Philosophy and the Patience

of Film in Cavell and Nancy



Daniele Rugo
Daniele Rugo
Dept. of Social Sciences, Media & Communications
Brunel University
London
United Kingdom

ISBN 978-1-137-58059-7 ISBN 978-1-137-58060-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58060-3

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 To Abi

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 CONTENTS

1 Taking Things to Heart 1

Terms and Conditions 6
Patient Distractions 9

2 Cavell and the Conditions of the World 13

Views 13
The Skeptic’s World 18
Eyes Happily Shut 29
How Different Different Things Are 34
A Life More Ordinary 39
A Kind of Seduction 56
Every Word in the Language 67

3 Nancy and the World Without Sense 73

A Passion of Sense 73
The Invention of Distance 83
Folding and Unfolding 89
Faith in the World 95
Unreasonable Reason 101
Privation and Privilege 104
Excessive Curiosity 109
The Stone’s Affinity with Thought 115

ix

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x CONTENTS

4 The World Realized 119

Worldly Affinities 119
The World and the Viewfinder 121
Retouching the World with the World 128
Conditions of a Life 134
Estrangement and Realization 136
Moments of Innocence 143
A Scene of Instruction 146

5 The Patience of Film 161

The Image: Running Away from Us 161
Given Reasons, Giving Thanks 166
Powers of Patience 171

Bibliography 187

Index 193

daniele.rugo@brunel.ac.uk
 INTRODUCTION

This work develops the idea that Cavell and Nancy’s thoughts turn around
a central issue: the problem of the world. This book traces a movement
that opens with the entrance of film1 into Cavell and Nancy’s philosophy
and leads to film’s transformation of philosophical authority into a power
of patience capable of turning our negation of the world into a relation
with it. This relation can be said to demand a relinquishment of philo-
sophical mastery. It is precisely this giving up of authority in view of the
world that brings Cavell and Nancy to the study of film. Unfolding the
specificity of their engagement with film the analysis aims to disclose the
idea that film does not represent the world, but ‘realizes’ it. This realiza-
tion provides a scene of instruction for philosophy.
While film is then approached from within a particular philosophical
position its pressure produces a loosening of philosophical categories. As
a consequence, film influences and interrupts the development of a con-
ceptual gesture instead of merely illustrating its outline. The filmmakers
and films that appear in this work are not made to fit into a canon. They
compose a series whose articulation is sometimes suggested by the phi-
losopher in question (Chaplin, Keaton, Cukor, Capra, Ophüls, Antonioni,
Polanski, Makavejev, Kiarostami and Denis) and sometimes dictated by a
particular insistence encountered in a film or in moments within a film

1
The two terms—‘film’ and ‘cinema’—are taken as interchangeable here, but ‘film’ will
recur more often because of the preference accorded to it in the two main texts under analy-
sis. Cavell’s The World Viewed. Reflections on the Ontology of Film and Nancy’s The Evidence
of Film.

xv

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xvi INTRODUCTION

(Godard, Teshigahara, Allen, Rafelson, Farhadi and Ceylan). It is a matter

of investigating how film and philosophy reopen for each other the sense
of the world and our relation with it, establishing possible turning points,
pressures exercised by one on the other.
The division of chapters responds to the demand of the overall argu-
ment to keep testing these directions, from philosophy to film and from
film into philosophy in order to ultimately show a possibility for think-
ing as patience. The idea is that by proceeding in this way the mutual
resistances between the two will engender the kind of friction that can
ultimately provide a turning point.
Chapter 1 introduces the argument with a discussion of philosophy’s
attempts to ‘get to the heart of things’. The analysis aims to develop the
question—implicitly and explicitly articulated by Cavell and Nancy—‘What
can philosophy do?’ For both philosophers the answer can be identified in
a turn toward the concept of the world as that which rebukes thinking’s
inherent violence. Retracing paths opened by Heidegger and Wittgenstein,
Cavell and Nancy understand the world as that which escapes representa-
tion and remains in excess of knowledge, therefore producing a releasing
of philosophical authority. From this both thinkers invoke for philosophy
an ambition for patience: philosophy finds its own gesture by affirming
what draws it to work, what attracts it and sets it in motion. This aban-
donment of philosophy to an impulse that is not its own is the conceptual
moment at which Cavell and Nancy turn to film, as if the friction between
the two could produce a turn for thinking. The chapter defines the book’s
methodology not as the attempt to bring together two disciplines or two
philosophers from different ‘schools’, but as the possibility to measure the
distance between them and of each from the point that can elicit a renewal
of thinking. This encounter then should produce not an acrobatic conver-
gence, but a collision, a challenge and a release.
Chapter 2 is devoted to Cavell’s argument that an acceptance of the
world’s conditions, of our separateness from it, is key for philosophy’s
work. Cavell’s contention that the problem of philosophy is to accept
rather than deny ‘the truth of skepticism’ is discussed in detail through the
argument’s dialogue with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but
also through his engagement with Romantic poetry, Emerson, Thoreau
and Heidegger. The intertwining of the problem of the world with that of
knowledge-as-certainty is meant to expose the centrality of the notion of
‘acknowledgment’ for an understanding of the world. This analysis antici-
pates the possibilities of film to show us how different different things are.

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 INTRODUCTION xvii

Chapter 3 develops an exhaustive analysis of Nancy’s enquiry into the

sense of the world. Following Nancy’s insight that Christianity originates
in a conceptual turning point that precedes its historical manifestation,
the chapter unravels the proposed connection between monotheism and
atheism as reason’s transformation of its own excess into the positing of
a substance or organizing principle. The emphasis on thinking’s quest for
a principle beyond the world and Nancy’s demand that we abandon our-
selves to the world’s sense is further clarified through his engagement with
Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Gérard Granel. The world without given
sense and divine guarantor leads to the idea of the surpassing of knowl-
edge as decisive for man’s relation to the world. This relation is activated
in this context by reason opening to its own excess and opening itself up
to creation, adoration and, most recently, struction (2014: 44). The chap-
ter anticipates the idea that Nancy’s work on film is motivated by a reflec-
tion on the absence of the world as an object of representation. Film thus
becomes a conduct and regard for the world. The task for film becomes
caring for the world and this care takes place precisely when something
resists ‘vision’.
Chapter 4 shifts the focus to the question ‘how does film reorganize
philosophy?’ and attempts to find suitable paths for an answer by emphasiz-
ing how what is different between Cavell and Nancy, between philosophy
and film, belongs together. Borrowing an expression from Heidegger’s
Identity and Difference here ‘belonging has precedence over “together”’
(2002: 38). Through an attentive reading of Cavell’s The World Viewed
and Nancy’s The Evidence of Film the argument unravels the two philoso-
phers’ confrontation with the world of film. Two gestures can be said to
intertwine in the philosophers’ thinking of film: to recapture our relation
to the world as one that is based not on knowing as certainty but on
the reception of the singular; and to recapture thinking as that which is
attracted and called for by the insurgence of the singular, by the seam(s) in
experience. Nancy and Cavell then reverse the idea of cinema as complet-
ing the regime of representation stressing how cinema realizes the world,
producing a step away from thinking as representation in view of what the
book names thinking as patience.
In Chapter 5 the argument presents the interval between the world
and film’s realization of it as crucial for the emergence of the concepts
of acknowledgment and adoration. By way of this insistence, the chapter
assesses the ambition of the two concepts as Cavell and Nancy’s endeavors
to expose philosophy’s pursuit of foundations to the pressure of the singular.

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xviii INTRODUCTION

The chapter suggests how our longing for the unconditioned can turn
from the wish to be freed of every conditioning into the patience to bear
the condition of the world and the ‘presentation’ of its sense. The argu-
ment stresses how the reluctance to accepting film (the passivity it is said
to impose) as having an intrinsic force of philosophical instruction res-
onates with a specific aversion internal to the work of philosophy. For
Cavell and Nancy embracing film also shows philosophy its own repres-
sions, illuminating within philosophy the denial of reception, a tendency
to violence and resentfulness. It is abandonment to our romance with the
world, abandonment to the response it claims from us, its contestation of
our attention that gets us on the way to thinking. In its concluding section
the chapter names this new demand and ambition of thinking a ‘power of
patience’.

RESISTANCES
What hinders the encounter between film and philosophy then is a sys-
tem of parallel resistances, between the two and within them. One way
to put this would be to say that film neither provides nor helps the con-
struction of formal arguments and is therefore excluded from philosophy,
understood as responding to the claims of reason. Another way of putting
the matter is to say that philosophy’s claim to speak out of necessity and
universality excludes any internal relation to film. Philosophy will always
structure its discourse on the abstract and general, while film addresses
the concrete and particular. Resistances coming from film tend to stress
how a philosophical approach bypasses medium-specific questions. This
criticism would imply that film cannot be read philosophically because
this means reducing film to philosophy, stripping film of what is truly
cinematic (devices and modes of expression, production processes and
systems of distribution). This second option seems to restrict not only
philosophy, but film itself. It also seems to delimit what counts as the
cinematic, confining cinema to a set of established conventions and their
application. The result is that this criticism commits itself precisely to
the same generalized and abstract reading it accuses philosophy of. As
Cavell points out, a view as to what constitutes the cinematic must be
validated against specific instances, specific manifestations of conventions
and their subversions in singular cases. It is impossible to decipher what
exactly the cinematic is apart from its occurrence in specific films. These
may appropriate modes that are until then not recognized as part of the

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 INTRODUCTION xix

established canon of cinematic conventions. If the criticism is brought to

the possibility of identifying the specificity of the medium, then philoso-
phy is no blinder than any other discipline (including filmmaking itself).
In order to identify what is specifically cinematic it would not be enough
to reconstruct the technological genealogy of the medium or prophesize
its future development. Specifying the sufficient and necessary features
of the medium requires critical commitment to matters that are likely to
precede and exceed the medium’s invention and are equally likely to lead
the analysis to a territory that cannot be merely cinematic, whatever the
rubric contains.
There is then a second resistance this book inevitably encounters. The
nature of this resistance is geographical or better geophilosophical. Cavell
says that both The Senses of Walden and The World Viewed have been con-
ceived as if Continental and Analytic philosophy had never drifted apart
(CR: xvii). It is a defining gesture of Cavell’s philosophy to attempt to heal
the mutual shunning. Nancy in speaking of Cavell’s work uses the image
of an ocean becoming smaller, almost a pond. Some elements that join the
two sides of the ocean are emphasized as a possibility to define differences
and offer opportunities that do not dismiss but work through these differ-
ences. Cavell’s constant engagement with Emerson and Thoreau and their
being read alongside not only Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein,
but also Kierkegaard, Blanchot and Levinas operate under a similar aegis.
A common inheritance (Descartes and Kant) and a prophetic anticipa-
tion (Emerson’s clutching of lubricious objects as an anticipation of
Heidegger’s hand) bring the different developments together, allowing a
dialogue, which also means the possibility to establish a distance. The lack
of arguments in Thoreau, evoked by Cavell (IQO: 14), and the register of
Emerson’s writing explicitly accept the idea of philosophy as a set of texts
to be read, rather than as a set of problems to be solved. However, Cavell
reminds us that this choice of what philosophy can do at once associates
and dissociates ‘Emerson and Thoreau from the Continental tradition’
(IQO: 15). What Cavell is saying could be reformulated as follows: there
are many routes to philosophy; no route however is able to guarantee us
access to philosophy ‘itself’. The idea that terms of criticism are defining
each attempt at philosophy implies that philosophy must, so to speak,
be invented, each time anew, so as to invest in its own re-invention. In
a sense one is always speaking and writing toward philosophy and never
from a previously assigned place (something like a philosophical podium).
Authority has to be earned, but it can be earned in manifold ways.

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xx INTRODUCTION

It cannot be transferred, but neither can it be withdrawn on grounds

defined by previous standards alone. To sign one’s discourse is in itself
a gesture toward authority. The acceptance of philosophy goes together
with the acceptance of new beginnings for philosophy, invention of dis-
courses (such as that of Thoreau, Emerson, Heidegger and Wittgenstein).
In the end Cavell writes ‘each claim to speak for philosophy has to earn
the authority for itself, say account for it’ (IQO: 19). It is in this sense, in
the sense of a search for a different way to account for one’s own words
(and as a consequence for philosophy) that Cavell and Nancy will be read
together in this book.

daniele.rugo@brunel.ac.uk