Lars von Trier and the Fear of Philosophy

‘Let us recognise the subject’s efficacy in the gnomon he erects, a gnomon that constantly indicates truth’s site to him.’ Lacan, Ecrits.

Lars von Trier and the Fear of Philosophy - Lecture by Scott Wilson

Date:	23 May 2013, 6:00pm to 23 May 2013, 8:00pm
Location:	Lecture Theatre E002, Granary Building, Central Saint Martins, London
	N1C 4AA1
Fee:	Free

This is a paper about the creativity of fear in film and philosophy, focussing on Lars von Trier and Gilles Deleuze. The former is a film maker who has a long history of psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment for phobic anxiety which he has used both critically and creatively as material for his films. The latter, we discover from his biographer Francoise Dosse, had a phobia for both milk products and schizophrenics. In this paper, the understanding of phobia developed in the cinema of von Trier will be deployed in order to disclose the link between a fear of milk and the figure of the schizophrenic and offer a different way of understanding the dynamic genesis of Deleuze’s philosophy, particularly his logic of sense. Neither exactly a structure nor a symptom, phobia is a problematic category in psychoanalysis. Here, psychoanalytic, schizoanalytic and neuroscientific accounts of phobia are discussed by way of elaborating a ‘gnomonology’ that articulates a critical and clinical understanding of cultural production, particularly in its engagements with scientific discourse.

http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/crmep/events/

From a Dead Place ...

 

The words are barely discernible, thin, fragile shapes formed out of the hoarse yet bellicose raging of a desiccated, cadaverous throat, leprous, shredded; its death-rattled breath conveyed by the thundering vibrations of drums breathlessly pummelled without pause. There is no rock ‘n’ roll backbeat here, just a furious cacophony.  Voice smashed and sliced open by explosions of percussion challenging the darkness, buzzing guitar chords rising and falling up the scale, lurching, striving like a swarm of ravenous insects dipping and swerving in the frozen, airless void, defying gravity, seeking the taste of death ...

From Scott Wilson (ed) Melancology: Black Metal and Ecology, Zero Books, forthcoming in 2013.

Melancholia, Messianic Banquets and the 19th Hole

‘It is in the Eschaton that history surpasses its limitations and is seen for what it is’

Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology

‘The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it; nobody will miss it. Life on earth is evil’.

Justine, Lars von Trier, Melancholia.

From the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast to the vision of Ezekiel and the messianic banquets in Isaiah, Luke, even the Last Supper itself, where ever there’s an apocalypse or revelation of the end, there is always it seems an eschatological banquet. Ritual feasts and banquets mark points of personal or interpersonal transition, social change, the movement from stranger to guest, enemy to partner, weaning, weddings, funerals and so on. As such they are like the Eschaton which while enabling the possibility of time and history, is not itself, as Jacob Taubes argues, subject to history since it is its eternal end, condition and point of transformation.

Appropriately dominated by a register of orality and consumption, its mise-en-scene a luxury hotel and golf resort, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is organized around a series of eschatological banquets: a wedding breakfast, an end-of-the-world or death breakfast and the special meal of a meatloaf that tastes of ashes. Along this locus of eating and disgust, the paper will discuss eschatology in relation to Melancholia as an essential fantasy which (again following Taubes) can be seen as both a screen and condition for ideas of freedom, revolution and even self-consciousness. Von Trier’s film depicts what Freud calls in his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ a ‘mental constellation of revolt’ in the context of the voracious orality of a consumer culture whose acme and unsurpassable limit is represented in the film by the luxury golf course and the 19^th hole. The prominence of the latter, clearly signalled at the beginning and end of the film, indicates that the film’s register is phantasmatic and symbolic rather than realist, golf now become the pinnacle of (post)human culture, a pointless yet snobbish pursuit that nevertheless seems to sustain desire and negativity at the End of History, in the manner of Alexandre Kojève’s admiration for the Japanese. The film also juxtaposes scientific and religious versions of and responses to the imminent catastrophe of the earth’s demise and these will be discussed in relation to two quite recent eschatologies – the Messianism of Quentin Meillassoux whose ‘hyper chaos’ promises the coming of a God hitherto alien to this world, and the nihilism of Ray Brassier which regards the inevitability of extinction as an essential condition for a thinking of scientific realism without illusion, that is outside of the human-world correlation. 

In contradistinction to the religious and scientific thinking above, however, and in the context of Melancholia’s delineation of an essentially oral ontology, this paper will discuss the locus of the mouth as a site of multiplicity and a power of transformation in the base materialism of the depths that are both interior and exterior to time and history.

Culture, Politics, Eschatology: A Symposium

Department of English & Creative Writing, Department of History, Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion,Department of Sociology, the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts and the Journal for Cultural Research.

The symposium’s theme is the continuing cultural and political relevance of eschatology. In recent years, diverse contemporary commentators have attended to eschatology. The symposium takes its cue from the work of three in particular, Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. Originally published in 1947, Taubes’ Occidental Eschatology (2009) is a classic study of the legacy of Judaeo-Christian eschatological theology for radical politics in modernity. His The Political Theology of Paul (2004), published posthumously from lecture notes, remains a highly influential recuperation of the radical implications of Paul’s theology. Agamben’s The Time that Remains (2005) continues Taubes’ project with a stunning reading of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in relation to the messianic thinking of Walter Benjamin. His more recent The Kingdom and the Glory (2011), a genealogical study of the contemporary polity and its operation on an economic model, contests Foucault’s own, influential analysis of the same polity and its mode of operation by recovering their theological foundations. Foucault, for his part, maintained that ‘the new historicity of raison d’etat excluded the empire of the last days; it excluded the kingdom of eschatology. Against this theme, which was formulated at the end of the sixteenth century and is still with us today, counter-conducts develop that make it a principle to assert the coming of a time when time will end ... an eschatology in which civil society will prevail over the state’.

Storey Institute, 21-22 September 2012, Lancaster UK

Confirmed Speakers:

Gil Anidjar, Columbia University
Agata Bielik-Robson, University of Nottingham
Ward Blanton, University of Glasgow
Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island
Ziad Elmarsafy, University of York
Yvonne Sherwood, University of Glasgow
Scott Wilson, Kingston University

Confirmed respondents:
Arthur Bradley, Bulent Diken, Michael Dillon, Charlie Gere, Paolo Palladino, Thomas Rohkrämer and Yoke-Sum Wong.

 

Melancholia and the cinema of depths

Now, the history of depths begins with what is most terrifying: it begins with the theatre of terror whose unforgettable picture Melanie Klein painted.

Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense

There’s a resemblance between the two planets and Justine’s tits. Can you see that? ... when they were kind of getting very close. That’s a very important point.

Lars von Trier, Criterion Forum.

As its soundtrack suggests, Melancholia is a romance, but a romance between two sisters and two planets, apparently ‘good’ ones and ‘bad’ ones, set in a Kleinian cinema of terror. Appropriately dominated by a register of orality and consumption, its mise-en-scene a luxury hotel and golf resort, the film is organized around various scenes of eating: a wedding breakfast, an end-of-the-world or death breakfast and the special meal of a meatloaf that tastes of ashes. This paper will argue that the film depicts what Freud calls in his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ a ‘mental constellation of revolt’ in the context of the voracious orality of a consumer culture whose acme and unsurpassable limit is represented in the film by the luxury golf course and the 19^th hole. The prominence of the latter, clearly signalled at the beginning and end of the film, indicates that the film’s register is largely (or simultaneously) phantasmatic rather than realist. Here I will suggest that deliberately or not, the film’s narrative tells a very Kleinian story of psychic development from the earliest sadistic/oral, paranoid-schizoid phase of the infant’s relation with the mother’s breast through the ‘depressive position’ that enables the process of ‘identification’ (in Justine’s case with the planet) necessary for the passage to ‘symbolization’. The latter figured, no doubt, by Justine again in the erection of the ‘magic cave’ that provides the space for the ironic ‘happy ending’ of the sisters’ reconciliation and successful fulfilment of maternal responsibility. But beyond this simple allegory, my paper will consider whether Melancholia, through its technical means, seeks to produce a ‘kleinmatic’ cinema of depths.

Ashes to Ashes: The Ethics, Depths, and Image of Melancholia

Panel Proposal for the 2012 Film-Philosophy conference with Felicity Colman and Richard Rushton

MOUTH (coming soon)

The broached year
with its mouldering crusts
of delusion bread [Wahnbrot].

Drink from my mouth.

Paul Celan


Celan’s unnamed poem that begins ‘The broached year’ might be approached as a condensed iteration of his famous holocaust poem Todesfuge or Deathfugue where the command given is to drink the blackmilk of daybreak. The figure of the mouth appears in Celan as the last site of pleasure, and indeed of ethics, in a post-apocalyptic world. If the broached year only offers delusion bread or literally ‘crazy bread’, then drink from another’s mouth. Thus Celan inverts Adorno’s infamous dictum, no poetry after Auschwitz. From now on, there is only poetry, only the figure of the mouth. Edia Connole and Scott Wilson in MOUTH follow this ethical demand, drink from my mouth, as the only possibility of love. We are sure you will love what they offer to you if you manage to open your mouth and hear them…

Simon Critchley & Jamieson Webster

A Taste of Faith 2 (The Hazlenut and the olive)

Rationale for March 29 Food event following the book launch and talk by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster.




The recipes were devised in the spirit of a critique of Simon’s book on the basis of the psychoanalytic method that informs Jamieson’s writing and practice.


‘The infinite ethical demand allows us to become the subjects of which we are capable by dividing us from ourselves, by forcing us to live in accordance with an asymmetrical and unfulfillable demand—say the demand to be Christlike—while knowing that we are all too human’.
Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless.

‘The superego is an imperative ... [it] has a relation to the law, and it is at the same time a senseless law, going so far as to become a failure to recognise [meconnaissance] the law. ... The superego is at one and the same time the law and its destruction’.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar II: 102

‘The superego is your amigo’, Simon Critchley, On Humour.

In Faith of the Faithless (Verso, 2012), Simon Critchley shows once again that his philosophy is based on an ethics of the superego, the faculty of a divided self that, in its infinite, unfillable demand, is nevertheless our ‘amigo’. In his latest book, he continues to explore the superegoic paradoxes inherent to faith, truth and law. The book opens with ‘a parable of sorts’ concerning Oscar Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol in 1897 and his delivery of the manuscript of De Profundis to Robert Ross in France where he would spend that last two and a half years of his life, ill and destitute, dying in 1900. While he was not given a capital sentence for his acts of ‘gross indecency’, the two years hard labour in Reading Gaol ultimately amounted to a death sentence. Critchley is interested in ‘the religious dimension’ of Wilde’s text, ‘particularly Wilde’s interpretation of the figure of Christ’ and how suffering can become the ‘occasion for a fresh mode of self- realization’ that is analogous to redemption. The title for Critchley’s book comes from the following quotation from Wilde’s De Profundis.

When I think of religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith.

The theme of the last supper of bread and wine conjoins both the Eucharist – a taste of the afterlife in the consumption of God – and the last taste of the earth for the condemned man or woman. For the condemned the last meal is an entirely sensual affair, all nourishment at that point being strictly redundant. As such it is symbolic of the capital crime for which the prisoner has been condemned. In contrast to the Christian sacrifice of life for the everlasting life-in-death of Heaven, the criminal’s commitment to life on earth is affirmed in a spirit of transgression, in the ecstasy of crime, or at least in the determination to pursue material interests, the satisfaction of the drives, or consumption generally which, through risking the death penalty, is raised to the level of a categorical imperative. This imperative, the law of the lawless, is, we suggest, the continuous underside of the faith of the faithless.

In his book On Humour, Critchley revisits the scene of capital and state crime to give his readers an example of Freudian gallows humour that affirms, he argues, the importance of superego.

Freud speaks of a criminal who, on the morning of his execution, is being led out to the gallows to be hanged, and who remarks, looking up at the sky, “Na, die Woche fängt gut an”, “Well, the week’s beginning nicely”.

The humour here, Critchley remarks, is generated by the superego that turns ‘the desperate situation into a joke’, making light of it in order apparently to make it bearable, even enjoyable. In its function as an executive faculty of the divided self that enjoys itself mocking the self-importance of the ego whose personal suffering and tragedy is about to unfold, Critchley says, ‘the superego is your amigo’ (95, 103). It seems to us that the structure of Freud’s gallows humour is not dissimilar to that which shapes the symbolic power of the last meal: the affirmation of life in the taste of food (or in laughter) that is precisely enhanced by the proximity of death, one’s own death that is also that of the Other (the victim of the crime of passion and the crime of state execution that becomes identical to the whole world that is extinguished in the life that is taken). The evening’s culinary delights are thus dedicated to this world that is both sacrificed and affirmed, the world that is symbolized and embodied in the hazelnut that for Julian of Norwich contained the entirety of God’s creation and in the single olive that the anonymous prisoner of one of James Reynold’s death row pictures selected for his or her last meal.

The superego has been called a ‘gourmandise’ because ‘the more you feed it ... the more it wants’, which is why we offer the gourmandising, infinitely demanding philosopher of superego a celebratory feast that we hope is faithful to the spirit of a community of the faithless. The food for the evening is intended to evoke the continuity (as if on a Moebuis strip) between faith and faithlessness, law and crime in recipes inspired by Jesus Christ, Julian of Norwich, Angela di Folignio, Saint Agata of Sicily and prisoners on death row.

Edia Connole & Scott Wilson