and form of a film (of a work of art) assume secondary importance. This theory shows nothing, it only demonstrates what is always the same. Frank Kessler pointed out to me, however, that the magazine “Screen”, in emulation of Baudry, most certainly honours the form of films. 27 But also according to Luhmann: “Individuals are self-observers. They become individuals by observing their own observations. (. . .) One might argue with Simmel, Mead or Sartre that they acquire their identity through the gaze of

Exhibiting or Presenting?  87 others, but only on conditions that they observe that they are being observed” (quoted in: Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener, Filmtheorie zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius 2008, p. 134). 28 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books 1995, p. 217: “Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance”. We are “in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism”. 29 Cf. Manfred Frank, Was ist Neostrukturalismus? Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp 1984, p. 419. 30 Cf. May, Gilles Deleuze, loc.cit., pp. 13. 31 Cf. May, Gilles Deleuze, loc.cit., pp. 115–116. 32 Alain Badiou, Deleuze‚ Das Geschrei des Seins’, Diaphanes: Zürich/Berlin 2003, pp. 19–20. 33 Theo Kobusch, Art. “Intuition”, in: Joachim Ritter & Karlfried Gründer (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 4: I-K, Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co 1976, p. 529. 34 Steven Nadler argues in favour of the second side of the alternative and moreover defends Spinoza as a “complete” rationalist (Spinoza’s Ethics. An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006, p. 178). 35 Christof Ellsiepen, “Die Erkenntnisarten”, in: Michael Hampe & Robert Schnepf (eds.), Baruch de Spinoza, Ethik, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2006, p. 147. This ambiguity can also be found in the comments by Deleuze on the highest form of knowledge, cf. his, Exxpressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. by Martin Joughin, New York: Zone Books 1992, pp. 300–301. 36 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by T.E. Hulme,Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company 1999, pp. 24 & 33 (“Introduction a la Métaphysique”, in: Henri Bergson (ed.), La Pensée et le mouvant: Essais et conférences, Paris 1955, pp. 205 & 217). 37 Cf. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, loc.cit., pp. 23 & 33. 38 Richard Rorty, “Is It Desirable to Love Truth?” in: Richard Rorty (ed.), Truth, Politics, and ‚post-modernism’ (Spinoza lectures at the University of Amsterdam), Van Gorcum 1997, pp. 15 & 16. 39 Gilles Deleuze, Dialoge, loc.cit., pp. 63 & 64; on the intellectual relationship and friendship between Bergson and William James cf. Kennan Ferguson, “La Philosophie Americaine: James, Bergson, and the Century of Intercontinental Pluralism”, in: Theory and Event, Vol. 9, No. 1, (2006); in which sense Deleuze can be seen as a pragmatist is described by Paul Patton in his article “Redescriptive Philosophy: Deleuze and Rorty”, in: Paul Patton(ed.), Deleuzian Concepts. Philosophy, Colonization, Politics, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2010, pp. 60–77. 40 John Dewey, “Qualitative Thought”, in: John Dewey(ed.), Philosophy and Civilization, New York: Capricorn Books 1963, p. 95. 41 Dewey, “Qualitative Thought”, loc.cit., p. 98; cf. pp. 101. 42 Dewey, “Qualitative Thought”, loc.cit., p. 100–101. 43 Cf. Martin Hartmann, Die Praxis des Vertrauens, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2011, pp. 53, 78, 259, with reference to Robert Brandom’s theory of inferentialism. To this extent, there is no strict analogy between what Stanley Cavell calls “acknowledging” and the intuition or qualitative thought in Dewey. The act of acknowledgement enjoys a temporal and logical primacy; in contrast, unlike what Dewey and Bergson think, intuition, the implicitly or qualitatively known, enjoys only a temporal primacy (cf. here Ch. 9). 44 Dewey, “Qualitative Thought”, loc.cit., p. 107. 45 Dewey, “Qualitative Thought”, loc.cit., p. 105–106.

88  Exhibiting or Presenting? 46 Dewey, “Qualitative Thought”, loc.cit., p. 106. In this respect, too, Deleuze agrees with Dewey, since it is the verb, especially the infinitive, which is best suited in language to expressing an “event” in both senses of the word (cf. May, Gilles Deleuze, loc.cit., pp. 102). 47 Matthias Jung, “ ‘Making us explicit’: Artikulation als Organisationsprinzip von Erfahrung”, in: Matthias Jung &Magnus Schlette (eds.), Anthropologie der Artikulation: Begriffliche Grundlagen und transdisziplinäre Perspektiven, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2005, p. 128. Jung emphasises the concept of articulation which Dewey only uses peripherally, and addresses, as shown already by the title of his essay, Brandom’s Making it Explicit. With a reference to Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms, to Susanne Langer and others, Jung rightly stresses the diversity of articulating media, and does not restrict articulation to language alone. On predication cf. Dewey, “Qualitative Thought”, loc. cit., pp. 105–106. 48 Dewey, “Qualitative Thought”, loc.cit., p. 116. 49 Dewey, “Qualitative Thought”, loc.cit., p. 106. 50 Cf. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, loc.cit., pp. 32–33. 51 Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, loc.cit., pp. 52, 54 & 60. 52 Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, loc.cit., pp. 116 & 121; cf. 19–203. 53 Cf. May, Gilles Deleuze, loc.cit., p. 38. 54 Cf. here in summary once again May, Gilles Deleuze, loc.cit., pp. 97. 55 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Frankfurt/M. 1987, p. 136. 56 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, transl. by Paul Patton, Columbia University Press 1994, p. 64. 57 Deleuze, The Time-Image, loc.cit., p. 169. 58 Deleuze, The Time-Image, loc.cit., p. 216. 59 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, in: October, Vol. 59 (Winter, 1992), pp. 3–7; the fact that one does not have to read Deleuze antithetically to the liberal-democratic understanding of politics is shown by Paul Patton in his book. Deleuzian Concepts, loc.cit., pp. 137, pp. 161. 60 Cf. Patricia Pisters, “Violence and Laughter: Paradoxes of Nomadic Thought in Postcolonial Cinema”, in: Simone Bignal & Paul Patton (eds.), Deleuze and Postcolonial Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2010, p. 208. 61 Cf. regarding the following quotations of Gilles Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy”, in: Gilles Deleuze (ed.), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. by Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997, pp. 33–35. 62 Arthur Rimbaud, letters to Georges Izambard from 13th May 1871 and Paul Demeny from 15th May 1871, in: Rolland de Renéville & Jules Mouquet (eds.), Oeuvres complètes de Arthur Rimbaud, Paris: Editions Flammarion 1951, pp. 252 & 254. Jay Hetrick drew my attention to the connection between (new) seeing (opening up the unknown) and the aesthetic power of judgement, albeit in his interpretation of this connection, put forward in the dissertation Cineaesthetics: A Critique (of the Critique) of Judgment After Bergson, tending more towards Bergson than Kant. 63 Cf. Michel de Certeau, Mystische Fabel, from the French by Michael Lauble, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010 (French. Or. 1982). Certeau does not offer a transhistorical theory of mysticism, however, instead reconstructing it as a crisis phenomenon of Mediaeval certitude of faith, which appeals to the body, the corpse of Jesus Christ as an authority of certitude and an object of experience. This lends it its erotic character. The eroticism itself is comprehended by Certeau, as it is by psychoanalysis, as the further development or new onset of mysticism.

Exhibiting or Presenting?  89 64 Ernst Tugendhat, Egozentrizität und Mystik. Eine anthropologische Studie, München 2006, p. 122 (our trans.); cf. p. 125. While it is usual to define mysticism relative to religion, Tugendhat points out that in one central aspect religion is opposed to mysticism. It is namely not a transformation which takes on the self in itself, but a transformation of the world, and indeed, in the language of Feuerbach and Freud, “using a projection of volition” (122, our trans.). On Deleuze’s alliance with the theophanic philosophy of Meister Eckhart and others cf. Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, London: Verso 2006. 65 Cf. Tugendhat, Egozentrizität und Mystik, loc.cit., pp. 118 (our trans.). 66 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books 1988, p. 112. 67 Cf. Pisters, “Violence and Laughter”, loc.cit., p. 215. 68 Cf. P. Probst, Art. “Paradox”, in: Joachim Ritter & Karlfried Gründer Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 7, Basel: Schwabe & Co 1989, pp. 81–90; cf. Christian Thiel, Art. “Paradoxon”, in: Jürgen Mittelstraß (ed.), Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, Vol. 3, Stuttgart/Weimar 1995, pp. 46 (our trans.). 69 Cf. Schaub, Gilles Deleuze im Kino, loc.cit., p. 265. 70 Jay Hetrick points out in his dissertation that a political philosopher like Saul Newman interprets Deleuze as an individualistic anarchist emulating Stirner (cf. amongst others From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, Oxford: Lexington Books 2001, pp. 97–114), that Deleuze himself comprehends Stirner, however, as an ambiguous witness who, on the one hand, clings too fast to the Hegelian dialectic, and on the other hand visualises all too blatantly the consequence of this dialectic, namely nihilism (cf. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, loc.cit., pp. 161–162).

6 Made and Yet True On the Aesthetics of the Presence of the Hero

“Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and a people that are lacking as the correlate of creation”.1 As Heideggarian as this sentence sounds, it can be given sociocritical accent. It would then be reformulated thus: artists and philosophers are heroes who counter societal negativity with the new, the positive, with new ways of perceiving, new concepts. One reason they are capable of this is their ability to leap over every abyss inherent principally to all, yet especially to unconventional action. In order to risk this leap, a faith of considerable proportions is required. Deleuze rediscovers this faith in the name of Modernity, the age of lost cognitive and moral certainties. Viewing artists and philosophers as heroes is, however, nothing new. As far back as the late 16th century, Giordano Bruno presented just such an approach when, still true to the Platonic tradition, he accredited human beings with aesthetic and philosophical training as having the exceptional ability to rise up from the level of sensuality to the level of God’s beholding knowledge. Spinoza shared with Bruno both this view and that of pantheism.2 Today, however, the philosopher and the artist are not the only candidates for heroism, joined not only by the warrior but also by the sportsman. The US-American basketball player Bill Bradley, for example, has been reported as having “vision” as his most remarkable talent. “During a game, Bradley’s eyes are always a glaze of panoptic attention”. He obviously possesses a “responsiveness to the demands of the situation”—a situative-sensitive perception which comes across as “nearly mystical”.3

Hegel, Modernity and Art In order to localise the heroic in Modernity, we need to be reminded, however, of a sociophilosophical theory which states that heroes no longer really have a place within the structure of Modern society. Here ‘Modern’ refers to an age characterised by a constitutional division of powers, individual freedom and an economic division of labour. Hegel, the first to come up with this description at the beginning of the 19th century, also called it “prosaic” and contrasted it with that other extreme, the “mythical” age. In Modernity, everything is rational, sober and routine. The narrative form

Made and Yet True  91 in keeping with these characteristics is no longer the epic, the tragedy, lyricism or the novel, but prose. The Modern age is, in fact, no longer reflected in art at all, only in science and a philosophy which has become scientific. At the beginning of the 20th century, Max Weber was later to speak of the “disenchantment” of Western culture brought about by the Modern age.4 Meadows containing streams and silver birch trees have ceased to be home to the fairies and spirits celebrated in fairy tales and romantic poems. Celebration still takes place, but nobody seriously believes in these creatures anymore. And this is the situation facing art in Modernity: it still sings its songs, tells its enchanting stories, paints its figures and symbols of horror on the wall, or maybe just the screen, but people no longer perceive them as truthful, let alone the truth, or at least not with conviction. Modern art is made; it is no longer true. According to Hegel, as well as Weber, this is also precisely the situation facing heroism in the Modern age. As a way of acting, and as a character model, heroism belongs in the past, in a Premodern age; in other words, in an age not yet familiar with constitutional democracy, bourgeoisie and capitalism. In the post-mythical age, and especially the Modern age, heroism can only emerge in two contexts: firstly, under the abnormal conditions of revolution or war; secondly, under normal conditions, within the realm of art—i.e. that medium which, as has just been suggested—seems to be decreasingly in keeping with the times as a medium of truth. In post-heroic times, the place for heroes is art. We not only glean our knowledge of heroes solely from art, from ancient epics and tragedies but also, and more significantly, for Hegel, there exists a structural agreement between art and heroism. Just as the hero embodies something of general validity, so the artist in his works presents something of general validity. The hero is the personification of a sociocultural whole, an individual who embodies a community, a volonté générale. Correspondingly, the artist is the hero of a sociocultural truth brought into play by his work. He brings an “idea”, in other words a grasped reality, into play. According to Hegel, this is a completely appropriate description of artistic competence in post-heroic and pre-bourgeois times, especially in Ancient Greece, but it is definitely no longer appropriate in the age of civilians. Nevertheless, in art historical terms and especially since the mid-19th century, this notion, referred to polemically as ‘avant garde’, has characterised the self-comprehension of the aesthetic Modern age in a manner which has become increasingly aggressive as perspective has increasingly dwindled. If the place for heroes is art, and if, in the Modern age, art can no longer be a place of truth, then the figure of the hero also lacks the power to convince: he, too, is made and untrue.

Sport, Stars and Zidane In post-mythical and especially Modern times, heroism therefore, sociophilosophically speaking, has its legitimate place in art, its elitist and popular variant. Nowadays, this theory can be complemented by a sociological one.

92  Made and Yet True In a differentiated society, in the sense of Max Weber or Parsons and Luhmann, several subsystems are available as fields of heroism besides art and popular culture, for example politics, religion or science. Science proves to be too aloof. Researchers and inventors, such as Otto von Lilienthal, Wernher von Braun and, first and foremost of course, Albert Einstein, can admittedly be viewed as heroes for discovering and conquering new scientific and technological continents, as it were, sometimes against massive resistance from their colleagues, sometimes even risking their lives for the sake of experiment. And yet, even though this is the case, even though scientists and inventors fulfil typical heroic criteria—risking their lives, fighting popular opinion, promoting the new and unknown, and all of this for the common good—one still hesitates to call them heroes. ‘Pioneers’ or ‘geniuses’ seems more apt. In the case of religion, and especially in the case of politics, the situation is different. Religious heroes and heroines are saints, martyrs and legendary figures who embody faith in purity, who die for it or who serve as mythical role models on the back of their exemplary experiences. The glorious age of these heroes and heroines is long gone. With Modernity, they became far less significant. This is not true of politics, however. On the contrary. It is true that, in its party-based and parliamentary form, politics has counted as the anti-heroic stereotypical enemy since the bourgeois 19th century, but in its more or less revolutionary form it has brought forth a great many heroes during the same period. Taking my own generation, born in the 1950s, an ad hoc list would include John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. In this context, one does not hesitate to speak of heroes because the fight against popular opinion to promote the new and unknown is here fought physically and—often fatally—with violence for a populous which is only just emerging. These characteristics—physicality, violence, fighting against a powerful or even super powerful mainstream opponent—are also to be found in that sociocultural subsystem which advanced in the 20th century to become the “central system of heroes in Modern society”, namely sport or, more precisely, professional sport. It is “the only area of society able to produce real-life heroes in a non-dangerous and still socially acceptable manner”.5 Here we must stress that in this field we encounter real-life heroes, and increasingly also heroines, whereas the only other field in the running under Modern conditions, as Hegel has maintained, namely art or, more broadly, popular culture, involves unreal heroes and heroines. These heroes and heroines may be real people, in the shape of actors, pop stars or entertainers, and yet they are not really real since they primarily exist at a secondary level, namely on the (cinema or TV) screen. These heroic entities hovering between the real and unreal are known as “stars”. It is no coincidence that the emergence of this term coincided with the emergence of film at the beginning of the 20th century. And yet we should

Made and Yet True  93 not forget that the principle of the star was introduced as early as the 19th century. At that time, the idea of the hero or high-flyer was rooted in the theatre. The “virtuoso” or “stage hero” was the 19th century “star”.6 The following two elements have remained characteristic of stars to the present day: having a skill, and having a stage to stand on. Having a skill means mastering the rules. Masters know their rules inside out. They apply them with seeming nonchalance, in a manner which surprises us, enabling us to see or hear something we have never witnessed before. Like the way Marilyn Monroe sang “I wanna be loved by you” in a soft and creamy, lascivious voice, with a slight vibrato and wide, sad and confused childlike eyes before adding a “boop-boop-a-doop” in keeping with the genre of the time; the way in which Urban Priol can within seconds alter his facial expressions, posture and voice to those of Angela Merkel, Edmund Stoiber or Hansi Hinterseer, all stars of German politics and Austro-German entertainment; or the way Franz Beckenbauer could pass the ball by flicking his ankle, the way Diego Maradona could steal the ball from the centre circle and then zig-zag past all the players standing in his way, or the way Zinedine Zidane could dance powerfully and elegantly through the football arena like a bull7 (how could we ever forget the France versus Brazil match in the 2006 World Cup when, as was accurately noted by a sports journalist,8 the Brazilian football stars ran alongside Zidane like dogs on a lead, not daring to attack the leader of the French pack because disgrace loomed hard on their heels, in both senses of the phrase)—these are all examples portraying present stars as experts, as masters within kingdoms of rules.9 In bourgeois language, the star represents the achievement principle. This is why the star, unlike the hero, has his place in bourgeois Modernity. It is through his achievements that he distinguishes himself, makes his mark, creates a profile for himself. And in no other subsystem of Modern society is this principle so purely true as in professional sport. Age, origins, wealth, beauty, race, sex, religion, all play a role in other subsystems, but not in sport (with a few exceptions for certain types of sport). But the artist-expert is nothing, is non-existent as a star if he only has a skill and yet has no stage to stand on. A so-called achiever who shies away from the media spotlight—a footballer with no inclination to play to a full stadium in front of the television cameras, a writer who refuses to give interviews and have his photo taken—does not have what it takes to be a star.10 The age of technological reproducibility, of newspapers, photography, pictures in magazines, radio, film, video and ultimately the Internet, plays to this requirement. And, although stars undoubtedly have skills in their own right, they deserve the title publicity parasites for their extreme dependence on publicity, for being creatures which bury themselves in the multiple, pseudo-organic tissue called publicity. They only exist whilst this tissue is supplying them with attention, and yet this process only works if they in turn integrate themselves and feed the tissue. Stars, like heroes, embody something of a general nature, namely group-specific values and

94  Made and Yet True norms. Their success can be explained in no other way. They are publicity parasites with a built-in symbiotic effect (combining skill and sociocultural integration). The English word publicity does not only mean “in the public eye” and “generally famous” but also “advertising” and “PR”, and this is what the parasite within the star concentrates on. Unlike the hero, the star only exists as long as the spotlight of publicity is directed at him, not the publicity directed at discourse, but the publicity directed at selfpresentation. He is a “spotlight opportunist”.11 To this extent, he is what he has been since the very beginning, since the 19th century: a stage hero and nothing more. And yet for a person to be awarded star status, achieving on stage is still not enough. As a third element, it is also necessary to have something akin to an aura, or at least its secular successor: an image. Walter Benjamin defined aura as the localised and instantaneous appearance of distance, of an inapproachability in both a spatial and an epistemological sense, an untouchability and an inexplicability. Following his basic and thus rough categorisation, aura stems from the historical phase of culture steeped in tradition, originally formed in religion, ritual and cult and projecting through to the bourgeois age and its teachings on the autonomy of art. Since aura stands for the uniqueness and authenticity of a thing or person, it is defined by a space-time juncture, by the here and now, by the empiristic criterion of individuality. Only a work which is evidently in a certain place at a certain time, such as the “Mona Lisa” in the Louvre, can claim to be the original. Only a person who is evidently present in a certain place, on a certain theatre stage, at a certain time, can claim to be the actor who acted in a certain play, let us say Macbeth. Since uniqueness is logically not reproducible, neither is the aura attached to it. Film stars therefore cannot possess an aura, or at least not on screen. According to Benjamin’s simple construction, the capitalistically organised film industry responds to this “with the artificial build-up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio”. Although the age of technical reproduction suppresses “cult value” in favour of so-called exhibition value, the “cult of the movie star” proves that successful preservation mechanisms are in place. The cult “preserves that magic of the personality which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its own commodity character”.12 Accordingly, stars are commodities, are consumables produced for exchange, who in Marxian terms help to create their own spell, their own “fetishism”. In short, stars are a product of capitalism. If we concede to Benjamin that different definitions of aura are intertwined here, and that the empiristic definition erroneously tempts him into a moment of capitalism-critical madness, then one can accredit stars with having an aura even, and especially, in the age of technical-visual media. However, close admirers and fans come to them physically, and however much information fans are able to collect about them, as soon as stars appear in a photo, on a computer screen or in the cinema, they become distant again, they assume an individual manifestation which is ineffabile.

Made and Yet True  95 Stars are made and yet (in a certain sense, a broad sense) true; a sociocultural validity appertains to them. If we adhere not to aura, but to image as a concept, then we can circumvent the sophistic Benjaminian examination and grasp the star simply as a person who has at his disposal a (characterising and exploitable) public persona. Since the 1960s, if not before, image has been closely connected with pop culture, with “pop” being whatever or whoever has an image, a consumable and correspondingly marketable self-image with a mass impact, primarily constructed from technically produced and aesthetically expressive (‘loud’) pictures.13 To this extent, the element of the image conflicts with that of achievement, for far more important than what certain persons, the stars, are really capable of—playing football, playing the guitar, singing or running—is the image which they portray. Their supersize salaries and fees can be comprehended in this context. Those who give a great deal to society, as the simple rule of trade goes, are also given a great deal in return. What exactly stars give is not so easy to estimate. But they get public attention for it and, usually, a correspondingly large sum of money. They are paid not only according to their achievement, however, but also and especially according to their image. Image is by no account identical with achievement. Achievement demands to be paid in a market society, but image is unpayable.

Philosophy of Presence Sport has also been a starting point for a theorist who enjoys comparing the various arts, moving freely between literature, history and philosophy, and in so doing ignoring the petty distinction often made between elevated and popular culture. The theorist I am referring to is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, who—crucially in our context—is in the process of restoring a term which in the recent past—the Postmodern age—had a bad reputation, namely presence. After Edmund Husserl had first brought to this term a certain level of significance, including in the sense of relevance, conceiving of philosophy as phenomenology and presenting phenomenology as the science which grasps phenomena with immediacy in their purity, in other words intuitively and apodictically or, more succinctly, grasps them in their ‘presence’, Jacques Derrida then proceeded to identify this manner of philosophical thinking with the entire Western way of thinking and discredited it as a “metaphysics of presence”. It did not pay or rather—with a view to Martin Heidegger—did not pay enough attention to what is not shown. In contrast, what Derrida calls différance or “trace” refers to the permanent postponing of presence. Différance means neither presence nor absence, but precedes this relationship of opposition. This pattern is followed by the now sufficiently familiar deconstructivistic language game. This linguistic game does have a serious core, of course. Restoring the concept of presence is impossible today without a reference to Derrida’s,

96  Made and Yet True as well as Hegel’s arguments against immediacy theories. Gumbrecht seems to wish to eliminate these arguments with one fell swoop. He repeatedly stresses, almost imploringly, that presence is concerned with a spatial and a sensual or physical, not a temporal and a mental relationship to things and events, with a primacy not of comprehensibility, but of tangibility.14 One can readily understand the intellectual impulse towards this categorial shift. Especially post-Hegelian philosophy has repeatedly formulated a protest against the ideal of a purely mental conceptualisation of the human being which asserts itself successfully through the marrying of Platonism and Christianity, and which since the Early Modern Age has reinforced itself through the concepts of a res cogitans and a transcendental self. In our times this is sometimes exacerbated by an irascible feeling of “anger, an absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts”15 cast over (the materiality of) things and events, and receiving their latest benediction through the central linguistic-analytical and especially deconstructivistic assumption that there is nothing beyond language and text. But Gumbrecht knows, of course, that he is initially only giving language to a “desire” for immediacy, and by no means yet to proof of the same.16 Philosophically speaking, a desire or yearning, a persistent form of faith, does not make one blessed. And although the wish might have been father to the thought, it is, as we know, not identical to the thought. In philosophical terms, this desire is strongly contrasted to Hegel’s criticism of “sense-certainty” as a type of immediate knowledge which doggedly adheres to a deictic reference to the “this”, “here” and “now”, and yet which repeatedly proves itself to be something “mediated”, necessarily linked to what it is excluding. Correspondingly, Gumbrecht also states that the immediate only “appears” to be given prior to every mediation, presence only “appears” to be given prior to every interpretation, that one “ultimately” has to “oscillate” between presence and interpretation and bear out a “tension” between the two.17 Admittedly, the question still remains of how this tension may be described more precisely: with a relative primacy of one side or as equally balanced. In order to gain more clarity, Gumbrecht seeks support from Martin Heidegger. He appears to him to be “the one philosopher” who has elaborated a “repertoire of nonmetaphysical concepts”, and in this context, metaphysics means no more than an attitude which goes “beyond” (meta) the material (physics), a way of looking at things which “gives a higher value to the meaning of phenomena than to their material presence”.18 There are good reasons to doubt whether philosophy could develop non-metaphysical concepts without abolishing itself in the process, whether philosophy without metaphysics could still be philosophy at all. And if there were to be contenders for this new type of philosophy, whether especially the later Wittgenstein and in our age Richard Rorty would not also be among them. Certainly, Heidegger made some more or less convincing proposals for how to leave behind the old paradigm of subject-object thinking influenced by Descartes, philosophy of consciousness, mentalism and representationalism.

Made and Yet True  97 In his pioneering work Being and Time, the counterproposal is “being-inthe-world” of the “being-there”. Of course, the spatial-deictic “there” in “being-there”, with which Heidegger describes human existence, plays to Gumbrecht’s needs. And yet it is rather astonishing that he refers to Heidegger so unreservedly when, in that phase of his work, the latter made the hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology his concern. He wanted to show that the asserted, direct perception of phenomenology can be replaced by understanding, where understanding means seeing something ‘as’ something, seeing something prepredicatively and, to this extent, more fundamentally than seeing only predicatively, seeing something as ‘meaningful’. In Being and Time, understanding thus constitutes the Being of the beingthere. Instead of a subject observing objects, we now have an understanding existence within a (symbolically structured) world. Understanding is not the counter-concept to presence, but the interim concept between impossible phenomenological presence and linguistically articulated understanding. Here it is crucial that existing means that special being which is concerned with its own being, and in post-idealistic terms that means that which can have a relationship to its own being. Its understanding of itself is practical. Thus being and (prepredicative) meaning are identical. It cannot be separated from the hermeneutic act of understanding, and yet this understanding precedes not predicatively, but practically. This is how the oscillation between meaning and being presents itself in Heidegger’s early works. Practice is accorded primacy. Gumbrecht also refers to Heidegger’s later works, primarily to his “Work of Art” essay. Here the concept of being, as an occurrence of truth, is central. Accordingly, truth is “something that happens” in the sense of a double movement of un-concealing and concealing. In the background, here is Heidegger’s famous and still controversial etymological interpretation of the Greek term aletheia as un-concealedness. He uses it as a contrast to the corresponding term of truth, according to which a statement is true if it ‘equates to’ reality or is ‘in agreement’ with it (is adequate). Whereas in his earlier works Heidegger emphasises the active, the un-concealing side of truth, the “disclosure” of a situation, in his later works an equality between un-concealing and hiding emerges. Heidegger’s concept of truth may be notoriously underdefined as far as criteria for testing the truth are concerned (if every un-concealing involves a concealing, it is for example unclear whether, and if so which, criteria are available to define a degree of un-concealing, a progress of knowledge),19 but if this concept of truth is interpreted in the context of constructivism and culturalism, then its justified concern becomes understandable. In order, namely, to be able to experience something (in its being), one has to identify it as a thing, as a something, and that means being able to lift it out of the continuum of empirical flow. This constructive identification takes place through practical or linguistic reference. Since both reference forms are culturally defined (albeit not necessarily determined), the being of things and events can only

98  Made and Yet True be stated within a cultural semantics. On the other hand, the being which we mean when we speak of an (indefinable, only to be experienced with the senses and the body, immediate) presence can only be located outside this area. In his “Work of Art” essay, Heidegger describes this tension as the “striving” between “world” and “earth”, between what is clearly the semantic context and what refuses to have any semantic assignation at all. It is this tension which allows us to grasp why an attempt to say the truth about something has to be a continuing double movement: into the area of culture, its practices and linguistic forms, and back out again, whereby what is meant by “out” can have no more, but also no less than the status of a necessary fiction.20 In this case, the oscillation between inside and outside, sense and presence, is strictly paritetic. Gumbrecht has good reasons for preferring Heidegger as his philosophical inspiration. In my opinion, it is not difficult to show that a philosopher and political opponent such as Adorno should struggle with the same problem. With his theory of the “preponderance of the object”, Adorno attempts to answer in his own way the question of how being, now answering to the name “non-identical”, can be brought to bear in the midst of identifying thought. Here object means very different things. It means, firstly, the societal being, that which might not completely determine all subjective consciousness, but which does define it. It means, secondly, the inner nature, as explicated psychoanalytically as a libidinous unconscious, towards which the self, the unity of the subject, is a temporally secondary and always fragile form. It means, thirdly, that which appears in Modern epistemology in spatial terms as “the external”, in Hegelian terms as the immediate, in existential terms as the existence which systematically precedes the essence, the description of the essence of something. Although all knowledge expresses a reference, a mediation, and although subjectivity is defined by it, Adorno nevertheless concedes a precedence of the immediate, a “push” or an “impulse from outside”21 in order to start the process of conceptual-discursive mediation, which tends towards the infinite. It is not possible to prove that a theory is internally inconsistent without presupposing an external perspective, in hermeneutic terms a prejudice. The Hegelian-dialectical claim that a theory be measured by its own parameters and its premises accepted, is on the one hand imperative because a criticism cannot otherwise be convincing; on the other hand, this criticism is not triggered solely by the theory criticised. The criticism must allow the criticised to stipulate what is to be criticised and how. But that it is to be criticised (at all) presupposes an external perspective, the preceding, emotional, as yet unsubstantiated judgement that, so to speak, something is not in order. Here Adorno renegotiates the relationship described by Bergson as the primacy of “intuition” over “analysis”, described by Dewey as the primacy of “quality” over prediction and described by Cavell as the primacy of “acknowledging” over knowing.22

Made and Yet True  99 Precedence of the object means, fourthly and finally, primacy of the notyet-being, of the utopian. This interpretation requires the Kantian theory of ideas for its explication. The object is then not merely a constituted, but a regulative, not merely something which is given, but which is given up. Here Adorno once again encounters Dewey, defining (qualitative) experience as a regulative principle for thinking. To this extent, the object is not yet at all. Its true or actual being is consigned to the utopia of knowledge. It would have to be in a position to express the object as conceptless or “non-identical” through terms, in other words through identifying, unifying, generalising linguistic expressions. But it is only in a position to do this if it orientates itself to the object in the second meaning mentioned earlier, to the psychoanalytically explicated inner nature whose epistemological organ is mimetic experience, a subjectivity which “passive, without anxiety, entrusts itself to its own experience” in order to “truly fade into the object”.23 Fearlessness and trust are thus psychological conditions of knowledge. Mimesis is the name for the onto- and phylogenetic prerational capacity which already performs a first act of identification, but which is closer to the things and matters it identifies than the distancing, abstracting term. Identification here has a logical and psychological meaning: mimetically one identifies something (as a general case), by identifying with it. Adorno can therefore also be described as a “noetic of the non-identical”, as a philosopher who pursues the old programme of intuitive reason or beholding thought which, from Plato to Goethe and Hegel to Husserl and Heidegger (and Deleuze), ultimately assigns the intuition of ideas and the having of immediate mental evidence to the nous, not to the dianoia, and in this sense stands for an evidence theory of truth.24 With this theory, Adorno makes it clear that, despite all the mediation, despite the irrefutability of the theory that there can be no immediacy, it is not enough to content oneself with a parity between the two poles. The sense of oscillation between sense and presence is, far more, presence.

Aesthetics of Presence The link between a philosophy of presence and sport is now obvious. Being at a sporting event, even participating actively in one, following a football match live in a stadium or on TV, even playing oneself—is a prime example of the experiencing (“Erleben”, Gumbrecht’s favoured German term) of presence. In such cases, as in all cases of playing and experiencing which are intensive enough, we totally immerse ourselves in what is happening. In games and sport, presence or intensive experiencing is accorded primacy. Experiencing a football match in a stadium is not the same as experiencing it on a television screen (or big screen), of course. In a stadium, there is the unity of time, place and action, but on the TV or big screen, there is not, because the viewers are not at the place of action. Physical proximity and thus, according to Gumbrecht, the possibility to experience presence is

100  Made and Yet True therefore greater in a stadium. The stadium also provides an overwhelming (impressive and potentially violent) mass experience. Outdoor big screen events are able to provide at least an element of this experience, while television compensates the lack of physical proximity through visual proximity and a dynamisation of the action. Twenty cameras and more are now used for transmission. By switching between wide shots, close-ups and super slow motion, they celebrate and enlarge the action, both literally and figuratively. The intended effect here is heroisation—of the body, the skills, the personality. In contrast, the effect for the recipient is a presentation of real events, boosted by continually improving presentation technology (screen resolution, loudspeakers) as if they were taking place not far away, but in one’s own living room. In this respect, television, like all works of art, aims at extinguishing the as-if: the viewers are to forget that they are spatially separate from what they are seeing—for example, a sports event. In the case of a television image, it is not possible as in the case of a picture to speak of an “artificial presence”. “Someone seeing the Eiffel Tower in a picture does not say that he is seeing the real Eiffel Tower”.25 In contrast, someone seeing a football match live on screen can indeed say that he is seeing the real match which is taking place at that very minute. Here we have a para-real or simultaneous presence. Admittedly, this primacy of presence in games and sport is not without its restrictions. Firstly, total immersion in what is happening thrives on the memory of what has already happened, as well as the hope of what could still happen. The past and the future cannot be separated from the present in the case of experiencing either. As spectators, as (surrogate) members of the team, we enjoy what is happening all the more when we are aware of the time factor. The eighty-ninth and ninetieth minutes of a football match, for example, heighten the intensity of the experience, or at least they do if the match is not yet decided, if it could still twist towards a positive outcome, towards a victory or at least away from an embarrassing defeat. Experiencing the present requires time in its three modal-pertinent dimensions. And the intensity of the experience thrives on the extension of time. Secondly, and more importantly, the presence of stars and heroes on the pitch, the TV or cinema screen can also assume a different quality, for example an aesthetic one. An aesthetic experience of presence is different and more than (just) the experience of presence. One could describe the public spectacle of modern sport lapidarily as follows: “This is not art and should not be art; it does not have any (veritative, J.F.) meaning and should not have any”. Aesthetic experience, lived experience or “aesthetic perception”— the term preferred by Martin Seel—is concerned, in contrast, not only with becoming involved in the present, in what is happening at each moment, but also with the “consciousness” or—a Kantian equation—the “intuition” of a present.26 Aesthetic experiencing of presence accordingly takes place at an additional second level, a meta-level. It materialises in parallel to the present, so to speak, and this can happen gradually or abruptly. In the

Made and Yet True  101 language of classical aesthetics, this can be an occurrence of beauty or sublimity. When, in the World Cup final in 2006, Zidane brought down with a header a player from the opposing Italian side (his name went in one ear and out the other), the impact of the blow was also that of experiencing: a rip through the present which was mirrored in the unbelieving looks of the spectators and the confused barrage of questions that followed: ‘What was that?’ ‘Did I see what I think I saw?’ ‘Did that really just happen?’ In order, finally, when the truth was irrefutable, to follow up with the big why: ‘Why did he do it?’ Each question was like a catapult, shifting the entire situation, in a staccato rhythm and in one fell swoop, into a situation of the sublime.27 At this moment, Zidane turned from a star into a hero. Not only did he apply the rules of the game like a true master, but he breached them like one, too. And that is one of the characteristics of heroes: they often breach rules, making them dangerously similar to criminals. That is why our feelings towards them are often ambivalent; we not only admire them, we fear them as well. Sublimity and beauty are of course not the only aesthetic categories available to describe phenomena of aesthetic presence. “Grace” would be another. Friedrich Schiller defines grace as the “beauty of movement“, of the “movements of its body”.28 By this, he means a beauty which, firstly, does not belong to an object as a fixed predicate; even something which is not beautiful can be graceful. Secondly, grace is always “solely the beauty of the form moved”, or more precisely “the form moved by freedom”; movements which “merely belong to nature”, the realm of determination and science do not deserve the epithet graceful. Grace is, in other words, an achievement, not something which is conferred upon a subject, a being capable of freedom, from the outside, but something which the subject brings forth by itself. It can therefore also be said that grace is a cultural achievement. Thirdly, however, grace is expression not only of freedom but also of nature, of the nature in the subject. It finds its expression in instinctive movements. A non-instinctive, purpose-oriented movement, like a scientifically analysable movement in nature, can never on its own be graceful. However much this description might be rooted in German Idealism, it is very easily transferrable to the aesthetics of sport. In sport, in physical movement perfected according to fixed rules, the grace which in the age of Schiller was feminine, but which also has largely ignored violent connotations,29 enters the realms of the masculine. The meta-level at which aesthetic presence emerges describes the parallel movements of experiencing and (beholding) consciousness. As if one were to watch oneself experiencing. In the case at hand, this parallelisation only takes place on the receptive side. The object of perception, the scene being played out on the football pitch, does not have to be manipulated by a TV director in order to create an impression of the sublime, for example by setting the scene to dramatic music or darkening the images. The seemingly paradoxical doubling of experiencing and concomitant consciousness which

102  Made and Yet True defines the phenomenon of aesthetic presence belongs, as I hinted at earlier, to the experience of the as-if, or in more traditional philosophical language: appearance, or less traditionally: fiction. Presence is not to be had without fiction, the ‘is’, the being is always also bound to an ‘as if’. With a view to presence, this is then, with an objectivistic slant, what actually constitutes the state of tension: that which shows itself in a striking presence—the hero on the movie screen—is orchestrated and is playing a game with this state of tension. Admittedly, this is far more true of the hero as a fictive made up figure than of a real figure, such as Zidane. Phenomena of aesthetic presence which are mediated to us through a technical medium thus have an ambiguous status. They cause something prima facie to be experienced as real and (to a certain extent) true which is not real and (in the literal, objective sense) true. In Kantian terms, they have the status of the as-if which is based on a game of opposites. They are made and yet true, and that means, although they make it clear that they are not true, just mere fictions, they manifestly appear as if they were true, as if they were real. The presence of the hero on the screen is ambiguous: transparent in the fact of its creation and orchestration, and at the same time overwhelming in its evidence. This presence is full of tension and excitement, in both a naive and a reflected sense, as tense as the structure of the aesthetic and as exciting as a great football match.

Notes  1 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. by Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson, London/New York: Verso 1994, p. 108.   2 Otto F. Best, Art. “Held, Heros”, in: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 3, loc.cit., p. 1045.   3 Hubert Dreyfus & Sean D. Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, New York: Free Press loc.cit. 2011, pp. 10 & 11, with reference to John McPhee, A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of Bill Bradley at Princeton (1965).  4 Cf. Früchtl, The Impertinent Self, loc.cit., pp. 36 & 63. The conflict and the tendency towards exclusion between the citizen and the hero is, however, not just an invention of Hegel’s. This is a theme which has been included in literature and sociotheoretical essays since the late 18th century. For example, in the main character of his Robbers, Schiller laments the “slack” aristocratic “century of the castrated”, good for nothing except “denigrating the Ancient heroes with tragedies” (our trans.). In Jean Paul’s Titan a bourgeois protagonist yearns for “war and deeds” (our trans). And Kleist writes, quite in line with Hegel, that “since the invention of order all the great virtues have become unnecessary” (our trans.). Mareen van Marwyck analysed heroism from a gender-theoretical perspective and interestingly chose to accentuate grace as an aesthetics of violence with feminine connotations, cf. Gewalt und Anmut: Weiblicher Heroismus in der Literatur und Ästhetik um 1800, Bielefeld: Transcript 2010, there too the quotations from Schiller, Jean Paul and Kleist (p. 44).   5 Karl-Heinrich Bette, “Ein Jahr im Heldenkosmos”, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 Dec 2009 (our trans.).   6 Cf. Werner Faulstich, “Sternchen, Star, Superstar, Megastar, Gigastar. Vorüberlegungen zu einer Theorie des Stars als Herzstück populärer Weltkultur”,

Made and Yet True  103 in: Werner Faulstich (ed.), Medienkulturen, Munich: Fink 2000, p. 204, with reference to Knut Hickethier’s essay: “Vom Theaterstar zum Filmstar” (1997).   7 This is how I remember the Spanish author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán describing it.   8 Cf. Michael Eder, “Gegen Magier Zidane schrumpfen Brasiliens Stars zu Zauberlehrlingen”, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 July 2006.   9 This is not true, however, for everyday stars with a short shelf life, such as those found in reality TV and casting shows. They belong to those media celebrities who don’t have a particular achievement or specific competence. All of these— inaccurately so-called—stars are usually quickly forgotten because they are only self-referentially generated, a mere product of the media system (cf. Bernhard Pörksen & Wolfgang Krischke, Die Casting-Gesellschaft: Die Sucht nach Aufmerksamkeit und das Tribunal der Medien, Cologne: Herbert von Halem Verlag 2010). 10 Of course there are exceptions (which confirm the rule). In the literature they include Thomas Pynchon. 11 This is how the French President Sarkozy was described by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 Sept 2010 (our trans.). 12 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art” (third version.), loc.cit., p. 261, cf. pp. 255, p. 260. 13 Cf. Thomas Hecken, Pop, Geschichte eines Konzepts, Bielefeld: Transcrip 2009. 14 Cf. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2004, p. xiii–xiv. 15 Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, loc.cit., p. 57., a quotation from Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence (1993); cf. also p. 58 on Georges Steiner, Real Presences (1986). In the case of Gumbrecht, there is a clear irony to be found in a person who expresses so much holy anger about so much written material, yet himself cannot refrain from permanently writing and publishing. 16 Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, loc.cit., p. xv.; on Hegel cf. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A.V. Miller with Analysis of the Text and Foreword by J.N. Findlay, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977, pp. 58. 17 Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, loc.cit., pp. xv, 77, 116. 18 Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, loc.cit., pp. xiv, 22, 65; on the tedious issue of overcoming metaphysics cf. pp. 51 & 91, in each case with Derrida, & p. 93, where Gumbrecht contents himself with “modifying” metaphysics “in a serious way”. 19 Cf. Dorothea Frede, “Stichwort: Wahrheit. Vom aufdeckenden Erschließen zur Offenheit der Lichtung”, in: Dieter Thomä (ed.), Heidegger-Handbuch: LebenWerk-Wirkung, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 2003, pp. 127. 20 Cf. Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, loc.cit., pp. 69–70, pp. 74. 21 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in: id., Negative Dialektik. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2003, p. 183 (our trans.). 22 Cf. here Ch. 5 & 9. 23 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Subjekt and Objekt”, in: id., Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press 2005, p. 254. 24 Schnädelbach, “Dialektik als Vernunftkritik. Zur Konstruktion des Rationalen bei Adorno”, loc.cit., pp. 72 (our trans.). 25 Wiesing, “Zeigen, Verweisen und Präsentieren”, loc.cit., p. 23; cf. id., Artifizielle Präsenz. Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes, loc.cit., esp. pp. 103 (our trans.). 26 Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, loc.cit., p. 174. Under the term of contemplation even Kant equates intuition and consciousness (he calls it “reflection”), cf. Critique of Judgment, loc.cit., p. 45 (§ 2) & p. 51 (§ 5).

104  Made and Yet True 27 Those who view life and thus also football from the perspective of lovers of dramatic literature can also see the events of 9th July 2006 in the Olympic stadium in Berlin as “a tragedy of almost complete desolation” and will thus not describe them as sublime in the elevating sense (Benjamin Henrichs, “Endspiel”, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 5/6, 2010). As in a drama, a tiny occurrence (a slow Italian defender pulls the shirt of the “French football demigod”) becomes a “horror of epic proportions”. Because the viewers follow the whole thing from a safe distance, the horror is merely one of perception, not of existence. And this is precisely what makes it aesthetic-sublime. Ultimately, even the author of the football eulogy concedes that scenes like this are concerned with the “eternal metaphysical confrontation between good and evil”, a confrontation for which nobody is predestined as heroes and their parasites. 28 Friedrich Schiller, “Über Anmut und Würde”, in: Gerhard Fricke & Herbert G. Göpfert (eds.), Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 5: Erzählungen Theoretische Schriften, Munich: Hanser 1989 (8. ed.), p. 434; cf. on the following pp. 437 & 446. 29 Cf. van Marwyck, Gewalt und Anmut, loc.cit.; fencing has been a textbook example of graceful violence since the 17th century.

7 An Art of Gesture Returning Narrative and Movement to Images

La vraie condition de l’homme, c’est de penser avec ses mains. (Jean-Luc Godard)

When Hollywood examines what makes a hero, it frequently chooses the adaptable genre of comedy, and beyond it experiences difficulties with this theme. One could say that US-American cinema is only familiar with two grandmasters of serious, explicit self-reflection in the hero figure, and they are John Ford and Clint Eastwood, both at home, not coincidentally, in that traditional heroic genre: the western. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is Ford’s masterpiece in this context, while Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) is an equally perfect demonstration, more radical in its impact. The latter film manages to attribute a mythical and metaphysical force to the hero figure and his feelings of revenge, without denying the fact that both the figure and the feelings are based on a cultural construction.

Flags of Our Fathers When dealing with the hero in that realm of the extraordinary provided by civilisation in times of war, Eastwood calmly, yet emphatically, tackles heroism as a concept which is ‘constructed’, built up, hyped up. In Flags of Our Fathers, the sworn alliance between politics and the mass media once again drives events. That famous photo taken during the last year of World War II, which shows US American soldiers struggling together on the island of Iwo Jima to erect a flagpole and fly the star-spangled banner comes across as an image which instils positive, patriotic feeling on the war-weary home front at just the right moment. The film shows how this image, which was both literally and figuratively history in the making (history in the making, or in production; and history, or the achievement of fame, in the making), is likewise made and with its own history, indeed a far from laudable one. At the beginning the screen is black, and a soft, hoarse voice—the voice of Clint Eastwood—sings, “I’ll walk alone  . . . there are dreams I must gather”. The singing is unaccompanied, and it leads into a dream, one of

106  An Art of Gesture those nightmares which will not go away because the underlying reality will not go away. A soldier is running through a stony, barren, blue-grey landscape, looking for something or someone he cannot find. The camera moves in closer and closer to him until his face is out of focus and the viewer is looking the desperate soldier directly in the eye, when there is a sudden cut away from the eye and to a man dreaming, to the bedroom of an elderly man who cannot escape the dreadful events of war, but who also, as we are soon to discover, cannot talk about them. He is the main figure in the film, the former paramedic John “Doc” Bradley, who will die in old age and whose son is now trying to reconstruct the story the father did not wish to tell, namely the story of a human being who was declared a hero. Eastwood tells this story using film as his means. He moves back and forth between three levels of time and action: the battles on the island of Iwo Jima, the propaganda tour through the USA which occurred directly afterwards, and later everyday life with its disturbing dreams. From the outset, he orchestrates the pivotal point of the film as what it truly is: a staging. In other words, it is a presentation which seems to the same extent authentic and illusionary, one which disappoints precisely because it is deceptive, yet which equally does not disappoint because it reveals the deception. It is nighttime, the sky is lit up by rockets, three soldiers are climbing a hill. The camera remains in close pursuit behind their backs. It does not draw back until they reach the top, when it pans upwards to reveal that the whole scene is actually taking place within a stadium and that the rockets are part of a celebratory firework display. The whole thing is staged. Shortly before this scene, Eastwood has shown the famous photo, a still shot which is then being enacted inside the stadium. For a moment, the viewer might think that the film has switched from showing the photo to showing its reality. But this is a conscious delusion on the part of the director, who is far more interested in emphasising the ambivalent character of the event. It is ambivalent because, on the one hand, seen in terms of sociology and cultural anthropology, it assumes a positive—i.e. communally and morally constructive— function. On the other hand, seen morally, it is based on multiple lies. The event depicted in that famous wartime photo was not even the original, but a copy; one of the heroes passed around the USA for propaganda purposes was only a stand-in, while the other two ultimately have no desire to be those heroes the national community so wants them to be. For Eastwood, being a hero is a form of discontent in a culture which can serve cream cakes with a blood-red filling at a gala reception for homecoming soldiers. The cultural expectation surpasses the powers of these boys, who only ever really wanted to get out of the war alive. If they have risked life and limb, then, as military sociologists are well aware, they did so for their friends and comrades, lying next to them in the dirt while being fired at, not for the sake of noble ideals or ideologies. If their memory is to be honoured, then not with a marble monument, but with images like those at the end of the film, showing the soldiers splashing around in the water at Iwo Jima beach like little boys.

An Art of Gesture  107 And yet our relationship to these images also has to be ambivalent, for they have the power to generate feelings because they allow us to forget that they have been created in the first place. Both the strength and the weakness of images consist in their presenting meaning simply, in presenting simply (too simply), as well as in simply presenting (rather than substantiating with discourse). Like stories as well, they allow us to create meaning, but unlike stories they do not also require detailed and complicated text, at least not initially. “Take Vietnam”, the film tells us, “the image of that South Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner in the head. That was it. The war was lost”. This image had as much impact as the one from Iwo Jima 20 years earlier. It helped to end a war in the first case for the USA and in the second case against. These two aspects of simplification and presentation make images susceptible to propaganda. This susceptibility can be countered by revealing that they are made, constructed and staged, as well as by showing how. This is what Eastwood undertakes in Flags of Our Fathers: an attempt to restore the honour of images which he otherwise casts in a dark light, as if they should be ashamed of themselves.

The Art of Gesture A philosophical aesthetic of film refers not only, however, to its narrative level in a broader sense, at which verbally articulated and medially composed (camera positions, cuts, etc.) self-reflection of the figures, theme and subjects takes place; an aesthetic of film, and particularly a philosophical one, also refers to the ontological level. In Flags of Our Fathers, the cinematic ontology is the idea of ‘motion picture’, of taking a still image and returning it to the dynamic space of movement. During the transition to the narrative level, a picture is given back its story. This constitutes a philosophy of film as an art of the gesture. Let us once again take Deleuze as our starting point. He introduces the concept of the “movement-image” in order to express the idea that, in the case of film, no further distinction is possible between image and movement, as is possible in the case of painting on the one hand, or of dance and theatre on the other, the two areas being diametrically opposed. While painted images are “immobile in themselves” and need “spirit” which has “to ‘make’ movement”, choreographic and theatrical images conversely “remain attached to a moving body”.1 In the first case, the image is a physical entity and the movement occurs mentally, while in the second case, the movement is physical and the image is a mental entity. Deleuze goes further, introducing the distinction between “movement-image” and “time-image” (image-temps). Whereas the former presents situations of (purposeful) action, the latter presents situations of (non-purposeful, roaming) seeing and hearing.2 Here the movement-image is thus no longer merely formal, but also contentually generally defined, with a view to situations of action. Its epistemological equivalent is an objectivistic concept of truth. Not until

108  An Art of Gesture the time-image, the cinema of Italian Neorealism, French Nouvelle Vague and West German New Wave, does a confusion between subjective and objective description of processes emerge. The distinction between true and false becomes blurred. Time, as a dimension of the possible, of becoming, of change, now begins to dominate; time which, in the words of Henri Bergson or Martin Heidegger, may not be imagined as a straight line, but as a layering of the three dimensions past, present and future. Its graphic image is the logical symbol of infinity (∞), two connected circles, their intersection forming the present, functioning as a point where past and future overlap and traverse each other. In one of his miniature pieces of philosophical literature, Giorgio Agamben refers to this assumption by Deleuze, but gives it a completely different angle. He states that when an image is characterised by “antinomic tension”, on the one hand in order to halt movement, on the other hand to maintain its “dynamis” (“as in Muybridge’s snapshots or in any sports photograph”), one should “in fact” not speak of an image, but of a “gesture”, so that ultimately one could say that “cinema leads images back to the homeland of gesture”.3 Here, surely, video must be added to cinema, with a view to Bill Viola’s work “The Greeting” (1995) which is based on the visit of the Virgin Mary to her aunt Elizabeth, as depicted in the painting by Jacopo Pontormo from 1528/29, and which, using slow motion, stretches a film sequence lasting barely a minute to a full ten minutes. The effect is that of an image moving extremely slowly, magical in its contemplation, so to speak.4 And it is immediately clear that Agamben is allowing himself to be guided by photography of movement and not, for example, by photography of nature. It is indeed hard to accept that a photo of a flower could contain the same antinomic tension as a photo of a jumping horse. In this sense, not every image is a gesture. Agamben answers the question of what ultimately constitutes a gesture in his usual ambitious and obscure manner, in imitation of his major role model, Walter Benjamin. However, I can still find pleasure in his response. With reference to Aristotle and the Roman scholar Varro, Agamben categorises gesture as being in a third area between praxis and poiesis: acting, which is a means to its own end, and producing, in which the means and the end are distinct. Aristotle, of course, and with consequences, distinguishes between two types of striving (orexis) guided by logos, by reason. With striving in a technical sense, in the production or making (poiesis) it is not the act of producing itself which is the crucial factor, but the result. With striving in a practical sense, however, the reverse is true. The action itself is the crucial factor because its end purpose is immanent and already achieved in the acting. A person acting justly, cannily or heroically realises these virtues through his corresponding action. In comparison, gesture is then a form of doing which is neither action nor production, neither a means to its own end nor a means in itself. As Agamben explains, gesture can be seen as a movement which is an end in itself, for example dance as an aesthetic entity.

An Art of Gesture  109 There are also gestures which are means in themselves, for example marching when it has the purpose of moving the body from A to B. Agamben thus favours a broad concept of gesture, according to which gesture covers every (conscious or subconscious) movement of the body, including facial expressions, sign language, mental ticks, mannerisms, nervous reactions, but also religious and ritual actions, whereas in a narrower sense gesture refers to those movements of physical expression which are conducted using the hands, arms and head, in other words physical movements limited to certain parts of the body and performed with a communicative intention.5 Agamben, however, not only favours a broad definition of the term gesture but also concentrates on aesthetic meaning, as to be found in dance and pantomime. Just as dance is “nothing more than the endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporal movements”, or just as mime “exhibits gestures as such”, so “the gesture is the exhibition of a mediality (medialità): it is the process of making a means (mezzo) visible as such”. Transferred to the sphere of language, in other words to adopt a further analogy, Agamben, in the style of early Benjamin, is able to say that gesture, like language, is not merely communication, but “communication of a communicability”. “It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality”.6 It points to something which cannot be said by the communicating of statements. In so doing, it refers to the medium and means of mediality itself. A gesture, as such, reveals that it is a means, and precisely for this reason, it is not merely a means. It points to something, but also to itself. It is a medium through which something expresses itself and which at the same time exhibits itself as the realm of the expression. Agamben’s assumption is based, of course, on sliding semantic shifts, harbouring several argumentational streaks which are magnanimous—i.e. defiant of minor points—as well as dubious. He argues pars pro toto: a subset of gesture, namely the gesture of dance and pantomime, stands for the whole, for gesture itself. This generalisation is additionally aestheticistic: gesture in its aesthetic meaning as dance and pantomime stands for the whole of gesture. And finally, supported by an artificial linguistic expression (medialità) and an ambiguity (mezzo as both “middle” and “means”), there follows an essentialistic assumption: a gesture is a means presenting itself as a means, and thus a means which ipso facto transcends itself, a form of reference which at the same time is always also self-referential, in other words a form of doing which assumes a middle position between action and production, an end in itself and a means to an end, reference and self-reference. It should prove difficult to maintain this assumption in all its detail. The idea that for every gesture, from basic indication with the hand or head, via handshaking as a social ritual of greeting or parting, via gestures accompanying speech (emphatic, such as a clenched fist, or ironic, such as a wink), to subconscious ticks or nervous movements (such as playing around with a pen or pencil)—in other words the idea that, for every type of gesture, the middle

110  An Art of Gesture position speculatively assigned to it by Agamben is accurate, appears to be not only wildly simplistic but also extremely unlikely. Agamben overshoots the mark—one could say—yet again. And yet this expansive assumption is not even necessary. It is enough to provide a definition of aesthetic gesture, and for this, Agamben’s proposal is indeed acceptable. An aesthetic gesture, not gesture itself, then assumes the mid-ground between means to an end and end in itself, production and action, reference and self-reference. Agamben himself suggests this at the same juncture, separately from his examples, by referring to Kant’s aesthetic formula of a purposiveness without purpose. This understanding of gesture acquiesces with that of aesthetic fiction introduced at the beginning of this book and last mentioned at the end of the previous chapter. In traditional philosophical terms, aesthetic fiction is a type of fiction or illusion in which reference is only to be gained through self-reference, content (statement) only through form and the what only through the how. An aesthetic work falls between the two categories poiesis and praxis. To this extent, it has a presentative, and not a representative character. However, in this context, presentative means that it is a presentation of something which can only be presented in this presentation. The double structure theory of the aesthetic gesture can also be reinforced using the ontological-hermeneutic tradition. Gottfried Boehm made a contribution to this tradition under the heading “Hintergründigkeit des Zeigens” (which literally means “backgroundedness of showing”). According to his analysis, gestures of showing take place against a background (in German Hintergrund) which lends them meaning, and this background is the “physical flow of movement” or the “posture, the tonos of the body”, a state of tension or relaxation which, like tone in music, tone of voice or a social tone of behaviour, cannot be semantically nailed down, but on the contrary “grounds” each individual meaning. In a formulation which would probably please Gumbrecht, Boehm writes, each individual act of showing “comes from the pointless (deutungslos) off of a bodily presence”, whereby, once again, the body is not identical to its materiality, but implies a state of tension, an “energetic dimension”.7 I personally prefer a different formulation: “What gestures show never completely lives up to what they appear to say. For the overhang of the body brings tone, timbre, rhythm, flair into play”.8 I would like to add here that in the case of gestures, the overhang of the body brings the aesthetic into play. The aesthetic is the somatically triggered and at the same time perceived (on the meta-level), the experienced and at the same time consciously (an observing consciousness) accompanied interplay of tone, timbre, rhythm, flair. Put the other way around and more precisely: the interplay of tone, timbre, rhythm, flair, at the basic level of perception, that of aisthesis, fulfils a central and original Kantian definition of the aesthetic in a specific sense, namely that of the interplay in an arc of tension (in the case of Kant, the tension between imagination—i.e. a productive power of sensuousness—and understanding). The floor, the grounding of gestures of showing is thus not solid, but moving, a movement which results from relationships of tension.

An Art of Gesture  111

The Art of Gesture in Film The hermeneutics of image or vision also reinforces the fact that art cannot be understood according to the linguistic paradigm. Its model is not language in the semantic-propositional sense. Its model, as one can now say in contrast, is far more gesture: body language. Art is communication according to the model of human physical movement. Like that of the human body in motion, its semiotic potential can be updated at any time, which means it can be interpreted in its symbolic nature, always dependent upon the contexts of a situation.9 As a non-verbal communication using physical movement, human gesture must be said to have a rather indirect validity as a model for arts such as painting, sculpture, literature and, in particular, music. For arts such as dance, pantomime, theatre,10 opera and film, however, its direct applicability is obvious. So what does this mean for film? It means two things. Firstly, film is a non-verbal communication, the imparting of something significant using the physical movement of the actors. Karl Heinz Bohrer makes a welcome contribution at this juncture, criticising analysis of film as an “allegory of modern subject theory”, such as I presented in my Heroic History of Modernity. According to this analysis, certain genres (the western, the thriller and the science fiction film) become legible, so to speak, as expressions of the heroic figure in Modernity, a nonuniform, stratificatory Modernity which provides the answer as to what fascinates us about these genres: it is the fascination of the self, the self in its three different dimensions, namely the classical, the agonal and the hybrid. In his criticism of this theoretical philosophical approach and in his usual pertinent manner, Bohrer insists on an intrinsic aesthetic worth of the hero, on his “fictional aesthetic status” or, as he also puts it, his “character of manifestation and presence”.11 In order to make this comprehensible, Bohrer concentrates in his analysis of the western on the formal aspects of ritual (duelling) and gesture (walking), and is accordingly able to identify the “striding” of Henry Fonda, the “stumbling forward” of John Wayne and the “lascivious walk” of Robert Mitchum. The actor and former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger provides a further example. The artificial synthesis of flesh and armour which he has created for himself through weight training is ideal for representation of a cyborg, provided that we imagine this creature mechanistically. Schwarzenegger’s mechanical style of acting then finds its ideal role in the human machine. As a final example, the impression sometimes emerges that an actor’s gestures are in keeping with the technology of film or even dictated by it. Benjamin, for instance, interprets “the innovation of Chaplin’s gestures” from an avant garde perspective: “Whether it is his walk, the way he handles his cane, or the way he raises his hat—always the same jerky sequence of tiny movements applies the law of the cinematic image sequence to human motorial functions”.12 Film is therefore gestic, first and foremost, as an indirect, non-verbal communication using the physical movement of actors. While it shares this characteristic with theatre, opera, pantomime and dance, indeed with all the

112  An Art of Gesture physical performing arts, it is, secondly, unique as an art of moving images. Film, and only film, is a non-verbal communication which uses the movement of pictures. Here we find gesture—one could also say the “gestus” of film in a formal sense.13 And beyond this, film proves itself aesthetic through the way in which it is capable of suspending gesture in the balance, in that tense middle area between being a means and being an end in itself, between poiesis and praxis, between a contentual statement and form. Its aestheticism thus also results from a tension between the elements. This can also be reformulated with recourse to phenomenology. Accordingly, images on the one hand show by referring to something figuratively and through their sequence narratively. On the other hand, corresponding to the Ancient Greek verb phainestai, this occurs by something showing “itself” in or through the images. In this second sense, the phenomenological interest is aimed at what is visible or perceptible at all, at the phenomenon itself in its perceptibility. In contrast, the aesthetic interest is not aimed directly at the phenomenon, but is diverted via the perception, which in turn becomes an endless process (of perception), circling within itself and often overlapping itself on various levels. Showing (oneself) here becomes the theme in its own right.14 Film, like all art ultimately, therefore shows something not by showing it off (demonstrating it), but by showing it up, thus pointing to it in the manner of a gesture, while at the same time pointing to itself in the manner of an aesthetic gesture. In this double sense, film is an art of gesture. The art of this gesture is founded on the tension built up between the elements. This ultimately has a consequence for the character of presence as well. In the previous chapter I defined aesthetic presence, analogous to aesthetic fiction, as a double structure, as something which is oppressive in its evidence and yet transparent in its artificiality. An illusion which is see-through, a fiction which refers to itself, an artificiality which reveals itself to be artificial, which in the case of gesture, with recourse to Benjamin’s work of art essay, obtains an “exhibition value”. Gesture exhibits itself, rather than presenting itself as having a “cultural value”. Since, in line with my interpretative proposal,15 having an exhibition value should be understood as an emphasis on the visual and the interactive, gesture accordingly emerges in its visibility and invites the onlooker to join in. This last point is particularly patent because gestures, as a non-verbal communication using physical movement, are directed at others, particularly showing/pointing gestures; one cannot point something out to oneself, and having something pointed out means putting oneself in the position of the person doing the pointing.16 To sum up then, film is a movement-image, which means: an image made to move, returning movement to the motif of a still picture. It thus becomes gesture in a formal sense, becomes “gestus”. In their movement, and as physical movements, the pictures non-verbally and referentially show (point to) something which can then be narrated verbally. To this extent, film is a picture come alive, made animate. And in this characterisation, it once more

An Art of Gesture  113 proves itself as the art of illusion. Lessing, writing about the aesthetics of illusion in his Laocoon long before the invention of cinema, describes the effect of art making things come alive using words which seem predestined to describe film. Accordingly, true art, which for Lessing is poetry, “must awaken in us conceptions so lively, that, from the rapidity with which they arise, the same impression should be made upon our senses, which the sight of the material objects, that these conceptions represent, would produce”. And “in this moment of illusion” we should “cease to be conscious” of the “instruments” by which art achieves this effect of illusion.17 Film returns the movement familiar from everyday reality to the stationary motif of a picture. This is its ontological achievement. Its being is movement, more precisely gestural movement. The gesture lies in between the bodily gestures of actors and the mechanical movement of the slides. Speaking of a cinematic gesture refers to an analogy: a film shows something up like a bodily gesture. The automatic movement of film images which usually refer to movements of actors, living beings or things has to be organised in such a way that one perceives such an organised movement as a cultural product showing something up. Spoken in terms of the secularised-theological aesthetic tradition, this achievement is a quasi-divine act of breathing life into inanimate objects. And this is possible because the object—the image, the photograph—is already history that has come to a standstill, frozen time, interrupted connection of action and life.18

Deleuze and the Image Deleuze, certainly, is less than satisfied with this ontological and narrative achievement. Recalling that there are, at present, several theoretical frameworks potentially able to explicate the concept of image—symbol theory (Goodman), perception theory (K. Fiedler, Husserl), anthropological theory (H. Jonas, Flusser, Belting) and event philosophy (Heidegger)19, then Deleuze’s concept of image fits in with perception theory and event philosophy. Let us now take a closer look at his concept of image. As laid out at the start of this book, Deleuze attributed to the Modern cinema asserting itself after the Second World War the power to restore to the damaged offspring of the Christian and Cartesian traditions their belief in the world, to renew the torn bond between the subject and the object. Deleuze formulates his theory under the heading: “Thought and cinema”. The premise here is threefold: Firstly, there is an “artistic essence of the image”; secondly, it consists in “what forces thinking and what thinks under the shock”; thirdly, it emerges in cinema as a “movement-image” and a “time-image”. Therefore, as mentioned already earlier, it does not manifest itself in the painted image or the choreographic and theatrical image, for “pictorial images are immobile in themselves” and it “is the mind which has to ‘make’ movement”, whereas ballet and theatre “remain attached to a moving body”.20 The philosophical-aesthetic background to this is

114  An Art of Gesture the theory of the sublime. According to this Kantian theory, “what constitutes the sublime is that the imagination suffers a shock which pushes it to the limit and forces thought to think the whole as intellectual totality which goes beyond the imagination”.21 Deleuze distinguishes not two, in the Kantian sense, but three, in the quasi-Hegelian sense, forms of the sublime. He sees them at work in conjunction with different directors, and correspondingly describes three relationships between cinema and thought. Whereas, however, these three all remain within the framework of classic cinema, the cinema of the movement-image, Antonin Artaud advances a new, fourth relationship. The latter is no longer concerned with the “power of thought” (la puissance de la pensée) which compensates for the powerlessness of the imagination, but with an “impower”, with the “powerlessness” of thought itself. Cinema is now in a position to reveal this powerlessness: “The fact that we are not yet thinking”, and thinking means “to think the whole and to think oneself”. This is a discovery not only of the cinema of Artaud, of course, but equally of the philosophy of Heidegger, to which Deleuze also refers in this context. By attempting to think the whole, thinking encounters the “unthinkable in thought, which would be both its source and barrier”; by attempting to think the thinking self, it encounters “another thinker in the thinker”. Thinking grasped in this way is therefore inevitably a metaphysical thinking, thinking the whole and thinking oneself. Equally inevitably, however, it must fail in this immanent claim. It has to do something which it cannot do. Here Deleuze reformulates a paradox which also sparked Derrida’s deconstructivism: the condition of the possibility of thinking—the whole and oneself—is at the same time the condition of its impossibility. And it is “particularly clear” in Modern cinema, the cinema of the time-image, that it reflects this transcendental philosophicalmetaphysical plight, in other words reveals it and, to a certain extent, heals it.22 Deleuze formulates no less than a cinematic metaphysics on the basis of a new concept of the image. What Schopenhauer says about music can also be said about Deleuze’s cinema: it is “an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophising”.23 Deleuze would almost certainly favour a reference to Artaud, for whom theatre is “metaphysics-in-action”.24 But since Artaud’s way of thinking also moves within the Romantic tradition, defending “thought-energy” and “life force” against the dictatorship of verbal language, the blindly urging will against regulating representation, it is ultimately Schopenhauer who once again must be recognised as the secret force behind this. The belief which Modern cinema conveys, as already stated at the start of this book, is an ontological affirmation. It is not clear, however, what significance this assumes for Deleuze in the context of cinema. But it can be ascertained that Modern film geared to the time-image realises what phenomenology sets out to do as a mode of knowledge: namely, presentation of the ‘purely’ optical and acoustic situation which is no longer concerned with the so-called senso-motoric pattern, the reaction of subjects to a situation, but solely with perception.

An Art of Gesture  115 Concerning this contemplative mode of knowledge, Deleuze proves once more to be vitalist-romantic, and in turn classical metaphysical, for this mode refers back to Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva as the highest level of knowledge, an immediate, non-discursive knowledge which Schopenhauer interprets as aesthetic-metaphysical contemplation and which Bergson contrasts preferably, as the intuition mode of knowledge, to that of scientific analysis.25 Only this mode of knowledge is capable of grasping time as an image. The time-image is an image of time itself, no longer an indirect image like the movement-image, where time is always deduced from movement. If, overall, film stands for the equation “IMAGE = MOVEMENT”, for a conception which does not bind the image to a subject, whether as a perceiving consciousness, whether as a moving body, then Modern film, which is no longer narrative, stands for a presentation of time which is no longer linear, but stratigraphic, and that means immediately, directly.26 The present (of an image), the past and future (of the same image) coexist instantaneously. For nothing else is time. The big question here is how to substantiate this ontological statement. It is one thing to contrast the subjective, corporeal experience of time with physically measurable time. It is something completely different to maintain that this experience gives us the true concept of time. An ontology requires much more substantiation. Here Deleuze is essentially reliant on the concept of the idea.27 The time-image is an idea in the Kantian sense, a concept beyond experience. An idea can only be experienced or, in Heideggarian terms, be perceived as an event in aesthetic form. Kant first conceived of this in his Critique of Judgement, in his concept of the “aesthetic idea”. Schopenhauer then elaborated it in his metaphysics of the will, of blind, infinite becoming. Only to the extent that we are artists are we capable of beholding an idea, for example the idea of the time-image. The philosophers to whom Deleuze refers positively in this context, Spinoza and Bergson, have, like Schopenhauer, been accused of mysticism. Deleuze can only be protected from this accusation (although one can seriously doubt whether he would really want to be) by consistently aesthetisising his syncretistic theory of knowledge in the tradition of Schopenhauer and Bergson (that Bergson assigning a capacity for intuitive knowledge exclusively to privileged individuals such as artists).28 I say, consistently aesthetisising, for naturally Deleuze himself frequently makes connections between aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics, only then to leave these connections vague. Aestheticisation has to be decided if this vagueness, this room for conjecture, is not to disappear in a mystic vacuum. Of course, the question ultimately also remains of whether there is not a simpler way, without this plethora of metaphysical burdens. Let it suffice to say for now that this would require assuming the post-Heideggerian perspective more forcefully, a pragmatic perspective, as I have already hinted at with reference to the later works of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s challenge: “Don’t think, look!” would then mean nothing other than: Look closely! Like a good chess player, you will then also see solutions, without

116  An Art of Gesture having to calculate them like a computer. That is the trivial right of intuition or contemplation, of instantaneous, perceiving thought or thinking perception. Like a good scientist you will allow yourself to be guided by an idea or a hypothesis which is not yet connected in any substantiated manner with the whole, with the network of your convictions, but which indicates in which direction substantiations and analyses need to progress. That is the scientific right of intuition. Like a good phenomenologist, you will try to see the things and issues as needing plain description and not as needing explanation or interpretation, and you will describe them because you want to know what they look like, and not what they mean. That is the philosophical right of intuition or contemplation, which by the way is to be distinguished from classical metaphysical right, always directed towards the innermost essence (of creation, of being). And like an artist you will, in Kantian terms, perceive a game of sensual-meaningful phenomena, an exciting game of images, similarities, analogies and symbols which is remote from terminology. That is the aesthetic right of intuition or contemplation.

Metaphysics or Aesthetics? As I said earlier, Deleuze would be less than satisfied with the ontological and narrative achievement I am suggesting here. The reason is ultimately political. Time, and not movement, is of the highest relevance to Deleuze because time provides the ontological condition required for change. Accordingly, without an ontology of time there can be no concept of revolution or—Heidegger’s substitute—event. Since Zeno’s paradoxes, however, time has been in a relationship of dependency to both space and motion. Motion is linked to space, it runs through space and, from this, time is deduced. According to Deleuze, Bergson was the first to liberate time from this dependency. For time, grasped as that which connects a movement from one instant to another instant, can never be viewed as a continuum, simply because what ‘is’ between the instants has to fall through the cracks of the underlying conceptual grid. This common and physically objectified view is far more the result of a reduction undertaken for practical reasons. If, in contrast, one assumes time really to be a continuum, as flowing endlessly, then it has to be viewed as a virtual whole. The past and the future then exist virtually alongside the present, with the modal dimensions of time always merging, being as they are in a relationship of instantaneous coexistence. It is ultimately film—and here Deleuze abandons Bergson—which makes time experienceable, not just indirectly, via movement through space, but directly. By facilitating singular experiences or, in Deleuze’s terminology, presenting “affects” and “percepts”, in other words affections and perceptions, which cannot be subsumed conceptually, but which have to be experienced intensively (rather than spatially extensively), film, just like art in general, at least since its theorisation in the mid-18th century, eludes purposeful thinking and acting. Film does this specifically in the way in which

An Art of Gesture  117 it combines the movement of the human body with that of the camera, in which it brings together different elements through montage, and in which it presents movements, colours, sounds and language in its post-classical phase without shaping them to form an organic whole. In this way, film provides an experience of non-linear time, of time beyond its practical purposeful organisation, an experience of “pure” time. It provides contemplation or experience of a dimension which normally eludes contemplation, and which can only be thought of in philosophical-metaphysical terms. Pure time is as difficult to perceive as pure movement—that is, the movement of an object not followed from a certain point in space. Pure time exists only in thought. And thinking of it explicitly in philosophical terms necessarily means thinking of it as an assumption. Under certain theoretical conditions, we have to assume the existence of pure time. Yet here we can also clearly see why Deleuze’s outrivaling of the movementimage by the time-image is neither convincing nor even necessary. It is not convincing because it depends upon an intuitionistic theory of truth drifting towards mysticism as a vague evidence theory of truth (whereby I should immediately like to note that the problem is not fundamentally one of the evidence theory of truth, but of this type of theory in Deleuze’s work). An outrivaling of the movement-image is also not necessary because, firstly, a theory of the political, of more or less radical societal change, does not depend on an ontology, and therefore neither on an ontology of time,29 and, secondly, the idea of cinema as contemplation of a time-image in fictional and aesthetic parenthesis can be had more simply, that is without any metaphysical overcast. Deleuze has the choice of either staking claim to an intuitionistic-mystic theory of truth, or of taking a back seat fictionally and in particular aesthetically. Bergson or Kant—this is ultimately the alternative he faces. Either Deleuze adheres to Bergson in his fundamental distinction between two types of cognition, namely the analytical-scientific and the intuitive-metaphysical, assigning primacy to the latter (even though Bergson, I repeat,30 is himself not clear in this matter), or he comprehends the achievement of philosophy analogously to that of fiction and art, from the upright perspective of the as-if. Thinking philosophically and inventing concepts then means thinking in terms of a thought experiment and imagining the phenomena of time and motion as if they were not bound to certain objects and a certain standpoint. But that would mean clearly proclaiming a metaphysics of the as-if. The area between science and fiction, which Deleuze has claimed for his type of ontology,31 has to be clearly designated not only as an area of invention (rather than discovery) but also as an area of fabrication. In this way, film can then also be comprehended in the Kantian tradition as an experience, as a conceptually directed and instantaneous-intensive contemplation of an “aesthetic idea”, and of time. It is as if time in film were to exist simultaneously in its three dimensions, as if the past, present and future were forever merged. It is: as if. Not: it is.

118  An Art of Gesture My conclusion is that if one chooses not to follow Deleuze in his selfmanifestation along the Spinozan path of substance metaphysics and the Bergsonian path of time metaphysics, but consistently interprets him under the headings of fiction and aesthetics, then it is indeed possible to warm to him. Then even his dimension of a theory of presence can be viewed positively. In the phenomenological tradition Deleuze is indeed interested, as I have shown in previous chapters, in presentic articulation, in a linguistic pointing out which is not completely absorbed in propositions. Here aesthetic articulation is repeatedly attributed a prominent status. In this context, however, it is precisely the tradition which Deleuze is wary of or even outright despises32 which permits explication of the presence concept, namely the tradition of Kant and Hegel, as well as Derrida. We must conclude that presence, in every type of art, only ever manifests itself indirectly, in Hegelian terms as the result of a mediation, in Kantian terms as the result of interplay between opposing dimensions, and in the terminology of Adorno and Derrida as a tense hovering between assumed direct presence and representation. And particularly in film, it is only perceptible as gesture, as an indirect mediation of sense using movement of the body and of images.

Notes  1 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, loc. cit., p. 156.  2 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, loc. cit., pp. 2.  3 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, in: Giorgio Agamben (eds.), Means without End: Notes on Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000, p. 55 & 56.   4 “For me, one of the most momentous events of the last 150 years is the animation of the image, the advent of moving images. This introduction of time into visual art could prove to be as important as Bruneleschi’s pronouncement of perspective and demonstration of three-dimensional pictorial space. Pictures now have a fourth dimensional form”. (Bill Viola, in: Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973–1994, London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. 1998, 2nd ed., p. 165).   5 Cf. Winfried Nöth, Handbuch der Semiotik, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 2000, revised and extended edition, pp. 298.   6 Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, loc. cit., p. 58 & 59.   7 Gottfried Boehm, “Die Hintergründigkeit des Zeigens. Deiktische Wurzeln des Bildes”, in: Gottfried Boehm (ed.), Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens, Berlin: Berlin University Press 2007, pp. 23 & 24 (our trans.).   8 Boehm, “Die Hintergründigkeit des Zeigens”, loc. cit., p. 27 (our trans.).   9 Cf. Nöth, Handbuch der Semiotik, loc. cit., p. 301. 10 The concept of gesture, following on from 17th century rhetoric of the gesticular, is particularly at home in theories of acting. The theory of sentimentalism, as represented by Diderot and Lessing, addresses gesticular acting in the tension between authenticity and illusion (cf. summary Kappelhoff, Matrix der Gefühle: Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit, loc.cit., pp. 63). 11 Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Ritus und Geste. Die Begründung des Heldischen im Western”, in: Merkur. Special edition: Heldengedenken: Über das heroische Phantasma, Year 63 (2009), Vol. 9/10, pp. 944–945.

An Art of Gesture  119 12 Walter Benjamin, “The Dialectical Structure of Film”, in: Walter Benjamin (ed.), Selected Writings, Vol. 3. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2002, p. 94. 13 The double meaning of gesture as both a directed (albeit possibly subconscious) physical movement and an abstracted movement becomes very clear in the works of Brecht. In its latter sense, gesture means a kind of societally and culturally determined mental gesticulation, a “gestus”. Brecht understands this as a “complex of gestures, mime and (usually) statements” which contains a “societal relationship”, for example that of “exploitation or cooperation”. He also calls this complex an “attitude”. Aesthetically speaking, gesture can therefore be comprehended as a formative procedure, in the case of film as a “relational order” of visual, acoustic and also tactile perceptions and signs (cf. Ulrike Hanstein, Unknown Woman, Geprügelter Held: Die melodramatische Filmästhetik bei Lars von Trier und Aki Kaurismäki, Berlin/Köln: Alexander Verlag 2011, pp. 130ff, esp. pp. 131 & 146, on Brecht cf. p. 137). Hanstein rightly accentuates “the components of gesture which are not semantic or purposeful” (p. 153), while believing that this accentuation is commendably achieved in film aesthetics by Deleuze. Gesture is also key to Jay Hetrick’s concept of a “cinematic” or “cine-aesthetic” element extending beyond film. Astonishingly, he fails to notice that Agamben’s definition is itself already aesthetically invested (cf. Cine-aesthetics: A Critique of Judgment After Deleuze and Michaux, Man. 2012). 14 Cf. here Ch. 3, section “Evidence”. 15 Cf. here Ch. 5, section. “Cult and Exhibition Value”. 16 Cf. Landwehr, “Zeigen, Sich-zeigen und Sehen-lassen”, loc. cit., pp. 31f., with reference to, among others, Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication, MIT Press 2008; Raymond Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence, London: Atlantic Books 2010, p. 9. 17 Quoted in Voss, Der Leihkörper, loc. cit., p. 46. 18 It does not seem helpful to me to overstretch psychoanalytic concepts arising from a mythological background and ascribe to the spectator the double faculty of Medusa (freezing the living) and Pygmalion (making a thing come alive); see Laura Mulvey: Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaction Books 2006, p. 176. 19 Cf. summarising the theoretical framework Ludger Schwarte, “Die Wahrheitsfähigkeit des Bildes”, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Year Vol. 53, No. 1 (2008), pp. 107–123; Schwarte refers to a suggestion by Lambert Wiesing, cf. ibid., Artifizielle Präsenz: Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2005, pp. 17ff. Schwarte himself is in favour of the framework I have called the so-called event philosophical framework, which Wiesing does not acknowledge; cf. also Bernd Stiegler, “ ‘Iconic Turn’ und gesellschaftliche Reflexion”, in: Trivium: Deutsch-französische Zeitschrift für Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, No. 1(2008) (http://trivium. revues.org). 20 Deleuze, The Time-Image, loc. cit., p. 156. 21 Deleuze, The Time-Image, loc.cit., p. 157. 22 Deleuze, The Time-Image, loc. cit., p. 168. 23 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, trans. by E.F.J. Payne, New York: Dover Publications 1969, p. 264. (§ 52). 24 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. by M. C. Richards, New York: Grove/Atlantic Inc 1958, pp. 44 & 78. 25 Cf. here Chapter 5. Deleuze deliberately rejects the attribution of being a romantic. But what he consistently describes as central to himself is, following on from Schopenhauer as the philosopher of prominence here, also central to

120  An Art of Gesture Romanticism, namely that one would have to give up one’s own identity and disappear into non-identity, the anonymity of the whole. On Schopenhauer cf. The World as Will and Representation, § 34. 26 Deleuze, The Movement-Image, loc.cit., p. 58; cf. id., The Time-Image, loc.cit., pp. 34. 27 Cf. Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, London/New York: Routledge 2002, p. 52. The significance of the concept of the aesthetic idea, in contrast, is overlooked by Colebrook. Cf. here Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, § 49. 28 Cf. here Ch. 1; on Spinoza cf. Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Ethics. An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006, pp. 171; Nadler attempts to exonerate Spinoza from the accusation of mysticism; on Schopenhauer cf. § 34 from The World as Will and Representation. A consistent aestheticisation of Deleuze’s, in connection with Kant and—more unusually—Whitehead, is also suggested by Steven Shaviro, cf. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2009, esp. p. XIV. 29 It only does so for philosophers wishing to offer more than sociologists, political scientists and theorists of Modernity, wishing to go beyond a seizing of certain ontological and in each case historically changeable entities as their starting point of the analysis, such as the individual, social groups, society or the state, and consequently to look out for ‘more profound’ political ‘conditions of possibility’. 30 Cf. here Ch. 5, section “Deleuze, Ontology and Intuition”. 31 Cf. here also Ch. 5. Michel de Certeau’s expansive historical and (naturally cautious) systematic reconstruction of the mysticism of early European Modernity as a “fable” or “fiction” (Mystische Fabel. 16. bis 17. Jahrhundert, loc. cit.) provides a detailed account of this peculiarly epistemological and specific historic status of mysticism. 32 Deleuze: “What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics”. He called his book on Kant: “a book about an enemy” (Negotiations, loc. cit., p. 6).

8 It Is as if We Could Trust Fiction and Aesthetics of the Political

Fiction: A Short Story Let us return to the concept of fiction. At this juncture, I would like to turn to an experienced German storyteller. It is a short story he tells, but a fundamental one—as is the tradition with philosophy—and it goes like this1: For a long time, philosophy needed fiction, roughly speaking, only when figments of the imagination were called for. Sometimes this would be for arbitrarily combined characteristics (such as those constituting the creatures found in fables, like centaurs or unicorns), and sometimes for a selfcontradictory non-entity (like a square circle or a wooden iron). For Kant, a non-entity (nihil negativum, “Unding”) was located right at the bottom of the scale of “nothing”, meaning as it did a term which cancels itself out, a term in opposition not only to reality but also to possibility. In contrast, a “thought-entity” (ens rationis, “Gedankending”) may also be a “mere invention” or “fiction”, as Kant stated, but at least one which is possible. The opposite concept to that of fiction is thus: that of reality. Firstly, a fiction is not real, but it is possible. To the extent that the concept of reality gradually merges with that of truth, especially under the omnipotent influence of Christianity, the concept of fiction, secondly, assumes an accusatory meaning of deceit and delusion. Accordingly, in formal terms, fictions are deceptive because they deceive about their fabrication status. When Christian religion had to relinquish its power over science and philosophy at the end of the 18th century, however, one reaction to this development was the crystallisation, thirdly, of an additional interpretation of fiction, believing it to be beyond the alternative of true versus false, believing it able to stand up in its own right. Evidence of this interpretation can be found equally in science and in art. In the one case, that of science, fiction achieves validity as a hypothesis, as a statement principally capable of being true, but not (yet) proven true. In the other case, that of art, fiction—that world created in literature, drama, paintings and opera—is viewed as facilitating a field of truth, as presenting in a broader sense metaphors and images which are potential candidates for the truth. A fourth interpretation of the concept of fiction emerges as that of self-reference. Here fiction refers to itself; in other

122  It Is as if We Could Trust words, it does not attempt to conceal the fact that it is imaginary, fabricated, created, and in so doing can in itself stake a certain claim to truth (and not just facilitate a potential truth). This can also be found as a rudimentary concept in the work of Kant, before it was tackled explicitly by Hegel and then elaborated further by various 20th century theorists.2 The following generation, led by Nietzsche, was then, fifthly, to witness the unfolding of the last chapter in the history of the concept of fiction, or at least for the time being: its “fundamentalisation” (Marquard). What for millennia had been known as the truth now became a “lie in an extramoral sense”, a kind of self-delusion without which the human species could not survive. Truth had now become a necessary and fruitful fiction. The explicit link to Kant was to lead into a Philosophy of As-if. Hans Vaihinger, the author of this philosophy, emphasised the productive, heuristic function of fiction in the sciences. A final and prominent place within this short story must be awarded to Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory. Its counterfactual assumptions and idealising suppositions were once again to lend a validity to the concept of fiction as necessary in terms of truth theory. So ends the short story. If we asks ourselves why the European history of the arts should have led to such fundamentalisation of the fictitious, then, bearing in mind Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, we might venture the following major theory: “The eschatological destruction of the world is the trauma post Christum natum et mortuum that the here and now is seeking to counteract by living, and that philosophy is seeking to counteract by thinking”. Ultimately, fiction helps. Fiction permits a “counter-eschatological reinstatement” of the world in an as-if mode.3 As indicated, this is a very daring theory. There is, after all, a broad philosophical consensus that a major destruction of the world, a destruction of trust in the world, has been with us at least since the subject-based philosophy of Modernity. This loss of trust is the result of a radical epistemological and ontological dualism. If the connection between thought and spatially extended things, between the res cogitans and the res extensa, can only be guaranteed through the metaphysical-religious authority of God, then without God’s help the subject can be certain of itself, but not of the world. This is, then, our starting position: an ontological loss of trust, coupled with a fundamental, possibly complementary function of the fictitious in the sense of as-if. I would now like to relocate the position of Jacques Rancière. This not only immediately lends a political aspect to our theme but also and ultimately leads to a concept which has stood in relaxed opposition to the familiar habit of suspicion, mistrust and demasking for 200 years: the concept of trust. This initially means rehabilitating the concept of consensus and communitisation. Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgement in its as-if structure provides us with the necessary framework. Accordingly, the political becomes a sphere in which a (utopian-anticipatory) demeanour is feigned. In addition, however, the as-if structure is characteristic of the further context of the action itself for, as an agent, one has to act as if the action

It Is as if We Could Trust  123 will be successful. The as-if structure, as a description of fiction, is thus simultaneously in an aesthetic, political and everyday context a description of trust: at the same time, it is both uncertain and fundamental.

The Consensual and the Dissensual Just how fundamental the status of fiction for contemporary philosophy actually is, can be ascertained with a certain prominence, as I inferred earlier. The theory of truth is namely linked to Habermas and the concept of consensus, a concept which—from the standpoint of recent demasking theorists—has become severely discredited. It should be noted that, while Habermas introduces the concept of consensus within the framework of a theory of truth, to a certain extent, it is also socially and politically relevant. To Habermas, as a successor of Kant and Hegel, Modernity appears to be characterised, amongst other things, by the inevitable pressure of the discursive, of justified utterances to the effect of yes or no, in other words the exchange of arguments and changing points of view. But such an exchange would make no sense were it not to take place on common ground, on shared convictions, and were it not to lead to a result shared by all participants. In a real case, such a result can of course be dissent. There then exists (at the meta-level) a consensus concerning the fact that (at the factual level) there is no consensus. In contrast, for more than half a century now, the philosophy of dissent has untiringly stressed that at the very root not only of politics but also of language itself as we use it—a conflict is present which cannot be appropriately resolved. A rule of judgement which could be applied to both sides of the conflict, to two different ways of thinking, is missing. In the style of Kant’s analysis of the sublime, Jean-François Lyotard coined the term “differend” (différend). It soon becomes obvious that Lyotard himself requires a contrasting term, or rather a contrasting image, namely that of an archipelago, a cluster of islands, in which each island stands for a heterogenous method of discourse. They can be connected by a ship owner or an admiral; in other words, the capacity for judgement. This connection should consist in nothing other than a continual repetition of the statement that the methods of discourse are heterogenous and cannot be connected. And yet, the way to refute this is glaringly obvious: the statement itself presupposes that the person uttering it has always already made the connection. Thus a differend cannot occur until the two conflicting parties, for Kant they are imagination and reason, acknowledge their conflicting claims, in other words comprehend each other. According to Lyotard, “it is patently necessary that the parties ‘understand’ one another for their differend”.4 This rapid reminder seems necessary to me because, like so many other theorists in the French-language field of discourse, Rancière joins in enthusiastically with the philosophy of dissent and difference, immune to the formal and fictitious sense of the concept of consensus.5 He does point out that

124  It Is as if We Could Trust the concept of the differend must not be confused with that of “political disagreement” (mésentente), and to me that seems justified insofar as Lyotard’s focus on language stands in opposition to Rancière’s focus on perception theory, aesthetics, history and sociology. Disagreement “is less concerned with arguing than with what can be argued”; it is concerned with the “tangible presentation” of the object of the dispute.6 But even for Rancière, consensus democracy means that “idyllic” state in which the “dispute” and thus politics has disappeared behind the “regime of opinion” and “right”. Rancière also calls this “postdemocracy”.7 However, it is important to be clear about the fact that an essential part, even half of this postdemocratic consensus is based on feeling. According to Rancière, consensus democracy is the connection of “the one of the law to the one of feeling”, the bringing together of the “power to agree and to enter into contracts” with the “power to consent”.8 It thus at the same time somehow brings together two great figures of political philosophy: so-called archipolitics, for which Plato provided the model (the Republic as the community of the ethos) and the modern, contractualistic variant of “parapolitics”. The bad reputation held by the concept of consensus is thus due not to the semantics of the HabermasFrankfurt school, which includes it in the concept of discourse—i.e. the argumentative, mutual problematisation of claims to truth—but rather to a combination of the Modern principle of power and contract assigned to Hobbes and the ancient principle of ethos assigned to Plato. Consensus is bad because it makes the law of cohabitation a matter of contractual exchange, as well as a matter of feeling.

Aesthetic Community and as-if For Rancière, however, the matter is not to be dismissed this simply. At a crucial point in his own concept of politics, he refers to the idea of an aesthetic community. Moreover, he does so not only within the framework of his concept of politics but also within that of his concept of aesthetics. In the Modern age, in the so-called aesthetic regime, art is a “visualisation which communitises the ideas”. He believes that spreading ideas “to the common people” in this way is the “oldest programme of aesthetics”, which is, of course, a reference to the so-called Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism from the mid-1790s, in which Schelling, Hölderlin and Hegel wrote down their Kantian thoughts in a presumably impetuous and thus very non-Kantian manner.9 Kant also provides keywords for Rancière. Even though the latter holds fast, on the one hand, to the Idealistic-Romantic project of an aesthetic generalisation of ideas, in other words to the New Mythology project, as it is called in the Systematic Programme, he states on the other hand that truly “democratic politics” is based on a “practice of the as-if”, one “that opens up an aesthetic community, in Kantian fashion, a community that demands the consent of the very person who does not acknowledge it”.10

It Is as if We Could Trust  125 Kant actually does analyse the argumentative logics of aesthetic judgement as a logic of the as-if.11 Accordingly, one “must believe that one has reason to expect a similar delight from everyone”. In other words, one “believes” one to have a “universal voice”. An aesthetic judgement is an “imputation” or “request” (in German: “Ansinnen”) to everybody to “agree” (maybe the English words “consent” or “acclaim” are closer in meaning to the German word “zustimmen”, in which you can hear the noun “Stimme”, meaning “voice”). This agreement takes place not on the basis of concepts, but plainly and simply through the agreement itself, through confirmation by others. On the one hand, an aesthetic judgement is accordingly based on hypothetical agreement because, like political judgement, it is formulated as-if consensus were possible (in principle). But, on the other hand, it is also based on actual agreement for, according to Kant’s conviction, there are no concepts, no sound reasons which one can resort to,12 leaving only the option of saying that an object is beautiful and awaiting the agreement or disagreement of one’s conversational partner. Neither partner can provide sound reasons. If the two fail to agree in their judgements, each must then examine his or her judgement to see whether it might not after all be based on subjective preferences. In this sense, Kant’s statement is also interpreted as “soliciting” agreement. This solicitation cannot be verbose, but only deictic, indicative and inviting, along the lines of: look or listen again! Can’t you see, can’t you hear what I mean: that the object is beautiful? And Kant . . . ultimately calls the general voice a “common sense” based on “feeling” which is the “effect” of the “free play” of our cognitive and imaginative “power”. On the basis of this play of oppositional powers—and it is impossible to stress too often that they are strictly oppositional, for the one does precisely what the other does not want—it is possible to speak of the aesthetic “as-if” it were a conceptually “substantiated fact”. In an aesthetic judgement, we maintain something which we cannot prove, but do so as if we could prove it. That is the point of an aesthetic judgement. What we maintain has a felt concomitant claim to general validity, accrued from the endless interaction between understanding and imagination. Following Schiller’s interpretation, Rancière declares this aesthetic act as the prime example of a political utopia, while, to a certain extent, still remaining loyal to its Kantian origins. In political terms, one demands a right aesthetically by acting as if this right were already a reality, in other words by proclaiming its fictitious status to be reality. A prominent example of this is women’s rights in the context of the French Revolution. According to Rancière, women could “demonstrate”, or prove through public actions, two things: firstly, “that the rights owing to them by virtue of the Declaration of Human Rights were denied them” and, secondly, “that they possessed the rights which the Constitution omitted to grant them”. Since Rancière reveres the paradox, like nearly all of his contemporary French colleagues, he conclusively expresses the connection using

126  It Is as if We Could Trust the formula: women act as subjects “that did not have the rights that they had and had the rights that they did not”.13 This is, of course, not a paradox in that strict and challenging sense resulting from the application of a rule to itself (“the term ‘inapplicable’ is applicable”) or the self-inclusion of all-sentences (“all Cretans lie, says a Cretan”). It is only a paradox if we generously forget to add the different respects in which the object of the sentence (in this case “the rights”) has to be viewed. The rights which are principally and at an abstract level attributed to women (to humanity), namely those contained within the declaration of human rights, were de facto denied them through the Constitution valid at the time. In any case, following on from Rancière, politics—provided that it does not merely accept whatever is given at the time, whatever is perceived and said—is dependent on the as-if mode of acting, on feigning something as real which is not (yet) real, on maintaining that something is proven when it is not yet proven and may even be unprovable. To this extent, politics shares an essential element with aesthetics—namely, the aesthetics which were the provenance of Kant. To be sure, politics has one essential element far removed from aesthetics: the element of equality. Indeed, according to the axiom of Rancière in this context, politics “only” exists through the principle of equality.14 At this juncture, we would be justified in criticising the “emancipatory apriorism” which Rancière shares with Badiou. “Politics is a politics of equality, ergo emancipatory—or it is not politics”. This is so unconvincing in empirical terms that Rancière can only state it “axiomatically”.15 Generally speaking, an axiom is a principle which is neither capable of, nor requires proof. In this context, however, or so one would like to think, it definitely would require proof. Whether or not it would also be capable of being proven, is another question. And precisely because it is located in the grey area of an assertion which cannot be proven, yet appears as if it could be proven, the principle of equality is itself, in my eyes, a fiction in the sense described. Only when these two principles come together, the principle of the aesthetically acquired as-if and that of equality (which in turn is based on an as-if structure), in other words only when one comprehends it as Kantian fiction, does politics follow the formula, in the normative sense, of acting in a certain practical situation as-if those who did not count in this situation were already counted for. In a certain respect, aesthetic communitisation here acquires an antiRomantic accent. I am convinced that prominent and fairly recent Frenchlanguage philosophy pursues the Romantic metaphysics of a primacy of the unutterable and the non-identical and that, in political terms, especially for that tradition, which emerged in the early 1980s with a book by LacoueLabarth and Nancy, we need to speak not of a “Left Heideggerianism”, but of a Left Romanticism, albeit with that pertinent familiar danger of an essentialisation and transcendentalisation of the political.16 And yet I am also convinced that for Rancière the issue is far more tense, and thus conceived of in a more balanced way. Accordingly, art in the 20th century,

It Is as if We Could Trust  127 and especially film, is not a harmonising sensualisation of ideas to serve the people, but the sensualisation and thus communitisation of a “confrontation”, of a “contradiction of two worlds”. The consensus consists in the dissensual; disparity is the link. New protagonists are forcing their way, more or less violently, onto the “common stage” of politics. The only thing the protagonists have in common—why ‘only’?—is, then, that fundamental quarrel about whether or not they have anything in common, whether there is anything “between” them which links them, apart from the quarrel itself.17

The as-if Beyond Aesthetics and Politics In Rancière’s case, the political is a sphere in which the fictitious is proclaimed as reality, a sphere in which one acts as if certain rights, certain normative characteristics, were real. Translated into the language of Kant, it is a sphere in which one asserts something one cannot prove, but as-if one could prove it. In politics, the object of that assertion is a right. This distinguishes politics from aesthetics. But what links the two is that the assertion is characterised in general by an as-if structure, and characterised in particular by a structure of community, bringing together unity and separation, the consensual and the dissensual. However, the as-if structure is not only a feature of aesthetic and political judgement and action (in each case requiring a separate further differentiation); it can also, at least in a Kantian context, be demonstrated in the context of moral action. The “postulates of purely practical reason” can be grasped as useful fictions serving a purpose. Postulating God means acting as if God existed, in order to have a kind of security that, through morally implicit and unconditional action, things really will have a good outcome.18 To a certain extent, the as-if structure is also, however, characteristic of action itself. All actions have an inherent fictitious element. Because an action is never totally calculable in advance, because some uncertainties will always remain, an action has first to feign success in order then to become reality. Therefore, although as agents we know that action is not based on omniscience or a perfect plan, we have to act as if this were the case, as if our actions were calculable; otherwise we would not act at all. This can be explained against the background not only of a sociological but also of a teleological and existential-ontological concept of action, since against this background action is defined by a purpose still to be achieved, in other words by something which does not yet (in reality) exist. As we know, Sartre draws from this the consequence that human being is defined by non-being, and that this lack of being is precisely the greatness of human being. Translated into the language of Nietzsche and Georg Simmel, this means that the self is defined as acting through fictions, through its ability to feign. In the context of politics and aesthetics, a specific term is interesting here, namely that of “parasocial interaction”, in which a person first feigns a

128  It Is as if We Could Trust social relationship to another person in order, then, to form that relationship: a fiction with real consequences. A prime example of this is our dealings with stars on our TV or cinema screen, or our dealings with strangers, people who appear on our life stage without really belonging to it (in space/ time, or socially).19 Here too, trust is the most important condition. It is ultimately a trust in common rules between the self and another, between the viewer and the screen or actor, rules which can be seen in analogy to our dealings with strangers. Here we trust in rules such as those whereby, in our everyday dealings with strangers and especially in cities, nobody speaks to or shouts at somebody else without a reason, nobody kisses or hits another person, nobody gives something to a stranger or takes something away. Trusting in these rules, in other words, means doing things as-if we were to enter into a concrete interaction with these people in the near future, speak to them, tell them off, hug them or shoot them. But in reality we do not, or more precisely only do so if we have a (very) good reason. We behave analogously towards screen and TV actors. We act as if we were to enter into an active relationship with the people we see on the screen. The difference is that in this case we cannot in reality, not even with the best reasons in the world. This is where the analogy falls down. We can also clarify the analogy by analysing the different significance of the look in each case. If strangers meet in an everyday situation, they react like two car drivers at night: with a “dimming of the lights” (Erving Goffman).20 When the looks of strangers meet, they recognise each other as agents and as human beings who could, in principle, get to know each other. But when their looks only meet briefly, they quickly avert their eyes, and at the same time, the body sends out a certain signal. In other words, the body functions as a sign, usually sending the message that one does not have hostile intentions. This brief exchange of looks does not apply in the cinema situation, however. The face on the screen does look at the members of the audience, but it does not see them. The look of a screen star is for everyone, not for a certain individual. Each member of the audience believes that he is meant when his eyes meets those of the screen hero. But this is an illusion, an illusion inherent and thus crucial to cinema. At the same time the members of the audience are aware of this, clear from the way they feel no pressure to avert their eyes. What would appear intrusive, unpleasant and aggressive in an everyday context, is enjoyable in the cinema context. This is a benefit of the simultaneously intimate and distanced relationship which cinema (like TV) provides.21 This is therefore the answer to the question of how it is possible for human beings to confuse reality and illusion, how it is possible for them to mix up face to face situations with face to (face on) screen situations. Similarly, it is once again clear why it is an illusion, a deception, to expect that one could not only keep the division between reality and fiction permeable but also eradicate it. It can only be eradicated within fiction itself, within feigned reality. The Purple Rose of Cairo and Last Action Hero, films in which the

It Is as if We Could Trust  129 heroes blithely change from one side to the other, from the cinema auditorium to what is happening on the screen and back again, are, and always will be, films. Only here can parasocial interaction become (proto-)social interaction. Parasocial interaction is far more than as-if interaction, a social relation subject to reality. Listing these areas serves to remind us that, despite the uniformity of the as-if structure, despite the linking element of fiction in everyday, political, aesthetic and possibly even moral actions and judgements, this element takes on a different, even a very different form in each case. This is even true within a class of phenomena, for example within the textbook class of aesthetic phenomena. For Kendall Walton, the idea of doing-as-if plays a prominent role. He exemplifies this with children’s games and play-acting on the stage. Children act as if the sandcastles they have made were real, the actor on the stage acts as if he were slowly becoming drunk (whereas in reality he is only drinking water and imitating the speech and movements of a drunk person). This doing-as-if idea can only be insufficiently applied to recipients of art, however. “The truth of the statement: ‘The actor acts as if he were getting drunk’ primarily depends on the observed behaviour (speech, gestures, etc.) of the actor. The ‘inner states’ of the actor, his thoughts and feelings, are largely irrelevant”. The truth of the statement: ‘The audience is afraid of the drunkard portrayed on the stage’ depends, however, “not in the least” on the observed behaviour of a member of that audience, but “solely on his ‘inner states’ ”.22 For both parties, the actor and the audience, the as-if is constitutive, but it is constitutive for each in very different, indeed opposite ways: what is constitutive for the doing-as-if of the one is precisely what is not constitutive for the doingas-if of the other.

Kantian Trust In general terms, the as-if structure therefore only characterises the fictitious element in everyday, political or aesthetic judgements and actions. Against a Kantian background, however, something else is characteristic of the aesthetic sphere, namely an element of hope and trust. In the methodology of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant popularly summarises his own theoretical undertaking in the trinity: “What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?” In his Introduction to Logic from 1800, he adds the all-encompassing question: “What is the human being?” and categorises these four questions in terms of internal philosophical disciplines, assigning them to metaphysics, to morality, to religion and in a very broad sense to anthropology. There are, however, very good reasons to categorise the third question not only in terms of the philosophy of religion but also in terms of the philosophy of history and aesthetics. Accordingly, the Critique of Judgement is a work which seeks to provide “not the whole, but a substantial part of the answer” to what human beings may hope for.23

130  It Is as if We Could Trust In the (second) introduction to his Critique of Judgement, Kant names as the fundamental problem of his third critical work a “mediation” between nature and freedom. His two previous Critiques dealt with completely different areas: nature, including its corresponding causal laws, and freedom, which per definitionem has nothing in common with natural causality, and instead makes acting conceivable as a “free causality”. In addition, natural objects are only given in their beholding, in sensibility, as “appearances”, not as “things in themselves”. Conversely, the object of freedom is a thing in itself, a supersensible which cannot be imagined sensibly. Although, therefore, as Kant says, an “immense gulf” exists between the two areas, freedom is to have an influence on nature—i.e. “the concept of freedom is to actualize in the world of sense the purpose enjoyed by its laws”. A morality whose imperatives remain merely within the realm of the possible, and are not realised, is without consequence and therefore not a (viable) morality. Nature therefore has to counter this possible realisation of freedom-based morality. Hence, according to Kant, it needs to be able to be conceived of such that the “lawfulness in its form”, analysed in Critique of Pure Reason, at least “harmonises” with the “possibility” that we are to achieve in nature according to laws of freedom.24 Freedom and morality may not, with renewed reference to the “Table of Nothing”, be “empty concepts”, concepts which contradict not only reality but also possibility, and therefore cancel themselves out. A central concern of the Critique of Judgement is to demonstrate that the opposing areas or, as Kant also says in as-if mode: worlds (“just as if they were two different worlds”) are capable of mediation, however weak. The book especially undertakes to do this in the case of aesthetic judgment, by elaborating its argumentational structure: the peculiar lack of interest; the subjective universality which cannot be demonstrated conceptually, which is based on the game of our powers of recognition and thus on a rule; the purposiveness without purpose with regard to the object of the judgement; and, finally, subjective necessity, which cannot be demonstrated conceptually, but solely by example. It is a weak mediation because, according to Kant, philosophy can only be divided into two main parts: theoretical and practical philosophy, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of freedom. Compared to theoretical and moral-practical reason, judgement can consequently not stake claim to the same a priori power of legislation. It is therefore, more concretely, also a weak mediation because it occurs within the framework of the aesthetic, in other words within the framework of a non-discursive, but exemplary form of argumentation which has to rely on both one’s own sensitive perception and the judgement of others. In an early reflection, Kant formulates the context of mediation and reference in a sentence which nowadays sounds old-fashioned—in the language of Hölderlin, one could almost say “hallowed, sober”: “Beautiful things indicate that man fits into the world”.25 They announce in the sense that an ad or short newspaper article announces something, or a symptom

It Is as if We Could Trust  131 announces the onset of a disease. They tell us something briefly, indicate that something will happen or has already happened, but leave space for interpretation and concretion. Beautiful things, as could be stated in semiotic terms, have the status of symbolic signs (indications). To this extent, describing something as beautiful means that, despite all the negative experience which one might have assimilated, one has the impression that the world is still able to concur positively with one’s wishes. Beautiful things indicate this, just as wet streets are a sign that it has rained (or that water has surfaced from the ground or a sprinkler has been in use), and a shot is an indication of danger (or an animal hunt, clay pigeon shooting or the start of a race), and a scar is a sign of an earlier injury (but which does not indicate anything more specific about the type, and nothing at all about the reason for the injury). A sign can mean many things. But this is not the distinction between it and a symbol. The distinction is far more that a symbol, especially a word, aims at the imagination of an object, whereas a sign refers directly to an object and correspondingly to a change in behaviour. A sign is something which causes one to act, whereas a symbol is something which facilitates thought.26 Of course, beautiful things, whether it be those of nature, of the everyday or of art, assume an interim place, between the two semiotic spheres. Like symbols, they “prompt much thought”27 and, like signs, they point directly to something and do so with practical consequences. The idea that man fits into the world can be understood morally practically, ethically politically and epistemologically ontologically. The first and second cases are predominantly concerned with hope, the third with trust. The first interpretation means that we, as morally acting beings, require “at least a trace” or a “hint” that our actions could succeed in principle.28 In the second case, hope is directed at the successful attainment of an ethically good life. In the case of trust, the idea is that we as thinking and recognising beings are capable of comprehending what is. The judgement which Kant calls “reflecting” attempts to locate this “trace” within the framework of science and aesthetics. It cannot subsume a given, a sensitively perceptible, particular phenomenon, under a general, a law or a rule, but vice versa seeks this general for a given in each case. It can only do this by following the principle of purposiveness. With it, it assumes that both the individual empirical judgements, in other words the judgements of the natural sciences, and the corresponding particular forms of nature mutually, purposively agree, and that they come together to form a unity, a system of knowledge. But it also assumes that the epistemological poles sensibility and reason purposively agree. For this purposiveness, Kant also uses the term affinity. For him this is initially an epistemological term. Whereas Locke and Hume found human thinking and acting in habitual association, Kant questions the “ground for the possibility” of this association and describes it, albeit only in the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, using the term affinity. Here affinity

132  It Is as if We Could Trust means the association “contained in the objects themselves”. Judgements which are based on associations or habit are accordingly only of subjective validity. The objective validity of judgements, or the affinity of phenomena, in contrast, is based on a synthesis according to a priori terms, ultimately based on the transcendental unity of the self.29 In his Critique of Judgement, Kant becomes aware of the problem, however, that explanation of the objectivity and scientificity of an individual empirical judgement does not yet explain whether or how the linking of empirical judgments could lead to a systematic whole. And for the hypothetical assumption of such a whole, Kant in turn uses the term affinity. In order to “bring these empirical laws under a common principle (and so) to the unity (characteristic of kinship)”, in other words to classify them according to an ever higher and ultimately maybe even highest principle, we have to make the “subjectively necessary transcendental presupposition” that the empirical laws are not in themselves to be characterised through “boundless heterogeneity”, and thus nature itself is not to be characterised through the “heterogeneity” of its forms; instead, “through the affinity of its particular laws under more general ones it takes on the quality of experience as an empirical system”.30 The relationship between the two experiential terms, that is between experience as a system which is on the one hand transcendental and on the other empirical, here comes under additional argumentational pressure. It now, namely, has the justified semblance that the synthesis of the manifold perception developed in the Critique of Pure Reason can only result in the unity of a certain concept “if a correspondence and affinity (purposive agreement) of the capacity for intuition and of the capacity for concepts is premised”, an affinity which “we suddenly become aware of in aesthetic reflection”.31 Now it appears to be clear that, in the case of aesthetic judgement, something becomes conscious “which cannot be experienced in any other way— namely that the epistemological powers of the subject are harmonised purposively ”.32 In his Anthropology from 1798, Kant once more takes up this theme. Here he defines “affinity (affinitas)” as “the union of the manifold in virtue of its derivation from one ground” and refers in this context to the meaning of the term in chemistry, where it means the “interaction” of two different substances. If we transfer this to those two substances which are of interest to transcendental philosophers, namely the epistemological areas understanding and sensibility, one is ultimately confronted with a puzzle which is only partially accessible in the formulation of an as-if: Despite their dissimilarity, understanding and sensibility by themselves form a close union for bringing about our cognition, as if one had its origin in the other, or both originated from a common origin; but this cannot be, or at least we cannot conceive how dissimilar things could sprout forth from one and the same root.33

It Is as if We Could Trust  133 It is as if understanding had its root in sensibility or, vice versa, sensibility had its root in understanding, or as if both had their origins in a common root. This is beyond comprehension. It can only be formulated as a guiding cognitive and aesthetically authenticated fiction. In the epistemically insecure moments of aesthetic experience, it is, therefore, indicated to us that we fit into the world morally practically and epistemologically ontologically, maybe even ethically politically. And although for Kant, this experience begins with the beautiful, it also includes the sublime and thus that concept which the 18th century uses to address everything non-beautiful, in extreme cases ugly. Under the banner of Postmodernity, the discussion has often appealed to this Kantian concept because he speaks here not of “harmony”, but of “conflict”. Judging something as sublime then means that the mental powers of judgement, imagination and reason, are characterised by a conflict that cannot be quieted down.34 But this estimation is premature for at least two reasons. Firstly, it notoriously overlooks the fact that, even in the case of the beautiful, there is an underlying conflict, or a contradiction. In the non-everyday case in which we perceive something as beautiful, the powers of imagination and understanding, in principle diametrically and irreconcilably opposed, enter into the paradoxical or dialectic or tense state of a completely unstable, dynamic calm consisting in nothing other than the permanent struggle to assert their own principle. The harmonious feeling of the beautiful is not harmonistic. Far more, it is based on conflict. Secondly, under the hyperpremise of a radical critique of reason, the Postmodern perspective systematically blocks out the ambivalent character of the sublime, which consists in facilitating a transition— and not the only one—from aesthetic feeling to moral reason. If, in the case of the beautiful, we are convinced, in our experiencing of purposiveness, of our mental capacity regarding the purposiveness of the world, then we are not, in the case of the sublime, simply convinced vice versa, in our experiencing of unpurposiveness, of our capacity regarding a corresponding unpurposiveness of the world. The failing of the imagination to visualise something plainly great and plainly powerful, rather summons reason, and although both capacities cannot accommodate their contrary directions under the fleeting appearance of calm, the relationship between the two therefore, being experienced as a conflict and not as a game, here too results in “practical confidence”, in entrenched practical self-confidence.35 Even sublime things show to this extent, namely indirectly, that man fits into the world. Against the background of Kant, therefore, there is ample defence for the assumption that aesthetic experiences give room to the hope that we could fulfil our wish for successful action, as well as where possible for a successful life, and that we could give any room to the assurance that we could, the way we are, fit into this world, the way it is. Moral-practical philosophy and ontology are not to be separated from this aesthetics. Yet the bracketing together is, once again, to be seen under the heading of appearance or fiction;

134  It Is as if We Could Trust aesthetically, we experience the world as-if it gave us a reason to hope and trust. Only when one takes the fictive simply as real, does one become a slave to the ideology of the imaginary, according to which the subject projects the harmonious game of its own capacities, balancing out the opposites onto an object, just as the infant in Lacan’s infamous mirror stage projects its physical incompleteness onto its image.36 Put another way, it is concerned with an assurance that our knowledge and actions make sense. And the question of sense—as Camus pointedly said in the tradition of existential philosophy, which is worth remembering from time to time—is “the most urgent of all questions” (la plus pressante des questions).37 It makes actions obligatory which affect one’s own life in elementary ways, right up until death. One does not suffer and die for a theoretical truth. Whether the earth revolves around the sun or the sun around the earth, whether the world has three dimensions and the spirit has 9 or 12 categories—these are questions which usually only partially affect us. (Although there are of course exceptions, as to every rule.) In our existence, however, we are affected when the question is whether or not our life has any meaning. Those who become convinced that they do not fit into the world, not ethically and not ontologically, not with their ideas about a good life and not with their ideas about existence at all (the existence of their own person, of other people, of things), see themselves challenged to face consequences other than those facing people who do not share these convictions (consequences which can include heroic self-sacrifice and suicide, but which, as existentialism has in turn heroically emphasised, do not in any way have to include; one does not suffer and die any more necessarily for a practical truth).

Political Trust Trust is, of course, a concept with a fundamental function within the social sphere.38 Philosophically speaking, this is a theme for political, social and moral philosophy. Within the framework of contract theory, Thomas Hobbes dictates the baselines. For him, too, it is true that the forming of a contract between two parties is reliant on trust, namely when the agreed services or goods are not exchanged immediately. According to him, this trust is only possible, however, when the parties have accepted a third authority, independent of themselves, the powers of a state which is in a position, if necessary, to impose sanctions should the contract be violated. The contract theoretical approach becomes problematic, parallel to the approach of Kantian universalism, in its orientation to egalitarianism and the exchange of goods. Trust is by no means presupposed only for the relationship between partners with equal rights, but also for that between lovers or friends, between parents and children, between the sick and their carers. But trust is also a distinct and central concept in sociology. Beginning with Georg Simmel, trust appears here as a resource which is necessary in order to facilitate coordinated action under the conditions of far-reaching

It Is as if We Could Trust  135 anonymity. It is a functional knowledge replacement or, in the language of Niklas Luhmann, a resource of the “reduction of complexity”. Anthony Giddens is also in agreement here. According to him, whereas local and personal trust is crucial in Premodern cultures, trust in Modern cultures refers to abstract systems, especially to money and expertise. By using money, people can interact with one another without having to know each other. But this is only possible because, and to the extent that they can trust money to be generally acknowledged as such a medium. The same is true of expertise. It has consequences for the knowledge and actions of all those who use it, for example when they consult a doctor or a mortgage advisor, and they can only do this because they trust the expert, and to the extent which they do so. According to Giddens, this is what “lies at the core of all trust relations”. The “prime condition” for requiring trust is “not lack of power but lack of full information”.39 In the social theory of Jürgen Habermas, the concept of trust does not explicitly have a key inherent function, but is, so to speak, embedded in the concept of lifeworld as phenomenologically developed and communication-theoretically interpreted. Lifeworld is what is “given as unquestionable” to the experiencing subject, what is intuitively and routinely familiar, what it can trust.40 And to the extent that the concept of lifeworld behaves in a complementary fashion towards that of communicative action, and that the latter assumes primacy over that of instrumental action, we can say here that the concept of trust also has a foundational significance. Theorists of so-called radical democracy encounter the concept of trust with an almost in-born aversion. To a theory which declares the element of the agonal, of the inevitability and insolubility of conflicts as being the basis of the social, trust must initially appear as suspiciously ideological. Nevertheless, there are very good reasons to implement the emotion of trust, also during the discourse of radical democracy. One reason, for example, is that the friend-foe antagonism inherited from Carl Schmitt can only be defused if it is reinterpreted as agonism, as, for example, was the case for Chantal Mouffe: “A we/they relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognize the legitimacy of their opponents”. One would like to hear more from Mouffe about the structure of this recognition. But it stands to reason that the less this recognition wishes to be based on moral foundations, the more it becomes reliant on the emotion of trust. Trust then refers to the conviction “that the opponent in the political agon will not treat me as an enemy” and that politics per se is, so to speak, transcendentally possible “beyond transcendental conditions of possibility of the type of a universal reason, in which all political agents participate in advance”, but also beyond transcendental conditions of possibility of the type of a quasi-ontological difference trained by Heidegger between the political and politics which theorists such as Deleuze, Badiou and Zizek at least tend to imply.41 The discourse of the “radical” or, in terms of Derrida,

136  It Is as if We Could Trust the “coming” democracy presupposes to this extent an implicit yet unsubstantiable trust in democracy which in several respects seems to be paradoxically or even strictly paradoxically designed, for example through the fact that it is impossible to create trust through speech alone (“trust me!”). In Luhmann’s words, “It is not possible to demand the trust of others; trust can only be offered and accepted”.42 Of course there is a sphere—and here the argumentation comes full circle—which reinforces most beautifully the socially and politically inalienable feeling of trust in a literal sense and takes the sting out of its paradoxes: the sphere of the beautiful or, more generally: of the aesthetic and of art. In the case of the aesthetic, “we might say”, according to Kant, that the sensual experience refers to “favour” because in this case we are granted the “freedom” to “make an object of pleasure for ourselves out of something or other”. One hundred years later, in a completely different context, but in the same aesthetic tradition, Nietzsche uses the expression Overman for the person who has stopped infinitely wanting and has instead learnt to appreciate coincidence, that which happens to one by chance, as a favour, blessing or luck.43 In other words, the aesthetic is an exercise in ontological affirmation.

Politics and Aesthetics For Rancière, as before him Schiller and Adorno, politics and aesthetics form a unity in contradiction.44 Unlike Schiller, who tensely elaborates the transition between the aesthetics of Kant and those of German Idealism, and remains undecided between the subjectivistic and objectivistic line of argumentation, and unlike Adorno, who is to be counted in the tradition of Hegel’s truth aesthetics and to this extent the objectivistic line of argumentation, Rancière belongs to the tradition of genealogists from Kant to Nietzsche, interested in the researching of historical a prioris, of quasitranscendental conditions, which in each case establish le partage du sensible, that which is aistheton, in other words that which can be perceived by the senses. In contrast, in the link between politics and aesthetics backing Kant means following a different line, namely the intersubjectivistic line as first drawn by Hannah Arendt. Following this line, one can generally expose the character of aesthetic judgement, which in a certain respect is political, and particularly expose the corresponding concept of the sensus communis. One can therefore comprehend aesthetic judgement as political (and moral) to the extent that it present a paradigmatic manifestation of a certain characteristic of judging itself, namely, as Kant says, a “broadened way of thinking”, which acts on the maxim “to think from the standpoint of everybody else” and does this by “transferring himself to the standpoint of others”. Arendt is interested in this political and moral implication not pursued by Kant because it permits politics to be conceived of not as a mere distribution of power, but as “reconciliation of variability” and “negotiations of difference”.45 Here

It Is as if We Could Trust  137 we can certainly criticise Arendt for having the tendency to embrace only comparatively harmless differences, and to allow each dramatic difference to appear as a threat to community. She would also like to exclude from the political sphere self-conceptions which emerge as merely private forms of identity according to sex, race and ethnic background, and she orients herself exclusively to the bourgeois-idealistic hierarchy of true culture over mere mass culture.46 She also displays the dedifferentiating tendency to comprehend aesthetic judgement as the model of political judgement. But her recourse to Kant’s maxims of the extended way of thinking facilitates an alternative conception of power based on community or public. Accordingly, power emerges between people when they act together, in other words it arises from the opinion on which human beings have agreed not secretly, but publicly. In this sense, power is not, as conceptualised by Max Weber, the chance to assert one’s own will against antagonisers. Nor is it, as in the administrative sense, mere assertion of political decisions. Far more, this power means the chance to form an opinion spontaneously and coordinate corresponding actions. It places the accent on the constitution of power. In the language of Habermas, we can call it a “communicative power”, but we should then also stay loyal to Arendt to the extent that we make the connection to aesthetics. That of Kant is ideally suited in this context because it is based on the concept of “communication” and “communicability”, a concept which is emphasised nowhere in the work of Kant as strongly as in his Critique of Judgement. We have to agree wholeheartedly with Habermas that this power emerges most clearly when revolutionaries seize the power scattered through the streets, when a population committed to passive resistance opposes foreign tanks with their bare hands, when convinced minorities dispute the legitimacy of existing laws and engage in civil disobendience, when the ‘sheer joy of action’ breaks forth in protest movements.47 Here once again it is shown that community, public or consensus-oriented concepts do not in any way have to be politically conservative or antiradical. This is especially revealed if we enlist Kant’s concept of the sensus communis from his Critique of Judgement. This concept does not mean an argumentative discourse community, nor does it mean a plain “community of emotion” (communauté de sentiment). Neither a simply understood Habermassian, nor an explicitly Lyotardian interpretation is fitting here.48 Far more, we are concerned here with a feeling, namely an aesthetic feeling, which can be universalised, and that means which can be argued about (“disputed”) or, conversely, a feeling which can be disputed and which can therefore be universalised. Terry Eagleton also reduces the significance of this concept. He interprets the aesthetically ensuing sense of community in Marxian terms as the function of the aesthetic being in “bourgeois thinking”, in other words as a social order defined by class division and the

138  It Is as if We Could Trust competition of the marketplace. This sense of community then has to be interpreted as “an astonishingly optimistic and bitterly pessimistic doctrine”. On the one hand: “How marvellous that human unity can be found installed in the very inwardness of the subject, and in that most seemingly wayward and capricious of responses, aesthetic taste!” On the other hand: “How sickeningly precarious human solidarity must be, if it can finally be rooted in nothing more resilient than the vagaries of aesthetic judgement!”49 In contrast, using the language of Arendt and Habermas a good sociologicalsystematic reason can be found which not only transcends ideological criticism, but which also withstands Rancière’s aforementioned objections to the democracy of consensus. Societies can, namely, not only be integrated via administrative politics and economics, via political power and money, via formalised collective decisions and individual self-interest, that means united in a higher-level identity, a whole representing identification values; for this they also require a third element, a community-oriented dimension, such as Kant names, amongst others, in the aesthetically practised sensus communis. The ensuing question of whether this third dimension, as Arendt believes, is to be seen as more fundamental than the other two, or, as Habermas believes, is merely to be brought into play as a fundamental dimension, requires closer discussion, however.50 Those drawing the conclusion from the debates of the last decades about the substantive claims of reason that reason should no longer comprehend these claims as fundamentalistic and should take leave from a rationalistic self-misunderstanding, are certain to feel more affinity with Habermas and the interplay of different dimensions of reason in this case than with Arendt. And, concerning a further question—namely, that of the relationship between aesthetic and political dispute community—it is possible to argue, at least from a Kantian perspective, that this is a normative exemplification relationship: the dispute about appropriate aesthetic judgement is normatively exemplary of the political dispute within a community. In presentday democratically arranged societies, a conflict becomes virulent which, in terms of Habermas and Hegel, is already inherent in the philosophical principle of Modernity: namely, subjectivity. On the one hand, each individual increasingly demands all-round self-fulfilment, on the other hand this self-fulfilment is restricted by all the other people intent on the same thing. The question of how to combine individuality and universality is, in epistmological terms, the same question as how objectivity can be justified on the basis of subjectivity. This epistemological, moral and societal question has been familiar to aesthetics as a discipline of philosophy from the outset, since the middle of the 18th century. It became established in the course of the Enlightenment as a philosophical critique of taste, and it is therefore fitting to speak, in the language of Luc Ferry, of the “invention of taste in the

It Is as if We Could Trust  139 democratic age”.51 And Ferry is also in no doubt that Kant, historically and systematically, assumes a mediatory position (in his eyes between Plato and Nietzsche). In his philosophical critique of taste, and especially in his theory of a sense of community, this has at least provided the elements required to answer the fundamental epistemological, moral and societal question. For the intersubjectivistic connection between aesthetics and politics, theorists other than Arendt can also be named. They presently include Jean-Luc Nancy, responsible for the Heideggeranian variant.52 Heidegger is also the definitive philosopher behind Gadamer, who oscillates between the intersubjectivistic and the objectivistic, truth-aesthetic approach, an oscillation which for him is very characteristic. But it is a conversation which undoubtedly underlies Gadamer’s thinking about art and hermeneutics, art and understanding. Conversation is also a returning model for the aesthetic experience concept of John Dewey. An organological way of thinking from German Idealism, enriched by Darwin, receives a pragmatic linguistic accent. In a work of art, the parts accordingly “melt” to form a whole “just as in a genial conversation there is a continuous interchange and blending, and yet each speaker not only retains his own character but manifests it more clearly than is his wont”. Dewey also builds up an analogy with regard to the problem of mutual understanding of human beings and cultures, this time between friendship and art, and the connecting element is the imagination. Understanding—i.e. seeing through the eyes of another and hearing through the ears of another—requires imagination, and works of art are “the most intimate and energetic means” of the imagination. In this way, they ultimately become the tool of civilisation. “Civilization is uncivil because human beings are divided into non-communicating sects, races, nations, classes and cliques”.53 In the midst of so much understanding and euphoria, we do well to remind ourselves of the flipside of art. Walter Benjamin, clever and slightly cynical from his experience, deduced this flipside in surrealism: And that means pessimism all along the line. Absolutely. Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in I. G. Farben and the peaceful perfection of the air force. However, Benjamin ends this class war with a staccato question: “But what now, what next?”54 I would like to say: under conditions which make us doubt a reasonable version of the world, aesthetic experience can give a feeling of hope and trust or, in Deleuze’s terminology: can give us back a belief in the world because this experience arouses, in its tensely balanced relationship of images and concepts exhausted to the point of conflict, the feeling of a peculiar agreement which invites and tempts us to conclude an agreement between the

140  It Is as if We Could Trust self and the world. Kant determines this relationship dualistically as one of imagination and understanding, or of imagination and reason. But it can also be reformulated under the premise of Dewey’s concept of experience and Habermas’s theory of rationality. It then expands to a triadic and, with increasing differentiation, plural relationship. An aesthetic experience is accordingly sensitive (receptive-presentative as well as hedonistic), imaginative, ethical (referring to the idea of a good life) and cognitively formulated (analytical of work and form), and the relationship of these dimensions is regulated by the experience itself, or in Kantian terms through the practising of the powers of judgement. Its claim to validity is “coherence” (in German Stimmigkeit) and the conclusion from the aesthetic to the ontological and moral-practical is one of unprovable and yet seemingly abruptly provable premises. This leads to the fundamental function of the evidence in questions of aesthetic truth.55 Hope of an ethically sensible and trust in an ontologically sensible version of the world are nothing more, but also nothing less, than an attitude of as-if: equally fundamental and without foundation, in a word: fictional.

Notes   1 Cf. Odo Marquard, “Kunst als Antifiktion”, in: Odo Marquard (ed.), Aesthetica und Anaesthetica, loc.cit., pp. 83; Karlheinz Stierle, Article “Fiktion”, in: Karlheinz Barck et.al. (eds.), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, loc.cit., pp. 380; on Kant cf. Critique of Pure Reason, loc.cit., pp. 382–3 (B 348–349).   2 Adorno works with this concept of self-reference in the Hegelian tradition. In contrast, other traditions are pursued by Jakobson and Danto.   3 Marquard, “Kunst als Antifiktion”, loc.cit., pp. 86–87.   4 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Die Analytik des Erhabenen. Kant-Lektionen, Munich: Fink 1994, p. 142; cf. id., The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, p. xi, pp. 130; Manfred Frank, Die Grenzen der Verständigung, Frankfurt/M. 1988, pp. 77; Wolfgang Welsch, Vernunft. Die zeitgenössische Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vernunft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995, pp. 328.   5 At this juncture, we should remember that Deleuze, taking up the example of Kritik der Urteilskraft, also extols the seemingly paradoxical interleaving of dissent and consent (cf. here Ch. 5 section “The cinema of the seers”).   6 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. by Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999 p. xii.  7 Rancière, Disagreement, loc.cit., p. 95, 101–102. In contrast, the approach of Colin Crouch to the concept of post-democracy is politological. He means by it the constellation of civilian apathy, PR orchestrations, lobbying and backroom politics (Post-Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press 2004).  8 Rancière, Disagreement, loc.cit., pp. 120–121; regarding “archipolitics” and “parapolitics” cf. pp. 61.  9 Jacques Rancière, “Die Geschichtlichkeit des Films”, in: Eva Hohenberger & Judith Keilbach (eds.), Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit: Dokumentarfilm, Fernsehen und Geschichte, Berlin 2003, p. 240; on The Oldest System Programme of German Idealism cf. Walter Jaeschke, Hegel-Handbuch. Leben-WerkWirkung, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2003, pp. 76. 10 Rancière, Disagreement, loc.cit., p. 90.

It Is as if We Could Trust  141 11 Regarding the following quotations cf. paragraphs 6, 7, 8, as well as 19 & 20 from Kant’s Critique of Judgement. 12 Cf. Cristina Lafont, “Law, Normativity and Legitimacy: Can Moral Constructivism be Fruitful for Legal Theory?” in: Stefano Bertea & George Pavlakos (eds.), New Essays on the Normativity of Law, Oxford: Hart Publishing 2011, pp. 229–245. Hypothetical agreement is central to the Kantianism of authors such as Rawls, Habermas or Scanlon. The connection here could be a Kantian statement such as that in his essay “On the Common Saying: That May be True in Theory, but it is of No Use in Practice”. Accordingly, the “original contract” which political philosophy has been citing since Hobbes is for Kant “a mere idea of reason, one, however, that has indubitable (practical) reality”—namely, to obligate legislators to formulate and interpret laws in such a way that they “could have sprung” from the unified will of the entire people, and to regard every subject “as if” he had joined in voting for such a will (in: Werkausgabe Band XI, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Frankfurt/M. 1977, p. 153). In contrast, Lafont argues in favour of detaching democratic agreement from hypothetical agreement. 13 Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” in: The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 103, No. 2/3 (2004), p. 304; cf. id., Disagreement, loc. cit., p. 90. 14 Rancière, Disagreement, loc.cit., Sp 33. 15 Oliver Marchart, Die politische Differenz: Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010, p. 183. In contrast, Derrida sees the essence of democracy expressed in the antinomy of liberty and equality, which he, in a second step, ascribes to a more original freedom; liberty thus stands at the centre of his concept of a “democracy to come” (cf. Leander Scholz, “Freiheit, Gleichheit, Sinnlichkeit: Jacques Rancière, Hegel und die Holländische Malerei”, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, No. 55/2 (2010), pp. 187). 16 Cf. Josef Früchtl, “Auf ein Neues—Ästhetik und Politik. Und dazwischen das Spiel. Angestoßen durch Jacques Rancière”, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Vol. 55 (2007), pp. 209–219; critically on the same topic Robnik, Film ohne Grund. Filmtheorie, Postpolitik und Dissens bei Jacques Rancière, loc.cit., pp. 75; also critically Leander Scholz, “Freiheit, Gleichheit, Sinnlichkeit”, loc. cit., p. 195; Scholz’s objection precisely confirms, however, my accusation of Romanticism because it is the Romantic movement that assigns art an epistemic privilege which for Rancière, enriched by Marxism, means “comprehending artistic activity as the crucial location of production, in which spawning activity becomes visible for the first time” (ibid., our trans.); on political philosophy in France since the 1980s cf. Thomas Bedorf, “Das Politische und die Politik. Konturen einer Differenz”, in: Thomas Bedorf & Kurt Röttgers (eds.), Das Politische und die Politik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2010, pp. 13–15; on the concept of Left-Heideggerianism cf. Marchart, Die politische Differenz, loc.cit., pp. 59–60; the harsh criticism by Micha Brumlik (“voluntarism”, “decisionism”, “irrationalism”, ultimately fascist “in core and structure”, our trans.) concerns Badiou and Zizek far more than Rancière, cf. “Neoleninismus in der Postdemokratie”, in: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Vol. 55, No. 8 (2010), p. 115. 17 Rancière, Disagreement, loc.cit., p. 38; Robnik believes, in contrast, in having to turn Rancière against Rancière since, by emphasising the communising power of art, in particular film, Rancière leaves out the dissensual dimension of politics (cf. Film ohne Grund, loc.cit., pp. 21–22). 18 Cf. Marquard, “Kunst als Antifiktion”, loc.cit., p. 85.

142  It Is as if We Could Trust 19 Cf. Wenzel, Die Abenteuer der Kommunikation, loc.cit., p. 11, 19–20. 20 Cf. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford University Press 1990, p. 81. 21 Cf. Gertrud Koch, “Nähe und Distanz: Face-to-face-Kommunikation in der Moderne”, in: Gertrud Koch (ed.), Auge und Affekt: Wahrnehmung und Interaktion, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1995, pp. 272. Koch refers to research by communication scientist Joshua Meyrowitz. She bridges the gap to film theory with the help of Jacques Aumont (Du Visage au Cinéma, 1992), who expressly refers to the connection between modern city experience and the attractivity of close-up face shots in the cinema. By drawing on psychoanalysis, Koch can add the aspect that, ontogenetically speaking, the first level at which interaction with others occurs is the “mimetic study of the face” (285, our trans.), which creates an “existential memory” (Christopher Bollas), which in turn can later be reanimated in the close-up of the face. To this extent, Koch sympathises with the assumption that one can find the “specific aesthetics” of the visual media in this interaction mode “in which forms of somatic desire and horror are activated by the look at the face” (289, our trans.). In the medium of television, the parasocial structure crystallises in a manner which displays certain differences to that of film, however. Television provides the conveyors of this medium, especially presenters, talk-show hosts and quizmasters, better opportunities to blur the borderline between the presentation space and the audience. A studio audience can be granted a look backstage, for example, or a presenter, accompanied by a camera crew, can visit viewers in their homes. In addition, viewers can be addressed directly, in other words as participants in the action (cf. Wenzel, Die Abenteuer der Kommunikation, loc.cit., p. 473, 476). 22 Maria E. Reicher, “Die Gegenstände des Als-ob”, in: Gertrud Koch & Christiane Voss (eds.), ‘Es ist, als ob’. Fiktionalität in Philosophie, Film- und Medienwissenschaft, München: Fink 2009, pp. 65–66 (our trans.). 23 Birgit Recki, Ästhetik der Sitten: Die Affinität von ästhetischem Gefühl und praktischer Vernunft bei Kant, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2001, p. 134, there also (pp. 132–133.) the references to Kant (our trans.). Similarly, Marquard in his early essay “Kant und die Wende zur Ästhetik” (1962). Marquard might tend towards deeming the aesthetic to be a compensation for the failings of reason, but he acknowledges that Kant himself leaves the question “undecided” of whether or not the aesthetic is a substitute for reason (especially historical reason), and that this indicates a pluralism from rationality theory: “Kant did not yet find it necessary, in the manner of more recent philosophers, to stake everything on a single card” (in: Aesthetica und Anaesthetica, loc.cit., p. 32, our trans.). 24 Kant, Critique of Judgment, loc.cit., p. 15 (introd.). 25 Quoted in Recki, Ästhetik der Sitten, loc.cit., p. 135. Recki is of the opinion that the beautiful things of which Kant speaks are not those of art, but can only be those of nature. Nature is to be seen as reasonable, not as the world created by man, which also includes the things of art. The metaphysically and ontologically challenging character of the Kantian statement is surely in its reference to nature. Of course, one should take into consideration the fact that Kant emphasises for art, in those paragraphs of his Critique of Judgement which are dedicated to genius, a particular aspect of being made, namely that of the unconscious, which he in turn calls “nature”. Therefore the world is, at least regarding art, something made by man, and yet not, certainly not fully, intelligible. To this extent the world is, itself, nature. 26 Cf. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press 1979, pp. 53.

It Is as if We Could Trust  143 27 Kant, Critique of Judgment, loc.cit., p. 182 (§ 49). Kant speaks in this context about the achievement of works of art, not of the beautiful things of nature or of the everyday. The attribute of giving us much to think about is, beside that of giving us much to see and hear, a fundamental attribute of beauty, based on the interaction of understanding and imagination. 28 Kant, Critique of Judgment, loc.cit., p. 167 (§ 42). 29 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, loc.cit., p. 235 (A 113); cf. pp. 251–252 (B 142). 30 Kant, Critique of Judgment, loc.cit., pp. 397–398 (first introd.). 31 Günter Wohlfart, “Zum Problem der transzendentalen Affinität in der Philosophie Kants”, in: 5. Internationaler Kant-Kongress, Bonn 1981, pp. 314–315 (our trans.). 32 Recki, Ästhetik der Sitten, loc.cit., p. 106 (our trans.). 33 Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, in: Wilhelm Weischedel (ed.), Werkausgabe, Vol. XII, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1977, p. 479. 34 Cf. Wolfgang Welsch, “Adornos Ästhetik: eine implizite Ästhetik des Erhabenen”, in: Wolfgang Welsch (ed.), Ästhetisches Denken, Stuttgart: Reclam 1990, p. 140; on “conflict” cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment, loc. cit., p. 116. (§27). 35 Recki, Ästhetik der Sitten, loc.cit., p. 214 (our trans.). 36 Cf. on this criticism Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, loc.cit., p. 87. 37 Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe: Essay sur l’absurde, Paris: Gallimard 2010 (or. ed. 1942), p. 18. 38 Cf. Martin Hartmann, “Einleitung”, in: Martin Hartmann & Claus Offe (eds.), Vertrauen: Die Grundlage des sozialen Zusammenhalts, Frankfurt am Mian/ New York: Campus 2001, pp. 10. 39 Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, loc.cit., p. 33 & 114. Onora O’Neill is of the same opinion: “There is no complete answer to the old question: ‘who will guard the guardians?’ On the contrary, trust is needed precisely because all guarantees are incomplete (. . .) Where we have guarantees or proofs, placing trust is redundant. We don’t need to take it on trust that 5×11 = 55, or that we are alive, or that each of us was born of a human mother or that the sun rose this morning”. (A Question of Trust, The BBC Reith Lectures 2002, Cambridge University Press 2002, p. 6) O’Neill does not see this as a specifically modern problem, however. She merely notes “a mood of suspicion” (p. 11), not a crisis of trust. In the point that trust compensates a lack of knowledge, Luhmann’s system theory and deconstructivism also meet; cf. Catrin Kersten, Orte der Freundschaft. Niklas Luhmann und ‘Das Meer in mir’, Berlin: Kadmos 2008. 40 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. by Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press 1987, pp. 119, esp. pp. 130. 41 Andreas Hetzel, “Vertrauen als Affekt der radikalen Demokratie”, in: Thomas Bedorf & Kurt Röttgers (eds.), Das Politische und die Politik, loc.cit., p. 242 (our trans.), with the quotation of Mouffe as well. In order to escape the leftHeideggerian essentialisation and transcendentalisation of the political against (mere) politics, Hetzel subsequently makes the reasonable proposal to Mouffe that the political “not be distinguished as a sphere from politics, but rather interpreted as a certain aspect of politics”. (p. 238, our trans.). 42 Luhmann, zit. in Hetzel, loc.cit., p. 250; cf. also p. 246. 43 Kant, Critique of Judgment, loc.cit., p. 52 (§ 5); on Nietzsche cf. Früchtl, The Impertinent Self, loc.cit., pp. 182. 44 Cf. Rancière’s reference to the “primal scene” of aesthetics in Schiller’s, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, which include the “basic contradiction” that art is simultaneously autonomous and heteronomous (“The Aesthetic

144  It Is as if We Could Trust Revolution and its Outcomes. Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy”, in: New Left Review 14/2002, pp. 134 & 137) 45 Kennan Ferguson, The Politics of Judgment: Aesthetics, Identity, and Political Theory, Lanham: Lexington Books etc. 1999, p. 104; on Kant cf. Critique of Judgment, loc.cit., pp. 160–161 (§ 40). 46 Cf. Ferguson, The Politics of Judgment, loc.cit., pp. 109. 47 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norm:. Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. by William Rehg, Cambridge: Polity Press 1997, p. 148–149, cf. on the preceding passage pp. 146; for Habermas, law is the medium via which communicative power realises itself in administrative power; cf. here also Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas”, in: Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1992, pp. 73–98: Benhabib contrasts “associationism” with “agonism”; cf. also Susan Bickford: The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict and Citizenship, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996: “Communication inherently presupposes different beings and the possibility of something between them; it points to both separateness and relatedness (. . .) Communication is an effort that acknowledges a more-than-one, a separateness, a difference that may be the source of conflict, and at the same time foregrounds the possibility of bridging that gap by devising a means of relatedness” (p. 4–5); on the relevance of communicability within the context of aesthetic judgement in Kant cf. Brigitte Scheer, “Mitteilsamkeit ohne Mitteilung. Zu einem weiteren Paradoxon der Kantischen Ästhetik”, in: Forum für Philosophie Bad Homburg (ed.), Ästhetische Reflexion und kommunikative Vernunft, Bad Homburg 1993, pp. 49–50. 48 Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, “So etwas wie ‚Kommunikation . . . ohne Kommunikation’“, in: Jean-Francois Lyotard (ed.), Das Inhumane. Plaudereien über die Zeit, Vienna 1989, p. 192, cf. pp. 203–204; “Quelque chose comme: ‘communication . . . sans communication’ ”, in: Jean-Francois (ed.), L’inhumain: Causeries sur le temps, Clamecy: Klincksieck 2014, p. 109, pp. 114–115. 49 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, loc.cit., p. 76; cf. also Martin Jay, “ ‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology: Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?”, in: Cultural Critique, No. 21 (Spring 1992), p. 46, pp. 49.; on Arendt cf. pp. 54. 50 Cf. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, loc.cit., p. 269 & 298. 51 Cf. Luc Ferry, Der Mensch als Ästhet: Die Erfindung des Geschmacks im Zeitalter der Demokratie, trans. into German by Petra Breitling, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 1992, pp. 5, 11, 34; cf. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, loc.cit., pp. 16. 52 Cf. here Ch. 3. 53 Dewey, Art as Experience, loc.cit., p. 36 & 336. 54 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism. The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”, in: Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland & Gary Smith (eds.), Selected Writings, Vol. 2, part 1: 1927–1930, trans. by Rodney Livingstone and Others, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press 2005, pp. 216–217. 55 On the internal-plural relationship of the aesthetic and its evidence cf. Früchtl, Ästhetische Erfahrung und moralisches Urteil, loc.cit., p. 56, pp. 61, pp. 102, p. 107, p. 440; the German word Stimmigkeit includes Stimme (voice) as well.

9 All You Need Is Love Cavell and the Comedy of Remarriage

Between Film and Philosophy A sceptic is incapable of love, On the contrary, love is probably the last thing in which a sceptic can still believe, He can, Rather let us say he has to. (José Saramago, History of the Siege of Lisbon)

It is what it is says love. (Erich Fried)

At the end of the first chapter, following on from Deleuze’s comment that one has to believe “in the bond between man and the world, in love or in life”, I referred to Cavell, who dedicated the following aphoristic statement to “love” in a triad with man, the world and life: “To live in the face of doubt, eyes happily shut, would be to fall in love with the world. For if there is a correct blindness, only love has it”. Love is blind, or so the saying goes, and Cavell, an ordinary language philosopher, agrees. This blindness is obviously a condition for happiness. External observers who are aware early on that such happiness is based on a fundamentally false perception have no validity for Cavell. If any blindness is justified, then that of love. Philosophers need this feeling in order to overcome a philosophical problem, in Cavell’s eyes maybe even the central problem of philosophy: scepticism, fundamental doubt, the calling into question of everything. Falling in love with the world, so the quotation by Cavell suggests, is the appropriate solution to the problem of scepticism. It is the same answer of ontological or existential affirmation which Deleuze also offers in his philosophy of cinema. But I would like to show that, in contrast to Deleuze, Cavell presents a philosophy of cinema which no longer calls for redemption, or at least no longer in desperation. My basic theory will be that since we always have to rely on somebody or something, even if we do not know whether or not we can justifiably rely on them, and maybe even precisely because of this, film makes reference to the world not in the sense of a formally re-found time (Proust’s novel on “time lost”—to this extent Deleuze gives to film what

146  All You Need Is Love Proust gave to literature: the aesthetic explication—sometimes conveying happiness—of a shocking intuition), but presents us with the world returned from the epistemological division, like every other aesthetic experience, in the ambivalent mode of the as-if. No more, as the metaphysician of time, Deleuze, would have it, but also no less.

Film, Philosophy and Scepticism Other than Deleuze, Cavell is the only major philosopher to stress the significance of film and make it a central component of his philosophy. For him, it would seem fitting to describe the relationship between film and philosophy as one of love. The term comedies of remarriage, to which he dedicates extensive studies in his book Pursuits of Happiness, may also refer to that couple film and philosophy.1 Here, too, the ideal is a remarriage, after the previous one has failed—a marriage between equals who have to renegotiate their mutual standing and who, as we may cheerfully predict, will one day have to renegotiate it again. For modern married couples, repetition is actually a matter of course. In the natural run of things called marriage, the cohabitation of two formally equal individuals, it is normal for arguments to occur, and as long as reconciliation is possible, this should be celebrated, especially as one suspects it will not last forever. This is also how we may imagine the relationship between film and philosophy: as a jolly spectacle of falling out and getting back together. For Cavell, of course, this relationship is not only possible, but necessary. This couple cannot actually become divorced, or if so, then only with considerable losses. Film would lose that interpretational authority which makes it so much more than mere entertainment, namely by exposing film’s significance (its implied sense and thus importance) for human existence, at least for human existence within a certain age. Vice versa, philosophy would lose an area of interpretation and analysis enabling its essential tasks—or at least some of them—and thus an essential part of its self-conception to be fulfilled. Cavell sums up this loss for film compactly in his declaration of central hypotheses. Originating from the assumption “that movies have played a role in American culture different from their role in other cultures”, he specifies this role as “a function of the absence in America of the European edifice of philosophy”. Under the additional assumption that the US-American culture, no differently from the European (and no differently from any other) culture, is just as dependent on forming a self-conception, “that American culture has been no less ambitious, craved no less to think about itself, than the most ambitious European culture”, Cavell necessarily arrives at the conclusion that, in the US-American context, film assumes that role of cultural self-understanding as a process which, in a European context, philosophy and—an additional assumption—literature embrace or have embraced. “American film at its best participates in this Western cultural

All You Need Is Love  147 ambition of self-thought or self-invention”, film satisfies “the craving for thought, the ambition of talented culture to examine itself publicly”.2 Thus, in the US-American culture, film fulfils a philosophical and literary function. A philosophical interpretation of film is therefore not alien, at least not in this context. Quite the contrary. Of course, Cavell also makes it clear that the philosophical rehabilitation of film is not to be attributed to philosophy and film themselves, but to their US-American contextualisation. To this extent, Cavell’s philosophy of film is not plainly essentialist, but culturalistic. Secondly, for Cavell the loss for philosophy has to be seen in mirror image, as the central task of philosophy, the overcoming of scepticism. Of all art forms, film provides the greatest challenge to this philosophical and existential concern. In this context scepticism means, first of all, the well-known philosophical view that (safe) knowledge is not possible and that doubt (regarding all assertions of safe knowledge) has to be a guiding principle. For Cavell, however, scepticism is less this intellectual criticism of knowledge, and far more the condition underlying it. It occurs in two variations: cognitivistic and psychological-anthropological. The foundations of scepticism are cognitivistic or epistemic to the extent that its disenchantment or disappointment at there being no (safe) knowledge is based on a presupposition that knowledge (about objects in the world and about other subjects) always demands an epistemic relationship, in other words that our relationship to the world and to others always has to be strictly cognitive. Accordingly, sceptics are not only those who say that we do not know anything (for sure) and maybe even cannot know anything (for sure), but are also all those who universalise the strict knowledge model and declare it the foundation of all knowledge. In this broad sense, scepticism is a negative as well as a positive answer to the general questioning of knowledge. It covers the scholarly definition of scepticism and what Kant termed dogmatism.3 On this understanding, it is then possible for a dialectic of reason, as Kant calls it, or a transcendental illusion to develop. Driven by its permanent sceptical suspicion, reason seeks to gain a knowledge which, as dogmatic metaphysics, transcends the conditions of possible knowledge. Kant calls the latter conditions of experience or of finitude.4 Knowledge is finite knowledge. Yet, due to its cognitivism, scepticism leads to a false, namely dogmatic-metaphysical consequence. In a second interpretation, Cavell reveals an additional and deeper layer. He interprets the cognitivistic fundamental orientation as an intellectual strategy in the light of an anthropological situation which he describes in the sense of Nietzsche’s genealogy and Freud’s psychoanalysis. Accordingly, it is fear which seeks to conceal scepticism as broadly understood, fear of uncertainty and the finitude of the subject to be known, fear of its lack of place and lack of home in the world. Scepticism is a harmless term for something which is not at all harmless—namely, “the standing threat to thought and communication that they are only human”, linked with the understanding phrase “nothing is more human than the wish to deny one’s

148  All You Need Is Love humanity”.5 Overcoming scepticism cannot be a merely theoretical task, therefore, involving proof that it is possible for a subject to create a true representation of the (external) world and other subjects, for example. Far more, a surmounting of scepticism has to aim at revealing its subcutaneous suppression strategies in a theoretically manifold way and to seek practical re-legitimisation of the usual connections to the world. Cavell’s central concept here is that of acknowledgement. Ultimately, knowledge has to find its way back to acknowledgement. Following the scholarly definition of scepticism, Cavell’s intricate argumentation for the primacy of acknowledgement can be concentrated on two focal points, on the problem of a relationship to the world as a whole, and on the problem of other minds. Concerning the latter, Cavell convincingly counters the sceptics and their equally cognitivistic opponents with the idea that what separates us as human beings or as subjects is not, or not primarily, our bodies, but our minds, or more precisely “a particular aspect or stance of the mind, a particular way in which we relate”. Cavell names this aspect of the mind “position” or “attitude”. Thus what separates us from each other as entities in space and time and as empirical subjectivities is an attitude, an ethos in the Greek sense of the word. Separateness is something which can be denied or acknowledged. “Whilst separateness qua embodiment is an unavoidable fact of the conditio humana, separateness through denial depends on us. Our responsibility for others, one could say, consists in, or is a function of our responsivity towards them”. Accordingly, Cavell treats an inability to acknowledge expressive statements by others (‘I am in pain’) as a “fundamental relationship illiteracy”, an illiteracy founded on mistrust, for sceptics mistrust their own ability “to read what is expressed in the behaviour of others”.6 To this extent, philosophical scepticism is a rationalisation of human disappointment concerning relationships between human beings, seen once again through the eyes of Nietzsche and Freud, and Cavell’s undertaking is no less than to put a mature philosophical doctrine, an established way of thinking, on the couch. Cavell’s concept of acknowledgement is distinct from the one which made Hegel famous in a German and continental European context, the one which Honneth took up for a social theory able to link Foucault’s deliberations about the theory of power with Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Acknowledgement does not mean that a subject recognises himself in an Other alien to him (another subject or a supersubjective entity such as society, the state, history or something within the non-subjective field of nature) and in so doing finds his true identity. For Cavell, acknowledgement simply means that (expressive) statements by another party, by another person, prompt a reaction, regardless of which one. This reaction can be positive, indifferent or negative. It is the reaction as such which is important, for it conveys a non-epistemic confirmation of the other person. A reaction indicates that an expression of feeling has been understood as an expression of feeling—has been understood affectively, at the level of feeling. For

All You Need Is Love  149 Cavell, the attitude of acknowledgement represents, as Honneth sums up, “a completely elementary form” of intersubjective confirmation located “below the threshold”, marking the “affirmation of specific characteristics of the opposite person in question”. This fundamental level is concerned with ontological or, as Honneth puts it, “existential” affirmation.7 Cavell’s argumentation in favour of the primacy of acknowledgement also concentrates on a second context. Cavell sees “truth” or the “moral of scepticism” in the idea “that the human creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such, is not that of knowing”. The relationship of man to the world is not one of knowledge (presenting itself as certain). The term “world as a whole” suggests a Kantian understanding, and in fact Cavell readily refers to “Kant’s insight” that there are “limitations of knowledge”, but that these are not, or do not have to be “failures”.8 They are only failures from the point of view of a subject which misunderstands itself cognitivistically, which would like to assume its place towards the world as a whole, and which in so doing becomes placeless and homeless in it. If one remains loyal to the Kantian insight (just as one remains loyal to beloved people and objects), one accepts epistemologically the limitations of knowledge which metaphysically are limitations of finitude, and then the area within the epistemic limitations corresponds to an area beyond these limitations, a metaphysical whole. These two areas are not in a simple relationship of exclusion and opposition to each other, however, but in a particular relationship of presupposition. For the concept of the world, which is actually an “inclusive concept” or, as Kant also clarifies, an “idea”, namely “the inclusive concept of all phenomena” or the “complete inclusive concept of objects”9—for this concept of the world, this means that in every single act of knowledge we are forced to presume a whole, a referential context which we cannot draw level with cognitively, however. This condition of the possibility of knowledge must itself remain within the area of non-knowledge. For Kant this is still a regulative condition, for Heidegger and for Wittgenstein in his later years, all three of whom Cavell mentions in a single breath, it is a constitutive one. “Knowing” things (in the world) is one thing; “revealing” the world in which these things have their place (their significance) is quite another. Cognition—that which reveals itself to us, shows us, gives us to understand—is not exhaustively knowledge.10

Comment on Kant’s Concept of the World In this context, it is interesting to focus on the wider meaning of the Kantian concept of the world. Three different interpretations can be demonstrated, all loosely connected via the concept of the idea. Firstly there is the epistemological or, in Kant’s own words, “cosmological” interpretation, as developed in his Critique of Pure Reason. An idea is a concept of the unconditioned which is brought forth by reason in order to guarantee the highest possible unity of thought. The construction of a

150  All You Need Is Love systematic order of science is here, for Kant, the reason for developing the concept of ideas. Since ideas “concern the unconditioned in the synthesis of appearances” and “world” is to be understood as the “the sum total of all appearances”, Kant calls these ideas “cosmological” or “world concepts”.11 Although Kant would only like to ascribe to ideas a regulative, and definitely not a constitutive function for the knowledge process, this separation is not as unambiguous as it appears. For example, when Kant writes that the idea of “the form of a whole of cognition  . . . precedes the determinate cognition of the parts”,12 it is questionable whether this relationship between parts and the whole is described only in a temporal or maybe also in a logical sense. This unclear interdependence of ideas and categories, and thus of the world as a totality of all appearances and as an individual appearance is also relevant with reference to the second, the teleological interpretation of the world. This variant is particularly developed by Kant in his Critique of Judgement. The concept is no longer associated with reason, but with reflective judgement, with purposefulness as its principle. Kant distinguishes three individual meanings: general purposefulness of nature for knowledge as a transcendental principle, aesthetic purposefulness, and objective, organic purposefulness. The teleological interpretation of the world is not, like the epistemological one, more or less synonymous with the concept of the unity of nature, but rather extends further to include the practical and moral dimension. This comprehensive concept of the world is located within the conception of ideas, however. With it, Kant wishes to satisfy not only an interest stemming from the philosophy of science but also a metaphysical, and for him, this means moral interest.13 This teleological concept of the world initially seems to approach Heidegger’s explication of the world of everyday existence.14 It may be the case that in Being and Time it is everyday existence which constitutes world, not a subject which imprints form on a separate object; and yet for Heidegger, too, this constitution occurs a priori, as a condition governing the possibility of reasonable behaviour. He discusses this world within a teleological conceptual framework. Thus everyday existence, which is concerned with the handling of “the ready-to-hand”, of “useful things”, is subordinate to the “ ‘in-order-to’ which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time”,15 to the purpose served by the useful thing, to its “involvement” (Bewandtnis). The teleological meaning of the Kantian concept of the world extends into the third, the existential interpretation. Heidegger acknowledges the latter favourably whilst, just like Husserl,16 overlooking the teleological meaning. This is astonishing because the teleological concept of the world, like the epistemological one, occurs as an a priori—empirical hybrid, as an oxymoron of a subjective necessity, as a necessary and at the same time problematic term, but which, more than the epistemological meaning, refers to world in a comprehensive sense and comes closest to Heidegger’s

All You Need Is Love  151 transcendental philosophy with its existential-ontological spin. With the existential concept of the world, Kant does, in contrast, thematise a semantic layer of everyday practicality, but this layer is devoid of all transcendental and thus a priori validity. Kant gives shape to this concept of the world in the context of his anthropology. Anthropology, a “doctrine containing the knowledge of man”, deserves to be simultaneously called “knowledge of the world”. Knowledge of man means knowledge of the world, and vice versa. Kant adds to this man-world-knowledge doctrine the attribute “pragmatic” because it amounts not only to a “knowledge of the things in the world” but also a “knowledge of man as a citizen of the world”.17 Here the concept of the world most clearly acquires a moral aspect. But here it is also most clearly bound to the ethical, cultural, yes precisely the pragmatic aspect. As Kant purports at the same juncture, the citizen of the world finds his civilisatory embodiment most readily in the “so-called high society”, the “world of the nobles”. The ideal of a so-called man of the world feeds off this social class. With regard to Kant’s preliminary on an existential-pragmatic concept of the world, Heidegger comments in an essay from 1929 that it is likewise erroneous to take the expression “world” either as designation for the allness of the natural things or for the community of man. In fact, it means both, namely human existence in its relation to being as a whole.18 World therefore also always means social world. Kant provides some more very insightful definitions of the existential concept of the world. In line with the French language, he distinguishes between the expressions “to know the world” and “to have the world”. In the former one only “understands the play” one has “watched”, in the latter one has “participated” in it.19 Therefore, in this context the terms experience and education are also appropriate because experience makes one—even an anthropologist from a pragmatic point of view—smart. Here Kant does not mean experience in the strict, epistemological sense of the word, thus once again opening the door to a different concept of experience. Here learning processes are completed logically consistently along the path of imitation. The “man of the world” is educated not “through school” like the “pedant”, but “through the world” by imitating “grand designs”, and he acquires them individually by travelling, through contact with human beings (especially, at Kant’s time, with women, for “a pedant spends no time with women”), from history and finally from art, preferably theatre and novels.

Film and Acknowledgement For Cavell, scepticism and its counterpart acknowledgement stand for the central problem not only of philosophy but also of art. According to a statement by Cavell which seems to have been thrown in for good measure, art cannot be understood until one understands that it has to do with acknowledgement, with the existential acknowledgement of our self and of

152  All You Need Is Love the others. “Apart from the wish for selfhood (hence the always simultaneous granting of otherness as well) I do not understand the value of art”.20 Correspondingly relevant in art is the scepticistic mirror image, especially in the art form of tragedy. The tragic dimension of the sceptic, which consists in continually denying the existence of the other, the so-called problem of other minds, indeed of existence at all, and in so doing finding himself, the others and the objective world in isolation and meaninglessness, emerges with existential vehemence in the tragedies, for Cavell predominantly those of Shakespeare. The assertion is, admittedly, not that tragedy as such has to be understood scepticistically but, vice versa, that scepticism has an intrinsic pull towards the tragic.21 With logical consistency, the problem of scepticism can be found and, with repercussions for philosophy, newly discovered in tragedy. This link is specifically significant for film, which, in its best examples, achieves the romantic and US-American ideal of a popular art form. Corresponding to Cavell’s far-reaching hypothesis, it is “a moving image of scepticism”.22 This means, first of all, that the world which is perceivable on the screen is inaccessible (in a literal sense) for us as viewers, just as for the figures in the screen world our world is vice versa inaccessible. A screen is a “barrier”. The English language has this linguistic connotation: the screen “screens me from the world it holds—that is, makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me—that is, screens its existence from me”.23 So on the one hand, the screen screens me from the world, and, on the other, it screens the world from me. Film presents us as viewers with a world to which we may have access in our imagination, and yet not ontologically, at least not at the moment when we perceive it. As agents, we are excluded from it. It is a world, an action context, in which we cannot be physically present. We have to reconcile ourselves to our absence. The only role which cinema assigns to us is that of the viewer; a contemplative role. To this extent, the screen world is present to us as viewers, even though we are not present in it. This description not only leads to the well-known sceptical reaction that the world projected onto the screen does not exist; it thus leads not only to a confirmation of the fundamental sceptical doubt regarding the existence of a (in this case artificially created) world; Cavell’s description also denotes a fundamental ambivalence of the cinema experience, an experience of exclusion which is simultaneously negated and affirmed. It is negated because people “naturally”—i.e. for psychological-anthropological reasons, but also for historical-cultural, and especially for romantic reasons—require not “isolation and incomprehension”, but “union or reunion, call it community”.24 The experience which scepticism heightens to the point of tragic consists in denying this element, the communitarian element of the conditio humana. And yet the experience of exclusion, in other words the scepticistic experience, is also affirmed in the cinema because it allows the viewers to escape the conditions of subjectivity, or at least creates a positive illusion

All You Need Is Love  153 of the same, simply through the circumstance that film, due to its further development from photography, is based on technological automatism; it is not the work of the hand of the painter, but the result of a causal relation between camera, physical object and light.25 To say that film is based on automatism does not mean that it is nothing but automatism, but simply that the latter is inevitable because, and as long as, film consists of photographs. To put it pointedly, in its relation to the world presented—i.e. the world photographed—film realises automatically, in a simplified manner, that indifferent contemplation which for Kant forms the starting point of aesthetic experience. The background to this theory is the art historical and psychoanalytical theory that, with Protestantism and Shakespeare and Descartes, but also in every ontogenesis, an “unhinging of our consciousness from the world” takes place, bringing forth subjectivity as something which pushes itself in front of the world, so to speak, so that no longer it, the world, is present, but only subjectivity; in other words so that we and only we are present to ourselves.26 In contrast, film is a photographic technique, and photography, through its automatic mechanics, does not permit the subject to be present in the picture as a construing authority, as subjectivity. Seen this way, we as viewers are conspicuous by our absence in film. Photography and film free the subject from only being able to be present to himself. They bring the world back. But film is a moving, ambivalent picture not only of scepticism but also of acknowledgement. Corresponding to the two focal points in Cavell’s argumentation for the primacy of acknowledgement, film provides two possible ways of awarding evidence to this primacy. The acknowledgement of the other (the problem of other minds) is most at home in the Hollywood comedies of remarriage. Whilst in melodramas the external presentation of happiness in marriage is male-dominated, only permitting the wife to find her own voice and express her individuality in painful processes of selfdiscovery, the comedies of remarriage show how an individual can only build up a relationship to himself with the help of other individuals, in friendship and love. All the verbal—and they usually remain verbal—battles between the still married and not yet remarried couples are aimed at a readjustment of the balance between self and other, “self-reliance and conformity”, distance and proximity. In so doing, they aim at that everyday happiness which consists of repetition. In the melodrama the (married) man fights against the idea of his wife being acknowledged (by himself and by others); in the comedy (of remarriage), the battle of the sexes rages turbulently yet with ultimate bite inhibition, a purely verbal battle for mutual acknowledgement.27 Film also, however, provides a solution to the second central aspect of Cavell’s concept of acknowledgement, namely the relationship to the world as a whole. Building on Kant’s description of the problem, and addressing those by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Cavell’s solution is that we as perceivers are forced to anticipate a whole (world), but that we are not capable of grasping it cognitively. This accepted coercion, this insight into a necessity is

154  All You Need Is Love the correct consequence to draw from Kant’s theory of finitude. Film, based on the technique of photography, draws this consequence in its own way. The camera, being finite, crops a portion from an indefinitely larger field; continuous portions of that field could be included in the photograph in fact taken; in principle it could all be taken (. . .) When a photograph is cropped, the rest of the world is cut out.28 A photograph is “of a world” and “world” is a term of totality for an infinite referential context. The recording camera always cuts something out of the world, always presents a cutting of the world. That is its standpoint of finitude. But, turned on its head, this means that every cutting implies the whole, that every visual presentation implies what it is not presenting. In the case of the photographic picture, as opposed to a painted picture, the infinite is an implication of the finite.

Film as Philosophy Thus far Cavell’s decidedly clear theories, which quite obviously conceive of film as philosophy. To this extent film achieves much more than to illustrate certain philosophical themes and provide examples for abstract theories or, moving one step further, to offer counter-examples to theoretical assertions and, in so doing, potentially to promote the crystallisation of new theories, all of which have the additional advantage in this age of mass culture of becoming universally known, or at least far more widely known than those from literature and theatre. And it is not film alone which challenges us to think about a new form of perception and experience, and therefore about perception and experience as such, or about political, social and psychological aspects of the situation surrounding cinematic perception and experience (approximately akin to Plato’s allegory of the cave). No, despite the fact that this is a second and considerable step towards philosophy, and that Cavell pays a great deal of attention to this philosophical level of film, his intention is far more, thirdly, an inherent connection between film and philosophy. As already established, for Cavell this connection is scepticism (later also “moral perfectionism”, a formulation by Emerson referring to emphasis on authenticity in the conflict with the community). As film, film drives the problem of scepticism, denial of the existence of the alter ego and the world, denial, in a word, of reality, to some ultimate head by only being able to restore the connection to the world at the price of establishing our absolute distance and isolation. The world of film, the world viewed, is a world constituted by putting us in a condition of ‘viewing unseen’.29 That is the medial-scepticistic and thus a really philosophical, constitutive feature of film. Many objections and doubts can of course be raised against this film-equalsphilosophy theory, the simplest and most fundamental being a semantic,

All You Need Is Love  155 conceptual-logical objection that film cannot simply be philosophy because then it would stop being film. More generally: because then there would be no difference between film and philosophy, meaning that the two terms could be used without any differentiation, standing in for each other. Yet this is evidently not the case. Vice versa, however, maintaining today that there is a categorical difference between film and philosophy has to come across as pure dogmatics. As is usually the case, here too any differences are more gradual. All the practicistic and performative formulations in circulation for the relationship between film and philosophy—“philosophy in action”,30 “doing philosophy at the movies”,31 “thinking on screen”,32 astonishingly not “performing philosophy” (and maybe this is because the friendly/all-too-friendly takeover of the linguistic-philosophical term ‘performative’ by the cultural sciences has led to a ubiquitous expansion of this term, whereby all utterances can always also be viewed as productions—i.e. performances)33—only become more than mere formulae meant to entice— that is, labels from the philosophical advertising business—if they lead to a differentiated definition of the relationship between film and philosophy, which is fortunately the case in the examples earlier. In conjunction with Cavell and his relativising appropriation, it seems obvious to define film at this point as a form of presentative (not primarily discursive) and (primarily) narrative philosophising, bearing in mind that literature and especially theatre are also in the running as such forms. One particular criticism of Cavell’s film philosophy does not ring true for me, namely the one stating that a focus on scepticism is too narrow because films present “a much wider range of philosophical issues”.34 Scepticism for Cavell, as I have shown, is not merely one topic alongside other philosophical topics, however. Focused on the human condition as it is, it is quite simply the philosophical topic. Somebody able to grasp scepticism as comprehensively, able to grasp the linked theory of acknowledgement as fundamentally as Cavell can, has in some ways far more cause to comprehend both as topoi, as rhetorical-philosophical “commonplace remarks”, as the most universal points of orientation in existential reflection. When truisms emerge, for once this is not a flaw, but an accomplishment. On the other hand, two obvious objections can be raised for a critique of Cavell’s film philosophy pursuant to his two focal points: acknowledgement of the other and acknowledgement of the world as a whole. Firstly, solving a problem which arises through the medium of film by employing a sub-genre of film has to be unsatisfactory. As a medium, film places the viewer in a state of isolation, in the state of that Cartesian, Protestant and tragic subjectivity which existentially describes scepticism. A genre such as the comedies of remarriage can, at best, balance out this formal deficiency of the medium, but not solve it. Secondly, it is obvious that the world as a whole is an implication not only of film but also of photography. The film’s implication of the world and specific acknowledgement of subjectivity would therefore have to be presented in a different way.

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Subjectivity and Trust In which way, then, firstly, can film as a medium achieve acknowledgement of subjectivity? In order to answer this question in terms of Cavell, it seems fitting to extend his understanding of the concepts of subjectivity and acknowledgement to include the dimension crystallised in German Idealism. Both concepts are considerably less marked by Descartes than by Kant and his German Idealist successors. Accordingly, subjectivity is, let us remind ourselves,35 a relational concept. It is the term describing an entity whose relationship to other is accompanied by a permanent relationship to self. What we call ‘I’ is, within the Cartesian subject-object paradigm, nothing other than a (double) relationship. Anyone saying ‘I’ has always already doubled himself. He or she has produced an equation with ‘I’ on both sides. An ‘I’ can only exist as this relationship. It is not a thing, not an object. It is nothing other than the relationship itself, infinite self-reference. The tertium comparationis between subjectivity and film, thus, is movement. In a certain sense, the Self is pure movement, and however one wishes to define film and the type of movement which might be defining within it, it will not be possible without the category of movement as such. In the case of film, movement does not only mean the result of a mechanical action, such as that produced by the camera and the cinematograph. Nor does it only mean that objective illusion which, for us as viewers, always occurs when a sequence of pictures is accelerated (to 24 pictures per second). More than anything it means the result of a montage, of an intentional construction which creates the impression of a dynamic space without the body of the viewer having to move, as well as the impression of erratically changing time, permitting the viewer to be in one place at one moment and in quite another at the next. And within this framework of movement, the concept of acknowledgement can also be integrated in the medium of film. For within this framework, named by Hegel, acknowledgement is the result of an altercation, a movement back and forth, in which each subject attempts to grasp the other as an object and to destroy it in its self-reliance, in which each subject attempts in externally directed action to do what it has to do for internal reasons: to objectify itself. The medium which can, better than any other, present this complicated movement or process of self-objectification— directed to the outside, against others, and yet internal, directed against itself, i.e. within a story, as well as the actions linked to it physically, in space and time—is film (with literature, theatre and also dance as rivals, albeit weaker ones). Seen this way, film is the adequate medium of subjectivity. In it, the subject finds the symbolic-aesthetic acknowledgement best suited to its logical structure. And as long as subjectivity, in line with Hegel, also functions as a principle of Modernity, whether it be affirmative or critical, it becomes clear that the presented essentialistic determination of film is a modern one, or put another way, that it requires relativisation in historic terms.

All You Need Is Love  157 Of course the question remains whether the concept of acknowledgement as we know it from German Idealism may be assigned to the relationship between spectator (subject) and movie (object). In my reading, Cavell is working with two concepts of acknowledgement: an ontological-existentialist and a social one. The first one stands in the tradition from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Sartre, the second one from Fichte and Hegel to Honneth. In Cavell’s Hollywood comedies of remarriage the figures act in the sense of a social and reciprocal acknowledgement, though Cavell doesn’t refer explicitly to the German Idealist tradition, only indirectly, we may say, via Romanticism and the American transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau. But if it is about the relationship between spectator and the world on screen, we cannot strictly work with the social concept of acknowledgement. In that case, acknowledgement means that the contemplating or (using several senses) perceiving subject feels provoked to show a reaction which in fact is a non-epistemic confirmation: not of what is going on on screen, but that there is something going on. The fact that a subject is reacting to something is already a first and basic act of acknowledging it. The extension of Cavell’s perspective to German Idealism certainly has the additional advantage of not having to pursue an essentialistic and a particularistic definition of film. Those choosing to define film in its medial singularity at the beginning of the 21st century invite the objection, even the accusation that they are following in the well-worn path of metaphysical tradition. In contrast, it is important to be intellectually open to the manifold forms through which film (like every other large-format phenomenon) makes itself conspicuous. With regard to a philosophical method, the best presentation to date has been by Wittgenstein with his concept of family resemblance.36 But, as always, there is a third option (at least one-third option) located between existentialism and linguistic-analytical genealogy. For Benjamin and Adorno this was “thinking in constellations”, for Foucault it was “historical a priori” thinking. Accordingly, a constellation of elements changing throughout history defines the concept of film (of art, philosophy, science, etc.). The unity of a term is thus maintained, without consolidating it essentialistically, and the multiplicity of elements which convene to form a conceptual constellation is not dissolved in a contingent web of relationships. Secondly, the philosophy of Kant and German Idealism also seems to me to be helpful concerning clarification of the cineastic acknowledgement of the world as a whole. Albeit with one major difference to the first point. Whereas acknowledgement of the subjectivity specific to Modernity is best achieved by the medium of film (followed by the medium of dance and the medium of figure skating), an equal privilege cannot be claimed for film regarding acknowledgement of the world as a whole, or at least not while it is still dependent upon the technique of photography or is based on the trusted realism of everyday practicality, and this is even true of a genre heavily dependent on animation, like “mind-game movies”, films which play in

158  All You Need Is Love the heads of the main character(s) and therefore at the same time play a game with the viewer, frequently bound up in epistemological and ontological confusions.37 In Inception, a film about a dream within a dream within a dream, the cityscape of Paris collapses in on itself like an egg box; a wonderful, completely original image; but in order to impact as wonderful, our everyday realism, our photographic realism so to speak, is required. In order to acknowledge the world as a whole cineastically, it is necessary to take two larger argumentative steps. Firstly, one has to deviate to the more general level of aesthetic experience, and for this, Kant remains the best starting block. The game of our linguistic-logical and imaginative capacity which constitutes aesthetic judging permits no cognitive or otherwise definitive judgements. But the strange agreement between the cognitive capacities, actually directed against each other, permits us to conclude per analogiam the agreement of subjectivity and objectivity, of our self and of the world. In his early works, Kant coined a formulation for this analogy, which sounds just as old-fashioned and classically ancient as it does timeless and gentle: “Beautiful things indicate that human beings fit into the world” (Die schönen Dinge zeigen an, dass der Mensch in die Welt passe). The question of how one feels as a reasonable being would have to be answered in Kantian terms as follows: “One feels at home in oneself and in the world”.38 But one would have to add that this is a strange, irritating feeling, just as strange as the agreement of the cognitive faculty on which it is based, and that in addition it is primarily an epistemological-ontological and moralpractical feeling, not an ethical and certainly not a political one. Aesthetic experiences indicate that the relationship between man and the world can be viewed as a matching and a match. This matching can now be further explained in a second step—as hinted at already in the previous chapter—using the concept of trust. Philosophically speaking, to remind ourselves, this term has been part of political philosophy since Hobbes. It became a familiar term in moral philosophy through a criticism of Kant put forward by Annette Baier and Carol Gilligan. In sociology, the term has acted as a functional compensation for knowledge since Georg Simmel. Under the conditions of extensive anonymity, coordinated action is not possible in any other way. For the theme of matching experience and the world, a psychological and phenomenological meaning of the trust concept is particularly relevant, what Erik Erikson called “basic trust” (in German Urvertrauen) and Schütz & Luckmann called “trust in the world” (Weltvertrauen). Here it is a matter of existential and ontological trust, of trust in being, in one’s own being and in that of others and of things, of the world itself. It is a matter of familiar philosophical questions such as, Do I really exist? Am I still the same person today as yesterday? Do other people really exist? Does what I see before me still exist when I turn around? Such questions have existential weight when they are experienced subjectively as states of anxiety, states which can grow to become a disease, especially schizophrenia. The fact that this stage is not usually reached, that

All You Need Is Love  159 generally we only experience such questions as existence-threatening to a very marginal degree, can be attributed, psychologically speaking, to that basic trust developed in early childhood, a trust already based on a certain degree of reciprocity.39 For small children learn not only to rely on others, their parents or primary carers but also that those persons rely on them, expecting them to develop trustworthiness in their own behaviour. From this psychological perspective, reality awareness is a sedimented awareness of trust. The sense of the reality of things and human beings is here the product of a relationship of trust, which means a stable, positive interaction. A lack of reality, in reverse, indicates a lack of trust. And this is precisely Cavell’s theory with regard to sceptics. They deny reality because they lack trust, and they lack it because they cannot build upon the stability, however unstable, of positive interactional relationships. To quote Hilary Putnam, they cannot build upon the “shockingly simple” insight by Wittgenstein that “a language game is only possible if one trusts something”40 The scepticistic lack of trust is, viewed like this—i.e. through the eyes of the psychology of the ego, of Wittgenstein and Nietzsche—a “disease” which brings forth two opposing symptoms: relativism and nihilism on the one hand, and metaphysics on the other. A consequence of this (from a metaphysical and scientific point of view) disturbingly plain insight is not being able to say by definition what it means to rely on something or someone, to trust in something or someone. A concept analytical procedure attempting to determine the necessary and sufficient characteristics of trust does not sound very promising. Nevertheless, something approaching a “core meaning” can be provided when that core consists of a (historically and culturally variable) constellation of certain elements. For now this constellation can include the elements of attitude, cooperation, courses of action and (a lack of) certainty. Trust is then an attitude which enables us, in cooperative orientation and in the light of different courses of action, to assume that an event or a corresponding action which is more or less important to us will occur or be performed, and that it will be in agreement with our wishes and intentions, without us being able to predict with certainty that this event will actually occur or that this action will actually be performed.41 Trust is an attitude, as Cavell also stressed, meaning that it must be linked to wishes, feelings and convictions, but without being reduced to such. Trust is not (merely) a feeling. It is also not a conviction because it cannot be true or false. But it is rational or irrational, which amounts to “appropriate” or “inappropriate” and generally “based on justification”. The justifications do not have to be explicit, however. A lack of doubt is sufficient. “We trust when we have no reason to distrust”.42 All of these elements ultimately come together in the concept or, as we should really say, in the practice of practice. This, too, cannot be unambiguously defined, of course, but it does provide the context for the rules and criteria which help us to distinguish whether trust is appropriate or not. If it is true that one also has to trust in these rules and criteria, then this is only

160  All You Need Is Love possible if one grasps oneself as part of a practice in which one trusts in precisely these rules and criteria. As Martin Hartmann points out, a “practice of trust” presupposes a “trust in practice”, a trust in the existence of a practice of trust. Hartmann goes on to say that the vehemence of this vicious circle can be removed by giving the trust “a moderately existential character”, that means to the extent that one names it with recourse to what—as already mentioned—psychology calls “basic trust” and phenomenonology calls “trust in the world”. Normally, as is well known, we rely on the fact that a building will not collapse, that the sun will rise and that our fellow men will not approach us with evil thoughts (the most evil being torture). Hartmann initially rejects this manner of speaking about trust because it fails to fulfil a basic condition of action, namely the featuring of options. Where we cannot act any differently because we have no alternative, we cannot trust. To this extent, it does not really make sense to say that one trusts in the fact that the building one is entering will not collapse. But for Hartmann, as a trust in practice, basic trust or trust in the world is justified. We can do nothing other than to trust that those in whom we place our trust are actually pursuing our practical understanding of trust.43 To the extent, then,—in order to arrive at a conclusion regarding the matching of experience and world—that an aesthetic experience—i.e. the interaction of (presentative and hedonistic) sensibility, imagination44 and reason, in other words: of affections-perceptions, imaginings and interpretations— permits us to conclude an interaction between the subject of the said experience and the world, it achieves an acknowledgement of the world as a whole. As an aesthetic practice, it reinforces that existential or ontological affirmation which we exercise in various lifeworlds, in particular ontogeneticintersubjective practices. Yet not without simultaneously invalidating this affirmation by making it transparent as a fiction. This is, however, as I have said already, an achievement of the aesthetic, and not solely the cineastic experience. Aesthetic experiences are affirmations of ontological affirmation, substantiations of ontological realism. Through them, we discover, on the strength of evidence, that our tie with the world is not torn, or more precisely: does not evidently appear to be torn. They support us in the attitude of acting as if this tie were intact. In this ontological sense, Deleuze is also a philosophical realist, although he excludes interaction theoretical approaches and, in terms of film theory, is very clearly on the side of anti-realism. Trust means, once again, acting as if one were to have enough knowledge about the other thing or about the other person, ultimately about the world as a whole. It is necessarily based on the fiction or illusion of sufficient knowledge. In this context, it seems to me to be more appropriate to speak of illusion since it means, in accordance with its Latin origins, playing a game with someone. When we trust—and once again, we continually have to trust—we play a game with ourselves, the game of truth and deception. Illusion is a name for this game, for the less than strict distinguishability of truth and deception and for the always precarious plausibility or

All You Need Is Love  161 trustworthiness of (the human beings and things in) this world. This illusion is beautiful when it is also sensual, that means when a deception is created which is pleasant and which stimulates the imagination without my deceiving myself about the fact that I am deceived.

Coda Relationships of love, friendship and concern promote the practice of trust in a special way. They are felt by subjects who find themselves happily in relationships of this kind to be so necessary that they are apparently without alternative. But where there is no alternative, there is, as explained earlier, no action and ergo no trust. But it is well known that lovers, friends and those concerned about others do not feel it to be this way at all. It is precisely these relationships which are overwhelmingly deemed to be marked by trust. The situation here is thus another. A loving being is namely “not a being which cannot act differently, it is a being which does not want to act differently”. With the event of the onset of love, “the decision is made to not want to decide any longer”.45 Without really realising it, one has opted for trust. This is also what Cavell demands of the sceptic. Or would we have to say—one last objection,46 more a suspicion of sorts—that it is still wrong to speak of a “demand?” For taking trust, an attitude, as the solution to the problem of scepticism still adheres too closely to the basal assumption of scepticism, namely that there is an unbridgeable gap between the ego and the world, or between the ego and every other ego, just with the difference that we now (appear to) have a solution. Maybe the most important and most difficult thing which we have to learn is to take contexts seriously and to distinguish nuances. Maybe that is the right path in order to avoid the constant threat and major trap of scepticism. But propagating an attitude of trust is obviously not meant as a simple demand. It is far more a demand involving improbable conditions. Cavell’s formulation is cautious, not to say sceptical. “If” there is a solution at all, “it would” be that of love, a special form of trust. “To live in the face of doubt, eyes happily shut, would be to fall in love with the world”. Without realising it, the sceptic would have fallen in love with the world, with existence, and would have opted for (not completely, but always partly) blind trust. In so doing, he has become a true anti-sceptic, namely a practical one. “All you need is love”. This brings a whole new honour to the Flower Power hymn by the Beatles. As John Lennon is to sing later, love is the answer to all the “mind games” in which human beings crumple in their mutual projections. In musical terms, “All you need is love” is largely simplistic, but a new cover version could be recorded on the back of the whole scepticism problem. The musical allusions and changes in rhythm would then have to occur far more often, and the gay drifting of the coda in particular would have to become even gayer. Then maybe the song would become

162  All You Need Is Love a hymn which is not prone to kitsch and which would not try to curb the subtextual doubt. There is also subtextual doubt as far as the relationship between film and philosophy is concerned. Here we must permit the cinema of Hollwood one last appearance. In Moonstruck, a romantic comedy from the 1980s, the central scene plays out following an opera performance of Puccini’s La Bohème. Ronny (Nicolas Cage) declares his love for Loretta (Cher) in a wild and darkly romantic way in order to encourage her to come back to bed with him, and then ultimately marry him and not his brother: Love doesn’t make things nice. It ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. Snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. We are here to ruin ourselves, and to break our hearts, and love the wrong people, and die. In a certain sense, maybe film and philosophy are similarly not made for each other. They, too, could ruin each other, coming close to an amour fou, to the tragedy of becoming entangled and emitting a desperate cry for relief. But when all goes well, they pull the whole thing together: at least into a tragicomedy, maybe even a comedy.

Notes   1 Cf. William Rothman, “Cavell on Film”, in: Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998, p. 354   2 Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1990, p. 72.  3 Cf. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Scepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982, p. 46.   4 Cf. Davide Sparte & Espen Hammer, “Einleitung”, in: Davide Sparte & Espen Hammer (eds.), Die Unheimlichkeit des Gewöhnlichen und andere Philosophische Essays, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 2002, p. 10.  5 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, loc.cit., p. 47 & 109; cf. Timothy Gould, “Survey of Thought”, in: Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998, p. 350.   6 Hammer & Sparti, “Einleitung”, loc.cit., p. 21, also here the quotation from Cavell, The Claim of Reason, loc.cit., p. 369.   7 To this extent, as Honneth comments in the same place, we are concerned here with a “more elementary form of acknowledgement” than addressed in his previous works. Remaining consistent, he now assumes that this form of acknowledgement “underlies all other more substantial forms of acknowledgement” (Verdinglichung: Eine anerkennungstheoretische Studie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2005, p. 60). Again consistently, it then also forms the basis for (social) criticism. It authenticates a non-reifiable rudiment in times of reification (cf. 34).  8 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, loc.cit., p. 241; cf. p. 48.  9 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, loc.cit., p. 393; on Kant cf. Critique of Pure Reason, loc.cit, p. 466 (B 447); cf. also Markus Gabriel, Antike und moderne Skepsis. Zur Einführung, Hamburg 2008, pp. 141.

All You Need Is Love  163 10 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, loc.cit., p. 54. 11 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, loc.cit., p. 460 (B 434), p. 466 (B 447). 12 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, loc.cit., p. 591 (B 673). 13 Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, loc.cit., pp. 402–403 (B 385–386). 14 Cf. Klaus Düsing, “Teleologie und natürlicher Weltbegriff. Untersuchung zu Strukturen der alltäglichen Erfahrungswelt”, in: neue hefte für philosophie, Vol. 20 (1981), pp. 31–59, esp. pp. 44. 15 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, foreword by Taylor Carman, New York: Harper & Row, 2008, p. 98. 16 Cf. Rüdiger Welter, Der Begriff der Lebenswelt: Theorien der vortheoretischen Erfahrungswelt, Munich: Fink 1986, p. 23. 17 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. Robert B. Louden & Manfred Kuehn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006, p. 4. 18 Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen des Grundes”, in: Martin Heidegger (ed.), Wegmarken, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1978, pp. 153–154. 19 Kant, Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, loc.cit., p. 4. 20 Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged ed., Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press 1979, p. 22. 21 Cf. Sparti & Hammer, “Einleitung”, loc.cit., p. 23. 22 Cavell, The World Viewed, loc.cit., p. 188. 23 Cavell, The World Viewed, loc.cit., p. 24; cf. p. 155. 24 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, loc.cit., p. 463. 25 Cf. Cavell, The World Viewed, loc.cit., p. 20; Sparti & Hammer, “Einleitung”, loc.cit., p. 28; William Rothman & Marian Keane, Reading Cavell’s the World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective, Detroit: Wayne State University Press 2000, p. 62, 72. 26 Cavell, The World Viewed, loc.cit., p. 22; Cavell speaks in this context of “our presentness to the world”; cf. Rothman & Keane, Reading Cavell’s the World Viewed, loc.cit., pp. 64, p. 178. 27 Cavell, Contesting Tears, loc.cit., p. 9; on the battle for acknowledgement in the melodrama cf. p. 30; cf. also Sparti & Hammer, “Einleitung”, loc.cit., pp. 29–30.; William Rothman, “Stanley Cavell”, in: Paisley Livingston & Carl Plantinga (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, London/ New York: Routledge 2009, p. 351. 28 Cavell, The World Viewed, loc.cit., p. 24. 29 Cavell, The World Viewed, loc.cit., p. 195; cf. Jerry Goodenough, “Introduction I: A Philosopher Goes to the Cinema”, in: Rupert Read & Jerry Goodenough (eds.), Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell, Hamshire/New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005, pp. 1. 30 Stephen Mulhall, On Film, London/New York: Routledge 2002, p. 2. 31 Richard A. Gilmore, Doing Philosophy at the Movies, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 32 Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy, London/New York: Routledge 2007; Philipp Schmerheim takes a similar approach in his dissertation Scepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting in Contemporary Cinema. 33 Cf. Uwe Wirth, “Der Performanzbegriff im Spannungsfeld von Illokution, Iteration und Indexikalität”, in: Uwe Wirth(ed.), Performanz: Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2002, pp. 9, 39. 34 Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, loc.cit., p. 27. 35 Cf. here Ch. 2, section “Subjectivity, Movement, Film”. 36 Cf. Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, loc.cit., p. 28. 37 Cf. Thomas Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film”, in: Warren Buckland (ed.), Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, Oxford: WileyBlackwell 2009, pp. 13–41.

164  All You Need Is Love 38 Birgit Recki, “Wie fühlt man sich als vernünftiges Wesen? Immanuel Kant über ästhetische und moralische Gefühle”, in: Birgit Recki (ed.), Die Vernunft, ihre Natur, ihr Gefühl und der Fortschritt, Paderborn: Mentis 2006, p. 102; there, too, the famous Kant quotation (Reflection 1820a). 39 Cf. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, loc.cit., pp. 92. In his Introduction to Metaphysics Bergson also names trust (confiance) and comradeship, in other words a practice, as conditions for intuitive metaphysical knowledge: “We do not obtain an intuition from reality—that is, an intellectual sympathy with the most intimate part of it—unless we have won its confidence by a long fellowship with its superficial manifestations” (loc.cit., p. 61). Donald Winnicott describes the reciprocal interaction as a game. In the successful interaction between the small child and its primary carer, a kind of ‘playground’ emerges which, in a ‘to and fro’, equally separates and unites the two interacting persons. The result of this game is a sense of reality (cf. Playing and Reality, London/New York: Routledge 1991, esp. Ch. 3). 40 Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press 1995, p. 177; there, too, the Wittgenstein quotation from On Certainty; on the “disease” of scepticism cf. pp. 177–178. 41 Here I follow the “working definition” of Hartmann (Die Praxis des Vertrauens, loc.cit., p. 56). 42 Hartmann, Die Praxis des Vertrauens, loc.cit., p. 30, cf. also p. 52, 269; on the relationship of trust to desires, feelings and convictions cf. esp. pp. 18, 30, 52, 92f., 151, 168, 260, 269. 43 Hartmann, Die Praxis des Vertrauens, loc. cit. p. 31 &. 311, cf. also 71, 107, 114, 119. 44 As the “greatest power of sensibility” imagination belongs for Kant to sensibility, cf. Critique of Judgment, loc.cit., p. 114 (§ 27, B 97). 45 Hartmann, Die Praxis des Vertrauens, loc cit., p. 97. 46 James Conant drew my attention to this.

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Index of Concepts

action film 31, 33, 35 – 6 affect, affective 5, 7, 11, 14, 17 – 8, 20 – 1, 34, 36, 39, 54, 61 – 2, 75, 77, 116, 134, 148, 160 affirmation 3 – 4, 6, 15 – 8, 26, 81, 114, 136, 145, 149, 160 as-if 2, 6, 8, 14, 20 – 1, 63, 70, 80, 83, 100, 102, 117, 122, 123 – 30, 132, 134, 140, 146 auditory 36, 38 – 9 aura 8, 57 – 8, 62 – 3, 67 – 72, 80, 94 – 5 belief in the world 4, 7, 9, 10 – 22, 113, 139 Birds, The 37 Blair Witch Project, The 37 Blow Up 1 capitalism, capitalist vi, 2, 16, 57, 73, 91, 94 cartesian, cartesianism 4, 11 – 12, 14 – 16, 21, 43, 49, 75, 113, 153, 155 – 6 Close-Up 8, 57 – 63 communication 5, 8, 60, 109, 111, 112, 135, 137, 147 democracy, democratic 2, 9, 66, 73, 80 – 1, 91, 124, 135 – 6, 138 – 9 evidence 4 – 7, 9, 13, 15, 35, 42, 44 – 54, 69, 76, 99, 102, 112, 117, 121, 140, 153, 160 existence 1, 3 – 5, 11, 26, 46 – 7, 49, 50, 52, 58, 67 – 8, 71, 78, 84, 97 – 8, 116 – 17, 134, 146, 150 – 2, 154, 159 – 61 existentialism, existential 2, 3, 5 – 7, 14 – 7, 21, 57 – 8, 98, 127, 134, 145, 147, 149 – 52, 155, 157 – 8,  160

experience 1, 4 – 6, 8 – 9, 13 – 4, 16 – 9, 21, 26 – 7, 33 – 4, 36 – 7, 39, 42, 45, 51 – 4, 62, 66, 78 – 9, 83 – 4, 92, 97 – 9, 100, 102, 110, 115 – 17, 121, 131 – 4, 136, 138 – 40, 146 – 7, 151 – 4, 158 – 60 experience, aesthetic 4, 6, 21, 53, 100, 133, 139, 140, 146, 153, 158, 160 fiction 12, 74, 121 – 2 Fight Club 26 – 8,  34 Flags of Our Fathers 8, 105 – 7 gesture, gestus, gestic 1, 5, 8, 12, 21, 31, 35, 45, 57 – 60, 63, 80, 105 – 18 hero, heroic 36, 61, 83, 90 – 4, 100 – 2, 105 – 6, 108, 111, 128 – 9,  134 image 5, 7, 9, 12, 18, 20, 22, 29 – 31, 34, 36, 42 – 3, 48, 51, 54, 60, 62, 66, 72, 94 – 5, 100 – 1, 105 – 8, 111 – 18, 121, 123, 134, 139, 147, 152, 158 imagination 6, 19, 20, 53, 75 – 6, 110, 114, 121, 123, 125, 131, 133, 139 – 40, 152, 160 – 1 Inception 158 intuition 6, 44, 66, 73, 76 – 9, 82 – 4, 98 – 100, 115 – 17, 132,  146 Last Action Hero 128 La vita è bella 4 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The 105 metaphysics, metaphysical 3 – 4, 7 – 9, 13 – 4, 16 – 9, 21, 26, 29 – 30, 38, 49 – 50, 57, 66, 74 – 7, 79, 81 – 2, 95 – 6, 105, 114 – 18, 122, 129, 146 – 7, 149 – 50, 157,  159

Index of Concepts  179 mimesis, mimetic 12, 14, 19, 21, 58, 99 Modernity 4, 7 – 9, 14, 21, 26, 28 – 9, 32, 34 – 6, 42, 58, 70 – 2, 90 – 3, 111, 122 – 3, 133, 138 Moonstruck 162 motion 5, 20, 28 – 33, 48, 51 – 3, 61 – 2, 98, 100, 107 – 8, 111, 116 – 17, 135, 137 movement 4 – 9, 20, 29 – 37, 42 – 3, 46, 48, 59, 60 – 2, 74, 76, 79, 97 – 8, 101, 105, 107 – 18, 129, 137, 156 music 32 – 3, 48, 51, 59, 61 – 2, 101, 110, 111, 114, 161 ontology, ontological 2 – 8, 11, 15, 29, 32, 42, 45, 48, 50 – 4, 66, 72 – 5, 80 – 1, 107, 113 – 17, 122, 127, 131, 133 – 6, 140, 145, 149, 151 – 2, 157 – 8,  160 phenomenology, phenomenological 3, 7 – 8, 17 – 8, 28, 34, 44 – 5, 48, 66, 80, 95, 97, 112, 114, 116, 118, 135, 158 play, playing, interplay 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 19, 20, 36, 42 – 4, 50, 53, 60, 63, 74, 82 – 3, 91, 93 – 5, 97, 99, 101 – 2, 109, 110, 118, 125,129, 138, 146, 151, 157 – 8, 160, 162 politics, political 2 – 5, 7 – 9, 21 – 2, 29, 47, 51, 58, 66 – 74, 81, 83 – 4, 92 – 3, 98, 105, 116 – 17, 122 – 7, 129, 131, 133 – 9, 154,  158 postmodernism, postmodern 12, 42 – 3, 74, 95, 133 practice 1, 5 – 6, 9, 59, 68, 71, 98, 124, 158 – 61

pragmatism 3 – 4, 9, 53, 76 presence 5, 7 – 8, 35, 38 – 9, 42, 45, 48 – 54, 68, 72, 80, 90, 95 – 102, 110 – 12,  118 Purple Rose of Cairo, The 128 romantic, romanticism 20 – 1, 35 – 7, 49, 66, 69, 71, 83, 91, 114 – 15, 124, 126, 152, 157, 162 Saving Private Ryan 37 sensus communis 136 – 8 sport 8, 90 – 3, 95, 100 – 1, 108 subjectivity 7, 9, 21, 26, 28 – 9, 31, 33 – 7, 42, 68, 73, 98 – 9, 138, 152 – 3, 155 – 8 sublime 82 – 4, 101, 114, 123, 133 Target 37 time 1 – 2, 4 – 8, 11 – 16, 18 – 21, 26 – 7, 30, 32 – 3, 35, 38, 42 – 3, 45 – 9, 51 – 2, 57, 59 – 63, 66 – 70, 72 – 4, 80, 82, 84, 91 – 4, 96 – 7, 99 – 100, 102, 105 – 18, 121 – 4, 126, 128, 134, 137, 139, 145 – 6, 148, 150 – 1, 156, 158 trust 2 – 4, 6 – 7, 9, 14, 49, 57, 99, 121, 123, 128 – 9, 131, 134 – 6, 139 – 40, 148, 156 – 61 trust in the world 3, 6, 9, 14, 49, 122, 158, 160 Unforgiven 105 Un long dimanche de fiançaille 54 vision, visual, visualization 11 – 2, 18, 22, 36 – 8, 42, 62, 66, 70 – 2, 80 – 1, 94, 100, 112, 124, 133, 154

Index of Names

Adorno, Theodor W. 4, 17, 21, 50 – 2, 58, 76, 81, 83, 98 – 9, 118, 136, 157 Agamben, Giorgio 8, 108 – 10 Althusser, Louis 57 Angelopoulos, Theo 33 Antonioni, Michelangelo 1 Arendt, Hannah 72, 136 – 9 Aristotle 108 Artaud, Antonin 114 Augustine 15, 30 Bacon, Francis 17 Badiou, Alain 50, 74, 79, 126, 135 Baudelaire, Charles 35, 70 Beckenbauer, Franz 93 Benigni, Roberto 4 Beck, Ulrich 81 Beckett, Samuel 42 Belting, Hans 113 Benjamin, Walter 8, 32 – 3, 58, 63, 66 – 73, 80, 94 – 5, 108 – 9, 111 – 12, 139, 157 Bergman, Ingmar 62 Bergson, Henri 4, 6, 26, 29, 30, 66, 73, 75 – 9, 82, 98, 108, 115 – 18 Blumenberg, Hans 14, 122 Boehm, Gottfried 110 Bohrer, Karl Heinz 111 Bordwell, David 7 Bourdieu, Pierre 81 Bradley, Bill 90 Bruno, Giordano 90 Cage, Nicolas 162 Camus, Albert 16, 134 Carroll, Noël 30 – 1 Cavell, Stanley 6, 9, 21, 98, 145 – 9, 151 – 7, 159,  161 Certeau, Michel de 82 Cher 162

Deleuze, Gilles 4, 7, 8, 10 – 22, 26, 30, 42 – 3, 48, 50, 62, 66, 73 – 84, 90, 99, 107, 108, 113 – 18, 135, 139, 145 – 6,  160 Derrida, Jacques 17, 38, 47, 49 – 50, 52, 83, 95, 114, 118, 135 Descartes, René 10 – 1, 14, 28 – 9, 34, 43, 49, 96, 153, 156 Dewey, John 6, 53, 73, 76 – 9, 98, 99, 139, 140 Diner, Dan 4 Duras, Marguerite 33 Dylan, Bob 61 Eagleton, Terry 137 Eastwood, Clint 8, 105 – 7 Eisenstein, Sergeij M. 43, 72, 81 Elias, Norbert 81 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 154, 157 Engell, Lorenz vi Ferry, Luc 138 – 9 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 11, 157 Fiedler, Konrad 113 Fiedler, Leslie 32 – 3 Flusser, Vilém 113 Fonda, Henry 111 Ford, John 81, 105 Foucault, Michel 8, 10, 16, 21, 28 – 9, 36, 43, 57, 66 – 8, 73, 80 – 1, 148, 157 Frank, Manfred 35 Freud, Sigmund 27, 147 – 8 Fried, Erich 145 Gabriel, Markus vi Gadamer, Hans-Georg 139 Gaut, Berys 7 Giddens, Anthony 81, 135 Godard, Jean-Luc 105

Index of Names  181 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 71, 99 Goffman, Erving 128 Goodman, Nelson 113 Griffith, David 32 Guattari, Felix 16 – 8, 73 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich vi, 8, 95 – 9,  110 Habermas, Jürgen 4, 14, 29, 81, 122 – 4, 135, 137 – 8, 140,  148 Handke, Peter 48 Hartmann, Martin 160 Hegel, Georg W.F. 3 – 4, 17, 27 – 30, 34 – 5, 43 – 4, 66 – 9, 73, 90 – 2, 96, 98 – 9, 114, 118, 122 – 4, 136, 138, 148, 156 – 7 Heidegger, Martin 3, 13, 30, 36 – 7, 45, 47, 50 – 2, 57 – 8, 74, 80 – 1, 95 – 9, 108, 113 – 16, 126, 135, 139, 149, 150 – 1, 153,  157 Hobbes, Thomas 3, 124, 134, 158 Hölderlin, Friedrich 124, 130 Honneth, Axel 148 – 9, 157 Horkheimer, Max 67, 81 Hume, David 18 – 9 Husserl, Edmund 18, 38, 44 – 5, 49, 95, 99, 113, 150 Iser, Wolfgang 12 James, William 3 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 54 Jonas, Hans 113 Kafka, Franz 42 Kant, Immanuel 3, 4, 6, 8 – 9, 11, 13 – 4, 17 – 8, 20, 28 – 9, 35, 45 – 6, 50, 53, 76, 78, 81, 99, 100, 102, 110, 114 – 18, 121 – 7, 129 – 34, 136 – 40, 147, 149 – 51, 153 – 4, 157 – 8 Kennedy, Bobby 10, 22, 92 Kiarostami, Abbas 7, 8, 44, 48, 52, 57, 58, 60 – 3 Kierkegaard, Soeren 3, 11, 15, 83,  157 Kleist, Heinrich von 4 Koch, Gertrud vi Korsch, Karl 67 Kracauer, Siegfried 29, 32, 72 Kraus, Karl 63 Lacan, Jacques 47, 50, 134 Lang, Fritz 72

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 79 Lennon, John 161 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 113 Locke, John 131 Loos, Adolf 42 Luhmann, Niklas 83, 92, 135 – 6 Lukács, Georg 67 Lynch, David 37 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 29, 83, 123 – 4,  137 Maradona, Diego 93 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 35 Marquard, Odo 14 Marx, Karl 57 – 8, 66 – 7, 73, 94, 137 McLuhan, Marshall 32 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3, 47 Mitchum, Robert 111 Monroe, Marilyn 93 Mouffe, Chantal 135 Nancy, Jean-Luc 7 – 8, 32 – 3, 38 – 9, 42, 44 – 52, 126,  139 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3 – 4, 11, 13 – 6, 26 – 8, 36, 43, 71, 74, 83, 122, 127, 136, 139, 148, 159 Ockham, Wilhelm von 14 Panofsky, Erwin 51 Parsons, Talcott 92 Pascal, Blaise 11, 15 Plantinga, Carl 7 Plato 4, 10 – 1, 17, 26, 28, 63, 75, 90, 96, 99, 124, 139, 154 Proust, Marcel 17, 145 – 6 Puccini, Giacomo 162 Putnam, Hilary 159 Rancière, Jacques 8, 17, 122 – 7, 136, 138 Rembrandt van Rijn 71 Riegl. Alois 67 Rimbaud, Arthur 81 – 2 Röttger, Kati vi Rorty, Richard 76, 96 Rossellini, Roberto 20 Saramago, José 145 Sartre, Jean-Paul 16, 47, 58, 127, 157 Saussure, Ferdinand de 80 Schelling, Friedrich W.J. 124

182  Index of Names Schiller, Friedrich 53, 101, 125,  136 Schlick, Moritz 49 Schmidt, Alfred 58 Schmitt, Carl 135 Schopenhauer, Arthur 114 – 15 Schwarte, Ludger vi Schwarzenegger, Arnold 111 Seel, Martin 100 Shakespeare, William 71, 152 – 3 Shaw, George Bernard 10, 22 Simmel, Georg 8, 66, 70 – 3, 81, 127, 134, 158 Spinoza, Baruch de 4, 13 – 5, 17 – 8, 26, 30, 73, 75 – 6, 79, 82, 90, 115, 118 Stevens, Wallace 10 Stierle, Karlheinz 12 Stirner, Max 84 Taylor, Charles 29 Tertullian 15

Thoreau, Henry David 157 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe 81 Vaihinger, Hans 14, 122 Van den Berg, Karen vi Varro 108 Vidor, King 72 Viola, Bill 108 Virilio, Paul 32 Voss, Christiane vi Walton, Kendall 19 – 20, 129 Wayne, John 111 Weber, Max 28, 91, 92, 137 Welles, Orson 11, 20 Wickhoff, Franz 76 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3, 36, 96, 115, 149, 153, 157, 159 Zidane, Zinédine 91, 93, 101 – 2 Zizek, Slavoj 135