“WE WILL DIE AND WILL BE FREE”

Abstract:

This article has a dual purpose. On the one hand, I propose a Gnostic reading of Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Véronique (1991). In this interpretation, the figure of the puppeteer, who is eventually revealed to be the maker of the film's story, stands for the Gnostic demiurge. He creates puppet-people only to discard and sacrifice them when he is done performing. On the other hand, I use the film as a springboard for launching a broader philosophical conversation, existentialist in nature, on the notion of world as farce. Participants in this conversation are figures such as Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky and Cioran. Weronika's sacrifice is discussed from these two complementary standpoints.

Keywords:

• Gnosticism
• the world as farce
• Demiurge
• E.M. Cioran
• Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes

1 The notion has been famously explored by Hugo Rahner. More recently Giuseppe Mazzotta employed it in his reading of Dante (227). See also my essays “‘I was a Stranger, and ye took me not in’” and “To Die Laughing.”

2 I discuss at length Ivan's notion of world as farce in my essay “To Die Laughing.” See also my essay “‘God is Dreaming You.’”

3 Dostoevsky 261.

4 Ibid. 245.

5 Cioran, Entretiens 82–94.

6 Cioran, Short History of Decay 49.

7 Ibid. 74.

8 Dostoevsky 261.

9 In Stok 189.

10 Dostoevsky 134.

11 In Robinson 145.

12 Rudolph 75.

13 Jonas xxxi.

14 Ibid. 327.

15 Žižek, “The Double Life of Véronique.”

16 Lacarriere 29.

17 Ibid. 30.

18 Ibid. 20.

19 Ibid. 38.

20 As Hans Jonas put it:

something in Gnosticism knocks at the door of our Being and of our twentieth-century Being in particular. Here is humanity in a crisis and in some of the radical possibilities of choices that man can make concerning his view of his position in the world, of his relation to himself, to the absolute and to his mortal Being. (Jonas xxv)

21 Ibid. 127. Lacarriere adds the telling detail that “A Short History of Decay has, since its publication, been a constant bedside book for me.”

22 Cioran, Short History of Decay 142.

23 Cioran, New Gods 8.

24 Cioran, History and Utopia 73.

25 In Kickasola 34. See also his interview with Paul Coates (Lucid Dreams).

26 In Stok 69.

27 Ibid. 122.

28 Ibid. 150.

29 Ibid. There are also some subtle Marcionite echoes in the way he conceives the “two Gods” of the Old Testament and the New Testament, respectively:

when I think of God, it's more often the God of the Old Testament rather than the New. The God of the Old Testament is a demanding, cruel God; a God who does not forgive, who ruthlessly demands obedience to the principles which He has laid down. The God of the New Testament is a merciful […] who just forgives everything. The God of the Old Testament leaves us a lot of freedom and responsibility, observes how we use it and then rewards or punishes, and there's no appeal of forgiveness. It's something which is lasting, absolute, evident. (Ibid. 149)

30 Ibid. 205.

31 Ibid. 79.

32 In Filoramo xvi.

33 In Gnosticism, says a modern scholar, this “cosmos of ours is a pale, eroded, if not deformed (and upside down) image of the true world” (Filoramo 57).

34 Jonas 43.

35 Joseph Kickasola employs the term “threshold” when talking of Kieślowski's approach: “Kieślowski charts the liminal spaces, demarcating the apparent thresholds of metaphysical and physical, transcendent and immanent, eternal and temporal” (x).

36 In Jonas 63.

37 Ibid. xxxi.

38 Lacarriere 19.

39 In Filoramo 164.

40 Central to Kickasola's interpretation is that the film is about a “spiritual search” and an instinctive quest for a higher reality. “The film is about longing – deep, internal longing – and the attempt to follow one's intuition, which is part of the reason it is so difficult to write about” (244–46).

41 This is how Kieślowski describes his first contact with the puppeteer-actor who played Fabbri: “He animated those dolls and immediately, within the space of a second, a whole new world appeared” (Stok 180–81).

42 Smith and Wave 587.

43 It was “hominoid in appearance,” says Lacarriere commenting on Saturninus, but “incapable of standing upright on his atrophied legs” (31–32).

44 Robinson 138.

45 Lacarriere 10.

46 In McLellan 93.