前言：本文為Joan Copjec教授于2016年"Fantasies of Capital: Alienation, Enjoyment, Psychoanalysis" 會議上發言的粗略整理，尚存諸多細節待更正，期望各位批評指正。倘若了解Copjec教授此前的工作，能從本篇synopsis中看到許多熟悉（但保持距離!）的思想足迹，也希望這篇簡陋的錄音稿能與熟悉或不熟悉Copjec教授的讀者碰撞思想火花。
You'll see that, in this paper, my project for a long time now has been on the work of Abas Kiarostami, the Iranian filmmaker, and I want to treat him as a contemporary filmmaker, that he is, but I also wanted to deal with the quite definite background in Islamic philosophy that he's drawing on--it's quite clear that that that he's doing this--but it it's been a hard goal. So I wanted to mention, when Fissel[1] says, ‘the act of lifting the veil makes what's underneath the goal elsewhere’, some of you might hear the tones of Heidegger in that statement. And Henry Corbin, who is the person I've been relying on most for this background, who was the first person to introduce Heidegger into French thought, said that Heidegger held the key to Islamic philosophy. He eventually found another --I mean it was important to Corbin for a very long time, but at a certain point it was Malasaga that was the dominant influence in his thought--but I mentioned that for a purpose. It'll appear. I'm going to be talking about Heidegger a lot in the paper. I'll also say that this paper is a kind of synopsis of a much larger paper, 3 times as large, which was also unfinished. So with all those, warnings, I will begin.
<Taste of Cherry>, winner of the 1997 Canal film prize, is the bleakest film in Abas Kiarostami. The devastating 8-year War with Iraq had ended in 1988, but Iran's palpable battle fatigue is still pervasive in the film, not only in the dialogue’s numerous references to the war, but also in the ubiquitous presence of militia and the desperate conditions of the day workers. Absent are the Lush Vistas of the director's other films, replaced here by a flinty peri-urban landscape: bulldozers dig deep into the earth, emitting harsh sounds and creating perilous crevices, as if intent on ripping out by the roots. The lone tree perched on a hill, whose signature presence is sadly missing from this film. That there is not a single woman in the film is also disturbing, not because it demonstrates Kiarostami's indifference to the plight of women, as many feminists have claimed, but because their absence testifies to the aridity of conditions that nourish desire.
Sometime before the film begins, Mr. Badii apparently took the decision to commit suicide, for he spends the whole of his screen time trying to accomplish what turns out to be a not so simple task. The focus and fascination of the film lies in the effort it takes to carry out his resolve. With regard to Mr. Badii's controversial decision, Kiarostami had this to say in an interview: the choice of death is the only prerogative left to a human being in the face of God and social norms, because everything has been imposed on us from birth: our parents, our home, our nationality, our build, the color of our skin, our culture… If this or some such explanation seems warranted, it is because Badii displays no real distaste for life and even goes out of his way, rather humorously, to mention his love of eggs, which he has given up out of concern for his cholesterol. The film gives no hint, in other words, that there is anything lacking in his life, any particular circumstance from which he’s eager to withdraw. But how to put together Kiarostami's explanation with B's specific situation? I suggest we start with a passage, in which Emanuel Levinas sounds as if he had someone precisely like Badii in mind, when he wrote, ‘there exists a weariness which is a weariness of everything and everyone, and above all, a weariness of oneself. What wearies then is not a particular form of our life, our surroundings, because they are dull and ordinary, our circle of friends, because they are vulgar and cruel. Weariness concerns existence itself. In weariness, existence is something like the reminder of a commitment to exist, and of the impossible refusal of this ultimate obligation. In weariness, we want to escape existence itself and not only one of its landscapes.’
<Taste of Cherry>, I want to argue, is legible through the concept of fatigue, developed by Levinas in his early work <Existence and Existents>, other than the fact that this concept clarifies the odd and uncertain trajectory of the film. Fatigue has the advantage of allowing us to confront simultaneously the contemporary issues at the film’s center, issues of war and capitalism and their antipathy to fatigue, and the philosophical background that informs Kiarostami's image making practice. That the Lone Tree, with its zigzagging roots, a representation of what Islamic philosophy thought of as the imaginal world, is being ripped from the world before our eyes, is what the film urges us to observe.
If Levinas shines a light on this conjunction, it's because he, too, addresses concerns stemming from our bio-capitalist present, while rejoining a tradition that began with a thought experiment conducted in the 11th century by Avicenna, the initiator of the Iranian turn in Islamic philosophy. Avicenna's experiment, which came to be known as a ‘flying man’ experiment, consisted simply of his casting a human projectile into a void for all its apparent modesty. This experiment was enormously ambitious, for it was intended to unseat Aristotle's fundamental claim that we have an awareness of ourselves only secondarily through our relation to the world. Avicenna disagreed, arguing that a primitive self-awareness was the condition of our relation to the world. He stipulated that his flying man would glide through the void in such a way as to prevent his coming into contact with any external object, including his own body. This stipulation was motivated by his rejection of the idea that the body played any role in self-awareness, although it is important to point out that what Avicenna rejected was a particular notion of the body as a freestanding object that could be touched and contemplated. What his experiment isolated was an irreducible opacity, an obstacle to thought which Avicenna declined to ignore and on which he states his certainty. Admitting that this obstacle resisted removal, he offered his experiment as a means of demonstrating the certainty to which he attested. At the end of the 18th century and through the 19th, a number of philosophers reconducted this early experiment, only gradually to realize that its stipulation against touch that held the key to the argument, that the encounter was something that fled from touch and retreated from observation is precisely what constitutes our sense of embodiment, our sense of inner extension.
Although he does not mention Avicenna, Levinas does offer an interpretation of the thought experiment to which Avicenna’s experiment is often compared, namely Descartes’ experiment with hyperbolic doubt. Levinas's reading brings the two experiments closer into alignment, and at another point, Levinas acknowledges as a precursor, Maine de Biran[2], who is one of the philosophers who contributed to the later taking up of this experiment in the late 18th and early 19th century. To understand the importance of Levinas's intervention, it is useful to say a few words about the pronounced concern with the body's susceptibility to fatigue, which from the waning years of the 19th century onward, steadily increased to the point where it became an obsession, a problem whose very insurmountability spawned utopian dreams of fatigues elimination and or the body obsolescence.
Why such a problem? Because both war and capitalism and who in the last century would think of separating them, began to mount a non-stop push toward endless war and accelerated accumulation that left no room for the downtime human bodies require. A thorough account of this obsession is presented in Ansen Robin box, <the human motor energy fatigue and the origins of modernity>, which centers on the German concept of Craft, a universal energy or force that became the fetishized focus of late 19th century science and formed the backdrop of Freud's theory of libido as well as Marx's theory of Arbeitskraft or labor power. While the universal force of craft was used to overthrow the basic premises of vitalism, a power inherent in life, the vitalist worn out in the end, replacing craft inspired conception of the human motor with that of a living or organism. Devoted to the disciplinary Taylorism regime of the late 19th and early 20th century and the now displaced notion of craft, the vocabulary and specific target of Rorbin's book could use some updating.
<24/7, Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep>, a recent book by Jonathan Crary, seems to answer to this need, for it dwells on a new form of unmitigated capitalism that devoid of the utopian impulses that once characterized early modern industry, and buttress by a capacity thanks to the advances of science to remain unblinkingly awake. This unmitigated form regards fatigue with an unprecedented enmity. The aim of <24/7> is to call attention to the latest phase of what we might think of as capitalism's war on bodies and attempts to imagine ways of resisting it. To this end, 1) it turns towards dreams and sleep as bull works against capitalism, even as it rejects entirely not only Freud's work on dreams, but the whole of psychoanalysis; 2) several times evokes the work of Levinas, without giving any re-account of the latter's argument. The price Crary pays for this double neglect is his failure to get beyond the notion of a need to sleep. In order to elaborate what is entailed by the desire for it, a concept he seems to be aiming for without being able to produce. Taking a stand against the reduction of human existence to its bodily needs, Crary critiques capitalism's devaluation of dreams and desires. If the problem we confront however, is not capitalism simple, but as Foucault famously argued, capitalism's unholy alliance with biology and the other life sciences. Then that it is that alliance, which assigns life a dual position, simultaneously outside history, in its biological environment and inside human historicity, penetrated by bio-power techniques. It is that alliance which must be undone. This dual position is indicative of a dualistic understanding of life, in which the first term, life in in its biological element, is simultaneously foundational and susceptible to erasure by the second, life in its historicity. Thus bio-capitalism's field of operations can and increasingly has become all of life, except that part that grows fatigued and dies. In the absence of a full-fledged argument, which in my opinion would give both Freud and Levinas their due, Crary’s defense of dreams and desires often reads as a humanist concession, reliant on the pathos of human finitude and frailty, as the ground of community. This does nothing to disrupt capitalism's dual positioning of life but traps itself in the bio-capitalist orbit wherein cultural forms and political formations are conceptualized as the means by which human life defends itself against its own deficiencies. In addition, Crary advocates for a good privacy against the bad privacy which he finds the bad privacy he finds in Freud's theory of dreams, without off offering an account of their difference. What's more, the good privacy he champions, which as we will see contains its own hell, is always only represented as a welcome retreat.
<24/7> is to be credited for once again placing the capitalist vendetta against fatigue on the agenda, while drawing attention to the counter concept formulated by Levinas, who intended it as a means of exposing, in his words, the lies of capitalist idealism. I will return then to the areas of Crary's neglect to Freud, who in <The Interpretation of Dreams> literally underlined the fact that his conception of dreams bore witness to a wish to sleep, a notion far different from that of the body's natural need for sleep and so curious that Lacan once characterized it as the greatest enigma, and to the argument Levinas makes about fatigue in his <Existence and Existents>.
In 1940, as World War II and with it concerned over battle fatigue was erupting, Levinas was captured by the Nazis and placed in a force labor camp and that. By this point he had already become disaffected with the philosophy of Heidegger. But the rift was aggravated, as the official motto of National Socialism and unofficial motto of capitalism, ‘Arbeit adelt’[3], was being mounted on the gate of various concentration camps. Heidegger’s notion that Dasein was consigned in its being, had to assume as a task, what was given, came at this time and under these circumstances to seem all the more unpalatable. It was during his imprisonment in the labor camp that Levinas began to compose his thoughts on fatigue, which he would conceive not as phenomenon befalling and already constituted an embodied subject, but rather as what constitutes embodied subjectivity. He defined fatigue as an enigmatic recoil from and return to anonymous existence, or to what he called ‘the il-y-a’, the ‘there is’, the term with which he placed Heidegger’s general term ‘Es gibt’.
I refer to the recoil, return of fatigue as enigmatic, in order to stress its non-phenomenological character, that is the fact that it does not occur to a subject already there. But I also want to propose that fatigue is that greatest enigma, that very thing, in other words, the desire to sleep which Lacan's phrase designates. The movement of recoil, return, does not take flight from existence but inserts a hesitation, a sutura, a lag within it. To put it in terms made famous by Herman Melville, fatigue is a recoil of preferring not to, that also returns, thus acknowledging the irremissive character of our contract with existence. The resistance to all attempts to dislodge him from his office, his place, his staunch refusal to depart the premises, evidences the fatigue that defines his peculiar act. The lack, produced by recoil return, or in a word, the cleaving, that is the separation from and simultaneous clinging to, holds open a distance from anonymous being and thus makes possible the subject's relation to existence. (This refers the way I use relation we I can refer back to the discussion that we had yesterday I think it was; and whenever I say relation I mean the relation as that forms on condition that there is a non-relation, the relation happens in this space of negativity).
The subject is not the agent who forges this relation but the place open or afforded by it. ‘The subject is a place in existence’, Levinas says, purposefully avoiding the world in order to distance himself from Heidegger’s notion of thrownness, whereby Dasein is said to be cast or thrown into an already existing world, where it does not feel at home and thus projects itself beyond that world toward there. It is this ecstatic dimension of Heidegger that Levinas finds intolerable, believing it to be inadequate to a theory of imminence. He therefore insists against his former mentor that the subject is not situated in a place but rather is a place. The subject is thus defined as a primordial event of localization, the first place in existence, and in this way precedes the world of established places. Place is different from a simple abstract point implies extension, which is not to be confused here with the distance between one concrete location and another, the relation to existence forms the territory of an inner extension and thus runs from the subject as ‘I’ to an otherness it now assumes as its own, but does not fuse with, and cannot appropriate. Levinas asserts that this relation to ‘the il-y-a’, this extension of the subject, is what is called inwardness. And if you ask, where it is so called, ‘inwardness’, the answer would be in that long philosophical tradition that runs from Avicenna through Muran, where it is claimed that an inner sense or primitive self-awareness necessarily precedes the subject's relation to the world, and I will be returning again to that point.
The three points of Levinas’s argument on which I will focus are intertwined in their effort to refute the lies of capitalism. The first of these attempts to discredit the dual positioning of life, in a manner not dissimilar to the one Foucault chooses in his own account of that form of capitalism he calls biopower. This argument is part of the attack Levinas launches against Heidegger’s distinction between being and beings. While not of course contesting the fact that Heidegger’s theorization of being departs significantly from classical ontology, Levinas accuses the German philosopher of retaining in his thought the shadow of an ulterior finality. The ontological difference between being and beings appears to Levinas as an artificial and arbitrary verbal repetition that sets what exists to one side so as then to imagine and act by which an existent takes over its existence. Through this verbal repetition, bare existence breaks away from living to become living's end and time is reduced to an economic order that measures the success of our struggle for a future, conceived in terms of endurance and conservation. Here Levinas is accusing Heidegger of inheriting um from the development of the biological-sciences of the 19th century, a new type of finalism, which we would be justified in calling bio-finalism, to replace the Aristotelian finalism of the good Life. The good life of classical antiquity, when one lived in harmony and moderation, is replaced by a definition of life as ‘the good’, wherein modernity becomes the era in which one seeks to survive, to postpone death, to dominate one's rivals as per Lacan’s similar argument in The Encore seminar. Because the primordial possibility of giving myself to myself remains in Heidegger so Levinas claims, in permanent conflict with my being thrown, abandoned by being, Dasein seems always to lag behind its possibilities, unable to acquit itself of its debt by heeding fully the call of being. Everything happens as if being thrown into the always specific antique world, retroactively cast being as a lost object to which it is never fully able to return. It is said that Rudolf Höss, whose decision it was to display the infamous Nazi motto at the entry to Auschwitz, regarded that motto as a mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor brings a kind of spiritual freedom, Levinas's second argument is a stiff rebuttal of that declaration, i.e. of every labor mystique which appeals to themes of joy and freedom. The only joy offered by this mystique is the one Lacan described as fake, the super egoic pleasure of sacrifice and duty fulfilled. Levinas ties this critique to his critique of that bio-finalism he detects in the Heideggerian circuit, which leads each moment of our existence to the notion of the task of existing. When one has to eat, drink and warm oneself in order not to die, when nourishment becomes fuel as in certain kinds of hard labor, the world, he says, becomes unhinged. This statement does not stop at condemning the conditions of subsistence to which the poor are reduced, but aims beyond this, at the ontological assumptions that permit these conditions to exist. Ultimately the mystique of freedom, freedom promising labor, relies on a supposition of a lack or deficit, which the subject seeks to overcome by the willing sacrifice of her labor for some greater and far-off gain. This exposes another duality: on the one side, constraint and despair arising from it, the matter of the body dents with the weight of its frailties; on the other the effort of freedom and will, able to overcome all that resists it, an obscure idea of matter and its resistance is opposed by an equally obscure notion of action propelled by freedom, a freedom which is simply present and ready to do whatever it wants a freedom then that is as free as the wind as Levinas sarcastically puts it, or as a flowing river, as the mother in ten a film by kizami who is a little bit too much West toxification there in this utterance much too credulous credulously asserts.
It is this magical notion of freedom, which comes from nowhere and puts nothing at risk, that is responsible for counting fatigue as a nullity, a drag on the high-speed economy and the pace of production. Levinas's own conception of fatigue takes off from a radically different point from this biopolitical one: it is associated not with lack privation or the spent energy of worn-out bodies, but with an excess of anonymous existence, that is with ‘the Il-y-a’, from which the subject is unable to escape, and to which she remains incontrovertibly bound.
Levinas's critique of the modern form of finality, that is of the idea that Freud notwithstanding, ‘the aim of Life Is Life’, which implies among other things that we eat in order to live. Levinas's critique affirms an alternative position we eat to satisfy our hunger. Hunger cannot be understood, in this context, as a physiological feeling of emptiness that demands to be filled in order to keep the organism going but evokes rather a kind of voluptuous or desire (and desire, as Aaron referred to it and to which I will return) unlink to simple survival. The deliciousness of cherries, for example, referenced in the title of Kiarostami’s film, makes an appeal to this hunger (or desire), where the cherries are not simply there for the plucking. Rather than advocating a return to a simpler planer life or an appreciation of smaller things, <Taste of Cherry> should be read as an indictment of the metaphysical Calamity that grounds the refusal of bio-capitalism to acknowledge the very excess on which Levinas insists. Even as it that is bio-capitalism unwittingly deploys this excess in extreme forms of violence. One could argue as Lacan does, that this excess is the very thing capitalism tries to get rid of. The excess, which ‘the Ilia’ is shows up as well in Levinas's third argument, which maintains that otherness is the condition of time. Rather than the future to which the mystique of labor tempts us into leveraging our sacrifices, <Existence and Existents> privileges the present, in which effort and fatigue forge a relation to existence. The present of Levinas escapes the Dasein critique of presence, in as much as it extracts from the subject a ransom, the Ransom of its sovereignty and I will well I say I'm going to return to this point but maybe in the discussion but I do it is an important point to return to this question of the ransom.
Now this um quickly sketched quarrel between Heidegger and Levinas sets the stage for a return to taste of cherry, specifically to the assertion of that the fact that everything has already been imposed on us from birth makes suicide a prerogative. Kiarostami's statement cannot fail to call to mind Heidegger’s contention that Dasein is thrown into a world without having chosen to come into it and without having chosen the circumstances that obtained there. Existing as Throne dine constantly lags behind its possibilities, which always seem to precede it and burden it with guilt. The prim the primordial dejection attendant on this experience of utter passivity can however be overcome, Dasein can successfully assume its own destiny by anticipating its almost possibility of death it is because no one can die in my place that death has this privilege of being of all possibilities all capacities uniquely mine the Assumption of this exceptional possibility of the end of possibilities I.E of impossibility, does not require us actively to seek our own death but to anticipate it by means of an anticipatory resoluteness we take over the whole of our destiny by assuming the manner of our approach to death. That is to say, throughout our lives we take care to die in our own way. It is this argument that um it is in this argument that Heidegger’s indebtedness to 19th century biological sciences seems most clear to Levinas, who revolts again against it on the grounds that as Foucault will later put it volatilizes death distributes it throughout life instills within it a kind of moralism. Levinas distrusts, however, the whole concept of being towards death including the concept of nothingness that it is supposed to anticipate, for nothingness is still envisioned by Heidegger as being in the place of the now vacated place of being's ground. It lies outside being and like an ocean beats up against it on all sides. Levinas therefore turns to examine Bergson's famous counterargument, which ridicules the concept of total negation as impossible and the concept of nothing as a losery. In the end, however, Levinas rejects Bergson’s argument as well, since it is premised on the belief that the something that remains beyond all negation is, for Bergson, a residual entity, namely the force of life. For Levinas, on the other hand, the excess that survives negation is not an entity, and has no content. It is, on the contrary, what is produced by the negation of all content. From here we are able to respond to an admonition made by Derrida, on behalf of Heidegger and against Levinas. And this is what Derrida says: ‘Nothing is more clear,’ he says waving his finger in Heidegger's thought, ‘than the fact that being is nothing outside the existent and does not exist outside the existent as a foreign power, or as a hostile or neutral impersonal element.’ Being is not an archaic, which would permit Levinas to insert the face of a faceless Tyrant under the name of being.
The article by Derrida largely praises Levinas but does have certain harsh accusations as well. This criticism simply misses the mark. For Levinas did not dispute the fact that existence is nothing outside the existent. What he disputes is the characterization of this nothing as a simple nullity. ‘The il-y-a’, he insists lies in the very heart of nothing it inhabits the heart of negation thus Levinas rejects both Heidegger’s void of nothingness and Bergson's vital force to affirm what he describes as the density or atmosphere of nothingness, the teeming or murmuring of nothingness and brief ‘the il-y-a’ in the presence of an absence. And let us recall, by the way, that Lacan at certain point speaks in these terms of the teeming of the real. I think it's an opposition some to something that Sarge says about the nothing now this debate I claim helps to make <Taste of Cherry> more legible.
The remarkable premise of the film is that Mr. Badii is unable to assume the task of his own death and so solicits the assistance of others attempting through long conversations to convince three strangers: a Kurdish Soldier, an Afghan seminarian and a philosophically minded Turkish taxidermist, to take part in his suicide. For us, the critical point is the reason he gives, for needing someone else's help in ending his life. It has to be noted that he does not require that he accomplished assisting carrying out the original deed but that he performed his role afterward by throwing 20 shovels full of dirt on his dead body. It seems clear that Badii is not troubled by an anxiety of death, rather what seems to arouse anxiety is the impossibility of dying. It is undeadness that fills him with horror. It is undeadness, or to use Levinas's own phrase, the indefectibility of existence itself, that is the horror Badii seeks to escape through suicide. But if the anonymous existence is what remains beyond every negation, how can suicide succeed as a strategy of escape? How can Badii be assured that he will well and truly die, given that, as I am arguing, it is this very impossibility that drove him to contemplate suicide in the first place? In what way does Kiarostami’s suggestion that Badii faces the bleak fact that everything is imposed on us from birth, relate to our argument? It is precisely because there is nothing prior to existence, because every transcendent principle or superior being that might have been assumed to guarantee or determine our destiny has been negated(because this instance has been withdrawn), that the being of this existent(as Derrida rightly says, but without acknowledging that far from disputing this point Levinas exaggerates it) insisting that existence is remissive, and that the existent is riveted to it. While there is thus no faceless face of a tyrant hidden under existence, no antic element in ontological clothing, as Derrida's criticism would have it, there is no doubt that tyranny may and does emerge in direct response to the murmuring of ‘the Il-y-a’, can appear later as a content. We are riveted to the void, even the empty void, whatever power of negation is applied to it. It is worth stressing this point the horror of it, not only in light of Kiarostami’s clear invocation of tyranny, but also in light of the picture of a cloying and naive altruism to which recent readings including Crary have tended to reduce Levinas’s thought. It is not via the frailties, limitations or helplessness as biology would understand it, that Levinas approaches the finitude of the subject; but via a kind of helplessness much more in line with the Freudian concept of ‘Hilflosigkeit’. While Heidegger privileges the anxiety of death, Levinas focuses, as he and others have pointed out, it is again necessary to warn against readings of Levinas that see him as offering a gentler, less virile alternative to Heidegger. Levinas focuses on the horror of birth confronts, in a way not dissimilar to Freud. It is well known that Freud characterized the birth of the human being as premature and consistently maintain that this prematurity placed her not only at the beginning but throughout her life, in a position of radical helplessness or Hilflosigkeit. This phenomenon is first introduced in the project where Freud tells us that the initial helplessness of human beings makes them dependent on the extraneous help of an experienced person, and that this relation of helplessness and dependency is what establishes helplessness as the primal force of all moral motives(I stress this because it seems to open up that kind of reading of Levinas that I don't like, but I'm claiming that it opens up a different reading). Later in inhibition symptom and anxiety, He correlates helplessness with anxiety. After contemptuously rejecting Adler's conjecture that anxiety is caused by organic inferiority, he turns to the thesis formulated by Rank in the trauma of birth, which states that anxiety is dependent on the child's loss of the mother. The thesis earns the admiration of Freud, who nevertheless rejects Rank's larger argument on the grounds that it leaves no room for the ideological importance of sexual drives. This is no mere quibble, as Lacan himself recognizes, arguing in support of Freud's reluctance to embrace Rank’s thesis thus. While man's libido attains its finished state at the time of birth, the prematurity of birth results in a delay of the libido's encounter with an object. That is how this special fault, Hilflosigkeit, is introduced, perpetuated in man, in relation to a dimension of externality or otherness infinitely more fatal for him than the external world is for another animal.(So he invoking a kind of externality which is not the external world. This is clear enough at least to me.)
The primordial helplessness of the newborn and indeed the human being throughout her life, concerns not her defenselessness against the outside world, but against that negative excess psychoanalysis thinks as Iibido. It is not with a deficit so much as a surplus, that the newborn is burdened; for in the absence of an object, libido is lethal. We misconstrue the infant’s wild cries of helplessness if we take them as inarticulate pleas for the mother's presence. What provokes them rather is an overwhelming imminence that announces to the child, that she will be taken back up into the mother. Let us rephrase this in the very heart of negation of the loss or separation from the mother emerges the suffocating presence of her absence, which threatens to vampirize the child, to swallow her in its uncanny presence. For Levinas, it is only through the recoil, return of fatigue, that a distance will open up. For Freud and Lacan, it is the famous game of ‘Fort da’. In both cases, it is only the possibility of a distance from the mother that the child is able to assume a relation with her and thus begin to feel secure in her presence. For this reason, the concept of anxiety found in Freud and Lacan approaches, more closely to the horror evoked by ‘the Il-y-a’ than it does to Heidegger's concept of anxiety.
In addition, while for Heidegger, anxiety anticipates the individual subject's death, for Levinas, as well as psychoanalysis, one could argue, anxiety is correlated with a death or radical absence. That is not the subject's own, and has already happened. For Heidegger, finite human existence means that the subject must face the inevitability of its own extinction, or what has been termed the first death; for Levinas and arguably for psychoanalysis, finite human existence has to face a second death, one that is impersonal and inextinguishable. Freud begins to posit such a difference when he pointedly distinguishes anxiety from mourning. Anxiety responds not to a loss one has experienced and can thus mourn, but to a loss that precedes us. This non-phenomenological loss produces something we cannot let go, the presence of a ceaseless, interminable absence which Freud recognizes very early on through his conceptualization of das Ding. it is arguable, though not in the space we have here, that Lacan's contention that every drive, or drive as such, is a death drive, means to underscore this second death or aspect of death.
But we will for now leave it to Deleuze to articulate the difference between these two aspects of death, to which our argument has led us. The first signifies the personal disappearance of the person, the annihilation of this difference, which existed in order to die and the disappearance of which can be objectively represented, as though calculated by a kind of entropy. Despite appearances, this comes from without even when it constitutes the most personal possibility. The other death assumes a shape which excludes any identity whatsoever, there is always a one dies more profound than I die, as though there appeared a world in which the individual was no longer imprisoned within the personal form of the I or ego. Anxiety is, in the psychoanalytic sense, emerges in the face of the impersonal ceaseless death, in the face of a pure never experienced past. But I want to make two additional points regarding this second death, both of which bear on our reading of <Taste of cherry>. While Levinas never speaks directly of a second death, he invokes through <Existence and Existents> several references to the tragedy of Shakespeare. In one instance, he quotes Macbeth. ‘The times have been when the brains were out, the man would die and there an end. But now they rise again and push us from our stools.’ This is stranger than such a murder is. The horror, stranger more horrible than the murder itself, is the return of Banquo’s phantom in the very nothingness created by his death. Levinas's point is again, not that something or someone returns, but rather that bubbles[4] (I think that’s the Shakespearean word) for pockets of emptiness, erupt in the earth, functioning as traces of the deaths we have survived. The citation of Shakespeare is especially interesting, given the protestant’s pogroms against the past, well underway when he wrote. At a time when the dead were being stripped even of their Halfway House in purgatory and shoved unceremoniously beyond the point where they could exert any influence over the living. Shakespeare's strategies preserve a place for the undead that haunt us and thereby recall to us our very lack of ground. Protestantism and capitalism have famously been linked, but never as far as I know, on this particular point. Their concerted effort to rid the world of the negative surplus of undeadness. The bulldozers that rip up the earth in <Taste of Cherry> are intent, as we see, even more clearly in the wind will carry us, on carrying out the pogrom against the past on ruling out the bubbles or the imaginal world that evidence our interminable loss of ground.
After distinguishing death’s two aspects, Deleuze makes this apt observation. In confronting these aspects, it is apparent that even suicide does not make them coincide with one another or become equivalent. That the second ceaseless death of ‘the Il-y-a’ is indifferent to the first, the death of the individual, that suicide is incapable of negating the indeterminate menace of undead is, as I noted earlier, the dilemma Badii has to confront, and the truth to which <Taste of cherry> bears witness.
The question thus becomes, how if not through suicide, is it possible to resolve the fatalism of everything imposed at birth? The first two people from whom Badii solicits help, a military and a religious man, only confirm his fear that everything is determined in advance. Rules and regulations were set down long ago and must be observed, including the injunction against suicide. They therefore refuse Badii’s request. The third man, however, agrees to help after relating a story of his similar contemplation and subsequent rejection of suicide. But this man is nowhere to be seen in the penultimate sequence where Badii is entirely alone with the night. Throughout the film Badii has driven around a desolate landscape. This sequence takes place in a different location. At his home, as he awaits the taxi that will take him to his grave site, shot from a great distance. The scene is filled almost entirely with a vast and silent night, the darkness of night. Badii, a small speck in the frame, nearly imperceptible but for the light of his cigarette regards the impersonal night with a sleepless intensity, as he moves restlessly from room to room, making we imagine his final preparations. But we cannot be sure of this. The fact that we can barely see him, and that the camera, which does not move, calls attention to the edge of the frame, leaves open the possibility that it is he who is being watched by the sleepless uncaring night, exposed to an anonymous gaze. ‘The vigilance of insomnia, which keeps our eyes open, has no subject’, Levinas writes, almost as if commenting on Badii's restless but diminished presence. Attention: which presupposes the freedom of the ego that directs it, navigates a world filled with dangers to be avoided and opportunities to be seized. It turns towards objects in the world. For the majority of the film, Badii has, with rigid determination, occupied that world. Unlike attention, however, the vigilance that defines insomnia turns away from the world, unable any longer to avoid the consequences of a certain torsion that defines human existence. Vigilance remains awake to an anonymous rustling that lives on, refusing to disappear from the world of objects that ordinarily hold it in abeyance. We would add that insomnia names a helpless vigilance, divorce from will and intention, and implies the impossibility of sleep, of any kind of rest from wakefulness. And yet, Levinas concedes, ‘if I am aware of being an object of anonymous vigilance, I must be so in such a way that I am already detached from anonymity’. That is to say, my very awareness necessarily implies that I have taken some minimal distance from that vigilance, in which my subjectivity is eclipse. Can we not read, in this sequence from <Taste of Cherry>, a reprieve from the horror of everything determined at birth? Does it not signal the possibility of freedom for Badii and his compatriots, other than the disputable freedom to die?
Kiarostami follows the extreme long shot of the night with an arresting closeup. In an overhead shot, Badii is shown so smugly framed that we can say he is the place in which diagetically he rests. Were we able to ask Levinas what he thought of the shot, he would have been quite willing to respond in cinematic terms. At the same time, as the Hungarian film theorist Balázs[5], Levinas too, in <Existence and Existents>, the very book regards the cinematic closeup, not simply as a means of showing details of a larger scene, but importantly, of stopping the action by which a particular is bound up with a hole of letting it exist apart. While the long shot exposes the threat to Badii posed by the anonymous empty night, the closeup puts a stop to limits this indefectible limitlessness (That is to say, the closeup extracts the object from spatial, temporal coordinates). Badii is thereby permitted to exist apart, to sleep finally, sheltered from the eternity of the awareness. The desire for sleep, as conceived by Levinas, as well as for Freud, is not a matter of escape, but of participation by nonparticipation, which should not be confused with the enactment. (and here I quote Levina), ‘should not be confused with the enactment of a new life beneath life’.
Why this warning? What does it defend against? Levinas here wants to distinguish the subject he is introducing from ‘hypokeimenon’[6], the underlying substance of classical antiquity, which was presupposed as a primary undifferentiated substrate of being, to which determinant qualities or forms of being were added. The subject that emerges from fatigue, the operation of fatigue, is originally both the is originally both the underlying being it is, it is its own base, and the qualities or forms it has, or it is a verb doubled up by a having. That is, Levinas thinks, modes of being are not as supplements of a more primitive life, but as the taking up of a place within existence. It is his reading of Descartes's thought experiment, where this position is clearly on view in <Existence and Existents>, what Descartes finally affirms is not a logical term or substance, not a substance underlying thought, but an intimate and indissoluble relation between the ego and its act, the unique relationship of an eye with a verb in the first person, the certitude of the Cogito bears on the relation wherein the eye clasped itself in its own otherness to itself.
Now, I embarked on this project because I was following up on a longer paper. I wrote about Avicenna's thought experiment in the body, and I come back to the question of the body through this notion of fatigue, which seemed to bring Kiarostami’s project into the modern world more easily. But in this paper, I don't, or in the part of the paper I was able to read here the body seems to disappear a bit, so I just want to sketch out to you, how it gets reinserted or will get reinserted, and how it's implied. Obviously, it's implied in the fact that this inner extension is about the relationship of the subject to its body. It's always an embodied subject.)
Okay, so first point I would have made in a log one to bring back the notions of both bodies and the question of freedom which is important because the whole argument of Levinas is against this capitalist notion of freedom. Maine de Biran, whose work on the body is endorsed by Levinas, is critiqued on two points. 1) it is too reliant on will; 2) it proceeds as if the body is something discovered by the subject, where Levinas says the body is an event of the subject or the condition necessary for inwardness. No inwardness without body. It's not an abstract inwardness. The question of the relation of having a body and having a past must be brought together in the longer argument, and the fact that this relation concerns, as you say, the I and having of something a past or body, it cannot be conceived as a fusion. Levinas puts this in the following way, ‘we are unable to merge with our bodies with the innocence of narcissus espousing his own image’. So, the body remains a kind of opacity or dark spot in the mind.
3)The connection of the past with the body, I would go through a statement that Lacan makes in the anxiety seminar, where he speaks of the body not as a whole, but as real corporeal morsels, portions of ourselves, that can never be retrieved but remain lost objects. So that would be critical to the development of the full argument. Then finally the idea that rather than being as free as the wind, the capitalist notion of freedom, in Levinas, is bound to a past and a past that the worst thing has already happened, but the subject has never experienced it. In <Difference and Repetition>, Deleuze makes a few brief remarks on fatigue (very pertinent ones I must say) and follows them with the following remark, ‘a scar is not the sign of a past um of a past wound, but of the present fact of having been wounded. The scar contracts all the instance which separates us from the wound into a living present.’ Now this is a psychoanalytic Insight. Freud, in <Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through>, says, ‘we must make it clear that the patient state of being ill cannot cease with the beginning of his analysis, and that we must treat his illness not as an event of the past, but as a present-day force.’ And my argument would be that fatigue transforms ‘the Il-y-a’, the murmuring of the of the pure past, into a present-day force in the body, and from there the subject, through its unique relation to this unexperienced path, freedom means expressing a desire from that point of excess.
So, freedom is the responsibility and the capacity to articulate a desire on the basis of it. So it ends up again with an ethics of not as there was a tendency as was mentioned here in the discussion, to privilege drive over desire in terms of the question of ethics, because the ethics seminar came early; but it seems that Lacan goes back and insists on ethics being associated with desire, when he says ethics means speaking well of one's desire. So that's it.
[1] 待确認。
[3] 待确認。
[4] 待确認。
