Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Abstracted Subjectivity and Knowledge-Worlds: Aleksandr Sokurov's Taurus (2001)
- 2 The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin's The Miracle (2009)
- 3 Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov's Morphine (2008)
- 4 Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev's Elena (2010)
- 5 Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki's A Tale About Darkness (2009)
- 6 The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov's St George's Day (2008)
- 7 A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova's Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)
- 8 Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor' Voloshin's Nirvana (2008)
- 9 The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii's Alive (2006)
- 10 Intentionality and Modelled Subjectivities: Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls (2010)
- 11 Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili's The Wild Field (2008)
- 12 Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel'dovich's The Target (2010)
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor' Voloshin's Nirvana (2008)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Abstracted Subjectivity and Knowledge-Worlds: Aleksandr Sokurov's Taurus (2001)
- 2 The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin's The Miracle (2009)
- 3 Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov's Morphine (2008)
- 4 Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev's Elena (2010)
- 5 Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki's A Tale About Darkness (2009)
- 6 The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov's St George's Day (2008)
- 7 A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova's Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)
- 8 Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor' Voloshin's Nirvana (2008)
- 9 The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii's Alive (2006)
- 10 Intentionality and Modelled Subjectivities: Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls (2010)
- 11 Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili's The Wild Field (2008)
- 12 Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel'dovich's The Target (2010)
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the previous chapter, I investigated the idea of doubling performance and zigzagged gesture as one that defines the ontology of posthumous subjectivity. In this chapter, I focus on the relation of posthumous subjectivity to an embodied experience through the connotations of ‘zigzagged’ dance as an affective state overwhelming the subject on its journey towards the intemporality. The trajectory connects to Badiou's conceptualisation of subjectivity as an event, occurrence and situation, and I move towards such an understanding of subjectivity in film by revisiting the idea of the ‘body without organs’. It designates a state after or before existence, a stage in the finite–infinite relationship in the process of becoming without ever attaining that goal. Deleuze and Guattari use the idea to describe what they call the ‘plane of consistency of desire’. It is the field of immanence of desire, as opposed to its surfaces and stratifications, where a subject is born. The body without organs is a site of non-coded flows, like the full body of the earth, where the fusion of internal and external occurs. For Deleuze and Guattari, the body without organs is ‘not a notion or concept but a practice or set of practices’ (1988: 149–50). It becomes apparent through dismantling practices that include the hypochondriac body, the paranoid body, the schizophrenic body, the drugged body and the masochist body. They encourage us to see the body without organs as the body outside any determinate state, open to actualisation in the symbolic mode. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I aim to explore the possibility of conceiving the subject cinematically as a mode, as a system of gestures and affects: ‘waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 153). In my view, the body without organs is first and foremost a performing body, a body that performs itself by means of itself, whereby the boundaries between internal and external structures are blurred and the body becomes a continuous act of inscribing meaning. An analogy can be found in the thought of the Japanese Mahayana Buddhists who realised the non-substantiality of their own person, the fact that the ego-self is a construct. They taught how to ‘see’ the non-substantiality, or non-knowledge, that pervades all being.
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- Contemporary Russian CinemaSymbols of a New Era, pp. 163 - 180Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016