LIKE A STALKER TO THE ZONE

Abstract

Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker is often understood as both a cinematic masterpiece and an impenetrable mystery. The source text, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel, Roadside Picnic, provides clues to interpretation as well as insights into the evolution of motifs from book to screenplay. By subjecting the texts to a critical reading inspired by Alain Badiou’s philosophy of the event – itself considered enigmatic – this article elucidates novel, film, and philosophy, connecting such shared themes as desire, fidelity, militancy, and truth.

Keywords:

• Tarkovsky
• Stalker
• Badiou
• event
• subject
• Strugatsky
• Roadside Picnic

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A Frenchman extolling the virtues of universalism may give us pause, if only because it recalls the “mission civilisatrice.” Indeed, Badiou has been criticized for refusing to accept cultural difference as a site of political transformation. His hostility toward “capitalo-parliamentarianism” is well established. In the interview appended to the Ethics, Peter Hallward asks Badiou directly how he will take account of the fact that where persons are oppressed, they are oppressed “as women, as black,” and so on. In response, Badiou asks what is meant by “woman” or “black.” We know, for instance, what is meant by “French” when it is used by Le Pen. Any meaning ascribed to a particularity must be, he insists, “intelligible to all.” If it is not, then it cannot properly be called political. Rather he writes,

I would call “political” something that – in the categories, the slogans, the statements it puts forward – is less the demand of a social fraction or community to be integrated into the existing order than something which touches on a transformation of that order as a whole. (Badiou, Ethics 109)

An identarian politics may lead to something more transformative, but on its own, it is a form of “syndicalism,” a “demand that one’s particularity be valued in the existing state of things” (109). Whereas this is important, Badiou explains, it is not within the realm of a radical overhaul of the system itself.

2 Commonly Žižek maintains a distinction between desire and drive. The shift from desire to drive is the movement from “goal-oriented activity into an end-in-itself” – for instance, the gap between a desire such as hunger in relation to the oral drive. The goal may be to “eliminate hunger, but its aim is the satisfaction provided by the activity of eating itself (sucking, swallowing).” He gives the example of an invalid infused with nutrients through a hospital feeding tube who nonetheless misses the experience of eating, so that despite being “full,” the oral drive remains unassuaged. The reverse is also true: when “a small child sucks rhythmically on the comforter, the only satisfaction he gets is one of the drive” (Žižek, Living in the End Times 73). It is this loss (of oral enjoyment in the first case and nutritional benefit in the second) that becomes the locus of a fixation. It is in this constant non-identity – nourishment without orality, oral succor without sustenance – that the drive becomes “stuck,” out of sync with itself. This gap “‘eternalizes’ the drive, turning it into the endlessly repetitive circular movement […]” (73). In the case of the child Schuhart, the buttons deliver some aspects of candy: the sensation of sucking, the proximity of the mother, if only through her garment, but the dopamine rush of sugar is always lacking.

3 Jodi Dean writes,

Desire and drive designate relations to jouissance, ways that the subject structures her enjoyment. Desire is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance or enjoyment that can never be attained. In contrast, drive attains jouissance in the repetitive process of not reaching it. Enjoyment comes from the process itself, not from fulfilling an ultimate goal. (3)

The problem with Dean’s account is that she presumes a subject that preexists the snares of desire/drive, one who risks becoming “captured” by drive.

4 Lacan attributes the circular movement of desire to the death drive, or simply “drive.” Even though, as Žižek notes, Badiou derives much from Lacan, there is a significant parting of ways here. For Lacan, there is no way to “escape” drive or desire. Though he does theorize a “beyond the Law,” this can only be a negational turn, a certain “clearing of the ground” (a Void) for what will, in effect, be filled by a different Master-Signifier. Žižek criticizes Badiou, therefore, because the latter conceptualizes the Truth-Event in terms of a “New Beginning.” Though Žižek invokes “subjective destitution” to describe Schuhart’s response at the Golden Sphere – as might Lacan – he departs from Badiou in that he would not characterize this seizure by a Truth-Event in terms of this “New Beginning.”

5 Badiou is drawing less on Lacanian drive than alluding to Foucault on the “repressive hypothesis.” In his History of Sexuality, it is the mechanisms of repression which cause not so much censorship and proscription as explosive proliferation:

But more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail. (Foucault 18)

6 Another difference between Badiou and Lacan asserts itself here in regard to the matter of the subject, as Žižek explains:

Badiou’s main point is that the subject should not be identified with the constitutive Void of the structure, since such an identification already ontologizes the subject, though in a purely negative way, turning the subject into an entity that is consubstantial with the structure and thus belongs to the order of the necessary and a priori (“no structure without a subject”). To this Lacanian ontologization of the subject, Badiou opposes its “rarity” – the local-contingent-fragile-transient emergence of subjectivity […] Lacan, however, introduces a distinction between the subject and the gesture of subjectivization (or what Badiou describes as the process of subjectivization, in which the subject’s engagement with and fidelity to the Event occurs, versus subject as the negative gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being that opens up the possibility of subjectivization). The subject prior to subjectivization is the pure negativity of death drive prior to its reversal into identification with some new Master-Signifier. (“Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism” 253)

7 This is important for Badiou, because there are various venues through which to reach the truth. Both art (Writer) and science (Professor) can be such venues, along with politics (Stalker) and love (Guta, Stalker’s wife). Of the four categories of truth-process, each is represented in Tarkovsky’s film.

8 Qtd in Badiou, Saint Paul 71.