Tonight's lecture is entitled "From Debord's Spectacle to Baudrillard's Simulacra: Revolutionary Cinders Still Burn--or Stillborn--within Postmodern Cynicism?" We hermeneutic slow bicycle racers might already want to balance ourselves over these first words, lingering to consider what it means for something to be "entitled." What does it mean to be given a title? Who or what entitles such a title? What does it entitle us to do? In short: whence the entitlements that the title bestows--the entitlements that the title claims, in advance, as if on loan, thus creating a debt, a debt which already falls due as soon as the first word is spoken?
By the time the first naming word is spoken, we are already indebted to and perhaps entitled by that which simultaneously elicits and defies naming. Can a paper ever do more than try to pay off the debt incurred by its title? Can it ever succeed? And if we have to ask these questions, surely we are haunted by the debt which is also guilt, schuldig, haunted by being unable to do justice to that which is named in a name.
Perhaps by now you recognize that where the questions of ontological debt and hermeneutic guilt are intertwined, we are approaching the question of the martyras, the martyr/witness. I once asked Derrida if he knew what the Greek for "witness" was? He said "Yes, yes--what is it?" When I reminded him that the Greek word for "witness" was martyras; Derrida said emphatically to me, "Of course, of course: the witness is the martyr and the martyr is the witness." It seems obvious that the martyr is a witness; the martyr is the witness who gives his or her life in the name of something, as the feminist martyr Virginia Woolf gave her life in the name of something we can provisionally designate as "a room of one's own." But what about the other direction of the bidirectional equation? How is the witness a martyr? More specifically, and more to the point for us here tonight; what does it take to transform the suicide into a martyr? When does the suicide qualify as a martyr? We can answer this question by saying that, as a necessary but not sufficient condition, for the suicide to be a martyr the suicide must bear witness; in other words, the life must have been given for something, in the name of something. Life given in the name...
Those familiar with the Judeo-Christian tradition may want to object here that traditionally a martyr can't have committed suicide; suicide is a mortal sin, so the martyr must have been killed by another, murdered. Let's leave aside the many cases in which the martyr is complicitous in his or her own murder, as were Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ, at least on the Last Temptation reading, and as the poet Charles Bukowski was undoubtedly complicitous in the long slow suicide of his own alcoholism, whatever the Judeo-Christian 12-steppers might now want us to believe about addiction and free will. Let's assume that leaving aside all the martyrs who were complicitous in their own murders still leaves us with martyrs remaining to consider--Martin Luther King, Jr. perhaps. [We'll also bracket the fact that the Judeo-Christian stricture against suicide is often justified by a dubious reading of the Decalogue, a reading in which "Thou Shall not Kill" is taken to apply reflexively to oneself as well; as if it said "Thou Shall not Kill Thou."1]
Leaving these asides aside, doesn't the Judeo-Christian objection that the martyr must have been killed by another, murdered, overlook the fact that in suicide, in the "I kill my-self," there is always already a killing of self by other--or the killing of other by self, in short, a murder? This becomes clear when we consider the following question: When the suicide says "I kill myself," does he or she identify with the "I" doing the killing or the "myself" being killed? The answer? Both, of course. But the fact is that we can't simultaneously identify with both the active "I" who kills and the passive "my-self" that is killed, and this impossible simultaneity reveals a distance between I and myself, an irreducible other within myself, an other who either I kill or who kills me in this instant of suicide. Yes, this other is also me, but not at the moment--not in this apparently final moment. The self and its other come apart at the moment of suicide, revealing what Derrida calls the witness-structure: the difference, "discrepant by the time of a breath," between witnessing and bearing witness.
The paradox of what is for Derrida the tragic impossibility of death can perhaps be put most sharply as follows: even if we can witness our own death, we cannot subsequently bear witness to it. But a Heideggerian reading reasserts itself against Derrida's critique here. Witnessing something without bearing witness to it is like experiencing something for which we have no name--which is Heidegger's phenomenological description of poetic experience. It is for this reason that Heidegger says that "Death is the outermost witness of Being." Death shows itself as not showing itself, or as showing itself only in the sense that that without a name shows itself. We may thus come to suspect--and Heidegger himself says as much in "Building Dwelling Thinking"--that Gelassenheit, Heidegger's phenomenological ethos of dwelling, constitutes "practice...for a good death."
As we have seen, there is something of a kill or be killed logic to the suicide, an other who either I kill or who kills me, a murderous logic which refutes the simple-minded Judeo-Christian objection against a martyr's suicide. This murderous logic also inverts and expands Freud's apparently dogmatic claim that suicide can always be explained in terms of a hostility toward another, an initially other-directed hostility repressed and turned back on the self. For Freud, the suicide kills themself because they feel they can't hurt the other directly, so they kill themself to hurt the other indirectly; a pattern most clearly visible in the "they'll be sorry" suicide. But we have just seen that in all suicide, in every performative "I kill myself," either my other kills me in a moment of paradoxical passivity, or else my other is killed by I, as if the I were eliminating the myself, the I's material substratum, killing the other directly to kill itself indirectly. (Talk about cutting off the nose to spite the face!)
But what about the case of the heroic suicide, the suicide by which one would take control of one's own destiny, determining the moment of death, embracing the kind of self-inflicted death which Nietzsche's teacher Schopenhauer was perhaps the last (pre-postmodern) Western philosopher to defend? (Didn't Lyotard volunteer himself as a good candidate for the public execution of a postmodern philosopher?) Perhaps the question we need to ask here is this: In this Schopenhauerian suicide, is the tragic embraced and transmuted into the heroic? Is this suicide heroic? If the essence of the Sophoclean tragic is the fact that death cannot be brought under control, that death always escapes mortal control, is the heroic suicide properly so-called? Does Schopenhauerian suicide embrace the tragic uncontrollability of death--or does it compound that tragedy by trying--in one final gesture--to overcome mortality?
As we struggle to approach the question of suicide which this film addresses, let us return to the question which sent us down this path: What does it take to transform the suicide into a martyr? Can we not say that minimally, for the suicide to be a martyr, the suicide must bear witness, the life must have been taken--or given--for something, in the name of something. And here perhaps we reach a question which the question of suicide itself reaches toward: In this giving or taking of one's life, can our ontological debt ever be discharged? Or is this debt merely transferred, as though into another account?
We will return to these questions momentarily--assuming for the moment that there is such a thing as a moment, a moment in which or to which we might return. This is to assume, consesso non dato, in other words, "for the sake of argument, without conceding the point," to assume without conceding that after every single blink, Augenblick, or Winke, our eyes open once more upon the same phenomenological parade, the phenomenological parade of the same: life as Spectacle.
To define the spectacle, Debord writes: "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." We are immersed in the Spectacle when all our relationship to others are mediated through images. As Debord tells us, "The spectacle's function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation." Thus, what we may assume but never concede is that the eternal return is a return of the same. Here Debord's Situationist critique of the society of the Spectacle stands in stark opposition to Baudrillard's postmodern triumph of the simulacra. Debord says: Eternal return, yes; eternal return of the same, not so fast; for that is to concede the revolution itself.
It is precisely the postmodernist's assumption of the eternally recurring spectacle of the same that the Situationists would contest, were they still here, and thus that, to ensure that they are still here, to accept the transfer of debt and entitlement which is heritage, we must contest in their stead, if not in their name. (But why not in their name? Why must the name remain unpronounced, their community, unavowed? What debt, contract or promise would we circumvent by not speaking in the name of that in whose name we are trying to speak?)
The name Situationism, for example, a name which, in the claim implicit in its naming, "the claim of its name," as Heidegger puts it, invokes the free decisions inherent in the existential "situation" (which Heidegger first described in Being and Time and which the Situationists appropriated from him by way of Sartre.) If we are to borrow on Situationism, then, the collateral which we must be put up is this contestation of the eternal return of the same. For a postmodernist like Baudrillard, this needs to be heard as: the eternal return of the same spectacle, as the eternally returning unbroken sameness of the postmodern world-spectacle, the monotonous drone of the postmodern world-become-spectacle.
In the world of the postmodernists, which may or may not be the same thing as the postmodern world, the scope of the spectacle seems utterly without limits; everything has become spectacle, reality is spectacle and the spectacle is reality. There is thus no longer any exteriority to the spectacle, no uncontaminated standpoint outside the spectacle from which we could call it into question. This ubiquitous spread of the spectacle means that critique can only be imminent, taking place from within, and that the cultural critic is at best like a participant observer in a madhouse, or (as Nietzsche put it), a cultural physician treating an illness from which he or she suffers as well.
In this Baudrillardian postmodern world every relationship--whether a relationship to self or to other--every relationship has entered into the orbit of spectacle and spectator, the spectacular orbit of image and gaze. There seems to be no experience which isn't already mediated by constellations of images, pre-packaged image concatenations, life made commodity and put up for sale as life-style. In this spectacular postmodern world, what becomes of the existentialist's search for authenticity, for Eigentlichkeit: ownmostness, the proper of property and propriety, of appropriateness and appropriation? If there is no relation to the self that isn't processed through images which have always-already been constructed by the other, then there can be no authenticity. And what we have just seen compounds the tragedy; even death is not our own--in the promising ownmostness of our relation to death there is always already an other.
Considered phenomenologically, our relationship with death is a relationship which is missing at least one of its relata; it is a relationship to something that doesn't show up as such. For this reason Heidegger thought that our relationship to death stands as an analagon of Being, an analogy between two things which are not things. But even our relationship to our own death is processed through the images of the other; here, for example. In fact, we have no relationship--to self or other--that isn't processed and filtered through the image. This is the postmodern utopia, which literally means "non-place," a utopia which to the Situationists sounds like a distopia, an "anti-place," a placeless place, a place where there are no longer any places: existence become spectacle and spectacle become existence.
I have said that, against this postmodern vision, the Situations would contest the idea that what recurs is the same. How might this go? As we suggested in our reading of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, what recurs is the moment as the moment of decision--it is the moment of decision which recurs, ineradicably, eternally. So the Situationists might argue, were they still here, in the stillness of the here, against the stillness of a temporally unbroken spectacle, the stillness of what seems to be a permanent and inescapable iconographic presence (which is what makes Baudrillard's descriptions so powerful). This permanent presence is not just that of the television, which is already everywthere, but of the televisual reality, reality as it is structured and mediated by the image, which, for a post-modernists like Baudrillard, means reality tout court. When the Situationist's society of the spectacle hyperbolically fulfills its own logic, this is Baudrillard's triumph of the simulacra.
Debord wouldn't question the veracity of Baudrillard's diagnosis: he agrees that all events unfold within same spectacular nonreality, that the order of the spectacle has become all-encompassing, ubiquitous, all pervasive; that there are no longer any experiences which aren't mediated by images. What Debord would contest is Baudrillard's blithe acceptance and even embrace of this sorry state of affairs; for Debord, the permanence of the triumph of the simulacra is still contestable. In fact, given that the spectacle's triumph is triumphantly empty, the contestation of the triumph of the spectacle remains the major task for a critical praxis.
It was precisely the Baudrillardian assertion of the finality of the triumph of the spectacle that Debord continued to resist, up until the moment he put a bullet in his heart, and perhaps in that moment as well. The meaning of this last moment is perhaps the central enigma posed by the film we are going to view. This is one of the ways this film poses the question of the martyras, the martyr/witness, the martyr who bears witness and the martyred witness. I don't believe that it gives us a definite answer to this question; rather, it asks us to read--as ethically as possible, which means ethos-fully, with hermeneutic generosity and a sensitivity to the alterity of the text, an ear for its own resistance to any totalizing interpretations, those seemingly quick and easy answers which, on closer investigation, merely dismiss or repress the questions they presuppose (and, as repressions of what is questionable in this question of the last moment, risk an existential complicity with the dangerous denial and repression of death, the sine qua non of mortality itself).
For, as Heidegger tells us, we are the being who embodies an interpretation of the meaning of Being. In other words, Dasein occupies its ontological space by bearing witness; we are our there by bearing witness, if only in our bearing, implicitly, in our comportment, if not explicitly, in our creative poietic acts. "And who then is humanity," Heidegger asks. He answers, "We who must bear witness to what we are." And he cotinues, "But what must we bear witness to? That we belong to the earth." Insofar as this film is a work of art, and I believe it is, it too bears witness to the earth, to that which cannot be interpretively exhausted.
As you are no doubt beginning to gather, the alter-cation between Debord and Baudrillard resembles in many ways the alter-cation between Heidegger and Nietzsche, where Debord and Heidegger still hope for a return of the repressed, a resuscitation and revitalization of the Real, and where Nietzsche and Baudrillard claim that we need to get over our nostalgia for the Real and accept that reality is will-to-power, the dynamic flux of "sovereign becoming." This "true but deadly doctrine" is true and perhaps deadly. This is the truth of the "fatal logic" of the Spectacle, the regime of the gaze which sets the stage for the triumph of the simulacra.
We have seen that the artificial implant is the paradigm case of this triumph of the simulacra, where the problem is not just that we can't tell the real from the fake, but that we come to prefer the fake to the real, believing that it's "Even better than the real thing," as Bono put it. The simulacra triumphs when we don't ever want to leave the televisual holodeck, when we come to prefer the virtual reality of the lives of the stars to our so-called real lives, when we become happy spectators to a reality more real than our own lives, happy hostages of the spectacle. And Baudrillard certainly seems to be describing Southern California when he says that "the virtual camera is in our heads... every existence is telepresent to ourselves." In this postmodern world, in which everyone would be the star in their own private movie, or at least an extra, Baudrillard tells us, "All things offer themselves up without a hope of being anything other than an illusion of themselves." In short: "Reality does not take place."
But this "murder of reality" which Baudrillard titles "the Perfect Crime" is never perfect, he tells us. Even now there are traces of the disappearance of the Real sticking out from beneath the simulacra, like grass growing out throught the cracks in the pavement. The problem with reading this as hopeful is that Baudrillard argues that the difference between reality and appearance is only an apparent difference; in other words, that any reappearance of this so-called real reality could only take place as a re-appearance of the Real, and thus as an appearance, as an event always-already situated within and thus imperiled by the order of the image, the simulacra. It is for this reason that Baudrillard calls the disappearance of the Real "irreversible."
As memories becomes memories of memories, so the postmodernist would reduce the Situationist's hope for a return of the repressed realm of lived experience into a nostalgic longing for the Real, for a real referent beyond appearance, a transcendental signified, an epistemic or ontological anchor. Baudrillard takes sides with Hegel--Kojève's Hegel--embracing the end of history, what we have called the crash of history into the Pacific Wall. Baudrillard thus reads Heidegger's "retrospective nostalgia for Being" as though it were on a par with a nostalgic longing for a return of the divine. And "The aura of our world is no longer sacred," Baudrillard tells us. However, it is precisely this same diagnosis that leads Nietzsche and Heidegger to call for a resacralization of the simple, a reinstauration of the irreducibly polysemic sacredness of all things, a bearing witness to the earth.
In Nietzsche's metaphysical tragicomedy, the pantheon of gods was replaced by the monotheistic God after these gods laughed themselves to death at the impertinence of a single God proclaiming Himself to be the one true God. But before we reduce Nietzsche to Baudrillard, we should remember that Nietzsche denigrates the "last men" who stand blinking in the shimmering light of the end of history, blinking as if half-hypnotized by the cathode-rays of the final televisual scene, blinking and thinking to themselves: "This is good." But there are still moments of hope in Baudrillard; cinders of the revolutionary conflagration continue to burn in his work, almost in spite of himself.
For example, on the first page of Cool Memories, he says--almost as if he were talking about what Heidegger might call the Rest of Being--that "the rest is what is given to you as something extra, and there is a charm and a particular freedom about letting just anything come along, with the grace--or ennui--of a later destiny." Here Baudrillard comes closest to the Situationists notion of dérive, or drift, the aimlessness of drifting through the psychic landscape, captured so artfully in the movie Slackers. In order to become psychogeographers, like the Baudelaire of Paris Spleen, the Situationists practiced dérive, developing a Gelassenheit-like phenomenological sensitivity to inconspicuous things, which for Debord include things like: "the sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contours of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places," these are all inconspicuous details of a physico-psychic environment which we tend to neglect, but which quietly mediates and shapes our every experience. The psychogeographical exploration of this neglected landscape is carried out in the dérive, drift, which was defined by the Situationists as the "technique of locomotion without a goal," in which "one or more persons during a certain period drop their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there." For the Situationists, the dérive was a model for the "playful creation" which constitutes all human relationships at their best.2
It is hard not to see the Situationist dérive as a kind of Heideggerian Gelassenheit, or receptivity, put into motion and adapted from the Black Forest into the urban landscape. And certainly the shared hope driving Heidegger's ethos of dwelling and Debord's psychogeographical forays link our Heidegger-derived elaboration of the phenomenological reconnaissance mission to the Situationist's psychogeographical dérive, the drifting or slacking of the psychogeographer, the phenomenological explorer of the psychic landscape.
This hope shared by Heidegger and the Situationists is founded on the belief that the poet-activist can still catch a hint of something Real, a fragmentary experience of a real life, an epiphany of Being itself; in other words, that between blinks even we last men at the end of history might catch the winks of the departed gods whose divine laughter was the instrument of their suicide-- and, further, that we might intercept these divine winks, hints, traces, or, in the Situationist vocabulary, that the beach might still show through between the cracks in the sidewalk, or that--as the most popular slogan of May '68 had it--"Beneath the cobblestones: the Beach!" This Heideggerian and Situationist hope rests on the idea that, on the spur of the moment, so to speak, we might recognize that we exist in--or rather ek-sist as--the timespace of a decision between crash and revolution. As Raoul Vaneigem, the author of the Treatise on Living for the Young Generations (translated as The Revolution of Everyday Life), who, along with Guy Debord, was one of the two most famous and outspoken Situationists, tells us: It all comes down to "a single choice: suicide or revolution."
But Debord shot himself in the heart. Shooting oneself in the heart--could there be a more poignant symbol of despair? How are we to read this suicide: as a martyrdom, a giving of one's life in the name of the revolution, or as an opting-out of the game, like Kurt Cobain's "You can't fire me because I quit!" When I first heard that Kurt killed himself, I must confess that I thought about giving a talk titled "Suicide and the Nirvana Principle." As those of you familiar with Buddhism know, Nirvana names the placeless place in which the soul or spirit which has finally transcended and thus escaped the seemingly endless cycle of death and rebirth goes to become one with eternal nothingness. Hence Freud called the psychic drive to become nothing again, to go back to being nothing, "the Nirvana principle."
We have see that for Freud, as the Thanatological force behind the Nirvana principle struggles with Eros, the gathering force of the erotic, this Eros versus Thanatos dichotomy or agon ultimately explains the shifting vicissitudes of history. For Freud, the eternal agon of these two great drives produces the various permutations of history; historical events are like seabirds circling each other at the beach, endlessly breaking apart and reforming at the behest of dionysiac and appolonian drives, more or less neurotic collections and psychotic dispersions. Envisioning history in terms of this great agon of forces, we near what Heidegger saw as Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical vision of will-to-power existing in the mode of eternal recurrence.
But Freud recognized that the victory of either Eros or Thanatos would mean the end of human civilization; an undifferentiated totalitarian neurotic unity would be just as deadly as total psychotic dispersion, disintegration, or deconstruction. But when Freud looked at his world he worried that Thanatos was gaining the upper hand over Eros; he saw the Nirvana Principle winning out over the pleasure principle. And, as some of our brightest revolutionaries, poets, and postmodern philosophers continue to give their own lives, must we not ask, in their names, whether and how the revolution is still possible?
What if "the revolution has well and truly happened," as Baudrillard holds, "but not in the way that we expected. Everywhere what has been liberated has been liberated so that it can enter into a state of pure circulation, so that it can go into orbit"? Baudrillard characterizes the present state of affairs as "after the orgy." We live "after the Orgy"--for Baudrillard this means that the revolution is over, that "all the goals of liberation are already behind us." But this total liberation has not liberated us in the positive sense of making us free for something, but has only in the negative sense of making us free from everything. Like Nietzsche's death of God, the revolution liberates all signs of their referents, unmooring all appearances from any ground in the Real, liberating all things in order to send them into orbit, into an orbit which according to Baudrillard is increasingly the orbit of pure circulation, the eternal circulation of substance reduced to mere information, entering the computers in preparation for the final and total deletion.
This non-destination toward which we are accelerating is what Baudrillard calls, quite ominously, "the final solution." As Baudrillard writes, "all substance will be transformed into energy and all that energy into pure information. This will beÉthe total achievement, the final solution. Everything will be accomplished, realized, and at the same time, ejected into the void." Should we follow Baudrillard into the void, accelerating toward the crash and its seductive promise of an impact? As Veruca Salt says: "Once you get a taste of impact, you're always hungry for the crash."
In J.G. Ballard's Crash, Vaughn has the outlines of his steering wheel tattooed on his body in anticipation of the crash, the impact where flesh meets steering wheel. How are we to read this anticipated impression in the flesh of the trace of the steering wheel? As a reminder that there are no longer any destinations and thus nowhere to steer, an impossible destination, the impossibility of all destination, nothing but the spectre of a wheel which turns without going anywhere, which revolves faster and faster without yet constituting a revolution? As Matt George says in the film, "Sometimes I just don't know..."
This infinite acceleration toward a non-destination, a destination of nothingness,
promises to fulfill our need for speed once and for all. But can even an
infinite acceleration catch us up to the temporality of the instant, the
Augenblick, the blink of the eye in which and as which we are and are not,
the moment in which we are eternally present to ourselves as eternally
absent from ourselves? We have formalized the phenomenology of the instant
as: either the eternal never-not-now or the evanescent neither/nor between
a no-longer and a not-yet, and argued that this phenomenology of the instant
lays the temporal grounds for the existential decision par excellence:
Revolution or suicide; the turning of the wheel or the crash. And thus
the problem of suicide: If the revolution is over, why not embrace the
crash, rushing Occidental history toward the Pacific Wall?
This is perhaps the central question with which the film we are going to see struggles, the question it bestows, as a gift and thus also as a debt, an inheritance and a burden--recalling Nietzsche's "heaviest weight," the weight Nietzsche created amor fati in order to bear. The film is Matt George and Adam Sinykin's "The Ticking Clock and the Timeless Face of Cruelty: Au Revoir Guy Debord." We spoke about titles and entitlements a moment ago, did we not? What does this mean: Au Revoir Guy Debord? Both "Good-bye Guy Debord" and "See you later Guy Debord."
Spurred by this fortuitous ambiguity we are driven to ask of this film: Is Matt George seeing Guy Debord again only to say good-bye to him? In a scene set by the question of debt and the spectre of death, we have to ask if Matt is Saying good-bye one last time, for good, a final good-bye? Or is he not rather saying that we can't say good-bye to Debord, only so-long, see you later? Au Revoir is used to say good-bye, but it literally means see you again.
I have it on good testimony, from a reliable witness (a slacker sophisticate friend of mine), that Au Revoir literally means "to the seeing again." To the seeing again; back to see, the open sea of the gaze, back--perhaps eternally--to the ocularcentric regime of the gaze, its seductive objectificications and loneliest lonelinesses, its fullest theaters and emptiest halls of mirrors. In this good-bye there is a so-long and in this so long there is a good-bye. This irresolvable ambiguity bestows the legacy of a decision upon each viewer, a decision about whether the viewer will remain merely a spectator.
As we have seen--can we ever escape the ocularcentric regime of the gaze?--to contest the Spectacle in the name of the Situation means refusing to concede eternity to the domain constituted by spectator and spectacle. We must assume the ubiquity of the spectacle, but we don't have to concede it. Consesso non dato. What, then, to return to our original question, should we conclude about this title's entitlements? Each of us must make that decision, but for me, "Au Revoir Guy Debord" bestows its legacy in the form of a question, a true question because an undecidable question, an undecidability through which every free decision must pass. Perhaps this question can be put most sharply as follows: Are Kevin Martin and Guy Debord victims of--or martyrs for--the struggle against the Spectacle? This question brings us full circle to our first questions. Thus this film's gift, the heritage it would bestow, is the gift of the space of a question, a question that can't be answered either way, an undecidable question, the very question of freedom.
Assuming the debt of this film forces us to pass through this indecidability without which there is no freedom, and thus no responsibility. It lands us in a state not unlike that of Buridan's ass, the donkey which--standing equidistantly between two equally desirable stacks of hay--starves to death, a state which Matt George calls "parallelalysis," but which we could call indecidability, remembering the Kierkegaardian lesson about freedom and responsibility which Derrida appropriates: that the passage through such indecidability is itself the condition of the possibility of all decision, the freedom for which we are responsible.
In Heideggerian terms, every work of art prescribes its own success-stakes. Perhaps we cannot receive the gift of this film in this space it itself bestows. Nevertheless, that is the unreasonable, perhaps even impossible demand of the gift, the Zumutung of the Es gibt, the existential heritage of an ontological responsibility which we decide only how--not whether--to bear, a Situation which no spectacularization can prevent from making martyrs of us all.
1A commandment to which
a Buber or a Levinas would certainly give a very different reading. Given
Buber's defense of the "I-Thou" relation, we might expect that
the commandment "Thou Shall not kill Thou" would amount to a
stricture against the elimination of the holy, against the treating of
all things as "its," objects to be manipulated instrumentally,
rather than as "Thous," be-ings worthy of non-instrumental respect.
2Guy Debord, as quoted
by Sadie Plant in The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International
in a Postmodern Age (Routlege: London, 1992), an exquisite text whose account
of dérive I adopt and extend. Cf., Guy Debord, "Theory of the
Dérive," in the Situationist International Anthology (The Bureau
of Public Secrets: Berkeley, 1981. Ed. & transl. by Ken Knabb), for
a very different rendering of the same passage (as well as for the cover:
Debord's
1957 psychogeopgraphical map of Paris).
1997 © Iain D. Thomson
