Loving/Thinking and the (French) New Wave: Cinema asis Philosophy

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a resurgent interest in the philosophical dimension of cultural products—cinema, in particular. Rather than analyzing the production, dissemination and reception of particular films through literary, cultural, sociological or psychological theories, one considers film as “doing the work” of theory/philosophy. This essay argues that cinema's possibility of being/becoming philosophy will emerge only if one remains open to the inconsistencies of the cinematic text, rather than seek to posit a mythical point of origin that reduces representation to its effective functionality, thereby announcing the death of thinking. Following the ways in which Adorno and Horkheimer indicate the deep ontological significance of the myth of origin involved in the logic of Enlightenment, this essay attempts to offer responsibility, vigilance and hesitation as alternative ways of engaging with thought. Cinema, this essay finally claims, can offer a model with which thinking, as philosophy proper, can be recovered from its mythical origin.

Notes

Notes

1. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” in The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, ed. Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham (New York: Mcmillan, 1968), 19.

2. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), 120–29.

3. Not only a cinephile but also one who is involved in making cinema.

4. Michel Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 13.

5. Jacques Derrida, “Is There a Philosophical Language?” in Points… Interviews (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 219.

6. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 55.

7. My understanding of a priori is more closely aligned with Derrida's differential treatment of the question of origin, or the “condition of possibility” of definition as such, than with Kant's definition. Whereas Kant's conception of a priori—whether synthetic or pure—marks it as a point of origin that is in the object of knowledge, Derrida considers a priori as a deferred origin that cannot be fully presented as the cause of the object of knowledge.

8. Adorno and Horkheimer's engagement with the way in which the “culture industry” conceals the dictatorial function of ideology informs my critique of the existing scholarship on the history of the French New Wave. Even though the “culture industry” attempts to present itself as non-ideological, it is “in deadly earnest” in its imposition of limits as the condition of the appearance of that which is thus circumscribed, as exemplified in the joke from Hitler's Germany that Adorno and Horkheimer recall: “No one must go hungry or thirsty; if anyone does, he's for the concentration camp!” (149). This paradoxical statement captures the nature of the “culture industry” for Adorno in “Transparencies on Film,” where he points out that the “culture industry” “excludes everything but the predigested and the already integrated, just as the cosmetic trade eliminates facial wrinkles” (199). Derrida's analysis of the laws of genre properly highlights the paradoxical relationality of the margin and the marginalized that is latent in Adorno's examples. Evidently, if one breaks the law by going hungry or thirsty—i.e. if one assumes marginalization as an act of protest—such deviation is generically circumscribed within law as an “already integrated” instance of exception, with its “proper” place in the concentration camp. The instance of deviation—the criminal tentativeness within the laws of genre—is necessary for the body of the law to constitute itself. Similarly, “facial wrinkles” are fundamentally necessary for the “cosmetic trade” as that which the trade exists to exclude/eliminate.

9. Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” 17–18.

10. Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” 18.

11. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” New Literary History 6.1 (1974): 23.

12. Derrida, “White Mythology,” 32.

13. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” New Literary History 10.1 (1978): 142.

14. Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” 145.

15. Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” 20–21.

16. Ibid.

17. Theodor Adorno and Thomas Y. Levin, “Transparencies on Film,” New German Critique 24/25 (1981–82): 201.

18. Ibid.

19. Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” 20.

20. Martin Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” in On The Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 58.

21. Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” 59.

22. Ibid.

23. Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” 60–61.

24. Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” 62.

25. Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” 64–65.