Finding Ourselves at the Movies by Kahn Paul W

Author:Kahn, Paul W.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI005000, Philosophy/Ethics and Moral Philosophy, PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2013-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION: IMAGINING OURSELVES

The imagination always works through the particular; it is concrete, not abstract. It constructs a narrative; it does not apply a rule. The philosopher’s burden is to bring self-conscious reflection to bear on this process of imaginative construction. He or she must interpret the particular work, with the ambition of bringing to deliberate awareness those archetypes by which we understand ourselves and our communities. The work of the imagination, I have tried to show in this chapter, is not so very different wherever it appears. The distance between the drama of life and death in film and our political drama of life and death is no distance at all. For we ask the same questions when we read the newspaper as when we go to the movies: who are we, and what are we doing?

In this chapter I have argued that we find ourselves in a politically anxious age. The source of that anxiety is a destabilization in the relationship of identity to representation. The nation-state managed that relationship through its control of the narrative of sacrificial violence. If we cannot attach a meaning to violence, then the relationship of identity to representation will fail. Anxiety over this possibility produces the three responses I have tracked: a longing for recovery of the unity of love (Gran Torino), a fear that political violence cannot be stabilized in law (Inglourious Basterds), and a fear that an all-too-stable code will preclude a free politics of identity (The Matrix).

Interpretation is not prediction. We cannot say in which of these directions we will go individually or collectively. We can only say that there are today substantial stresses on the relationship of identity and representation. At stake is the possibility of understanding politics as a domain of freedom. We do not occupy a position from which we can make a normative judgment on this formation of the political imaginary. We cannot say whether the nation-state is good or evil, or whether its demise would be good or evil. We can only say that it has been our world for both good and evil and that whatever imaginative products succeed it, they will again create a field in which we will struggle to link identity and representation. Here we will find love and interpretation. But here, too, we are likely to find violence and evil.56

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