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
11 - Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili's The Wild Field (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
Through sacralisation of space, Fedorchenko's Silent Souls produces an effect of ruptured continuity. The self-congruence of such a space is determined by the subject that regulates history as a conception of the end. The subject of Silent Souls is the subject that stops history by shifting its attention to the epilogue as the only space-world where the subject is not haunted by the end. The car's abrupt swerve, resulting in the death of the narrator and a separation of the self from the self, leaves the viewer with an eternal torment appearing in intemporality. In this chapter, I wish to explore how the subject deals with separation as an altering difference whereby death is a synthesis insofar as it helps the subject to bridge the void through repetition, awakening and restitution, and whereby living and dying appears as a double gesture of alterity. As ‘thinkers of an age of rupture’ (Boothroyd 2013: 13), Jean-Luc Nancy and Badiou believe that thinking is a form of withdrawal. Such a withdrawal is a traversal of identity which challenges the phenomenon of the other as resemblance or imitation. Subjectivity appears as a result of the negation of identity (totality) whereby absolute univocity is replaced with equivocity (recollection as anti-totality). Conceptualising the subject as the gap in the now – the gap as the presence in the present – Nancy and Badiou permanently dislocate the subject so that such a dislocation becomes a space-world per se. In his theory of subjectivity, Nancy speaks of ‘abandoned being’: ‘From now on the ontology that summons us will be an ontology in which abandonment remains the sole predicament of being, in which it even remains – in the scholastic sense of the word – the transcendental’ (1993: 36). For Nancy ‘abandoned being’ is a solution to the problem of Western discourse with its obsession with representation defined in such terms as authenticity, appropriation, fulfilment, destination, realism and so on: ‘“the West” is precisely what designates itself as limit, as demarcation, even when it ceaselessly pushes back the frontiers of its imperium’ (Nancy 1993: 1). This is because the West produces its own subjectivity conceived as the pure object of knowledge, and also because the West can only represent itself and for itself, and can speak only of the outside in terms of itself.
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- Information
- Contemporary Russian CinemaSymbols of a New Era, pp. 217 - 235Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016