Heidegger and Future Presencing (The Black Pages) by Spencer Golub

Author:Spencer Golub
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030318895
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Chicken and the Egg

In Predestination , Jane/John each/both have a full set of both/each male and female internal organs. (“Eggs are fish and fowl. This is perfectly reasonable. Tell them how to finish,” says Stein.) “Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?” John asks Jane who answers: “The rooster,” whose very identity—John-as-Jane is what Jane and John must and will discover.75 Does it matter if her story introduces the character in the first-person first as “Jane” or as “John?” “What is the difference between a question and answer.” “There is no question and no answer,” Stein answers her own non-question-marked question.76 In the jump-cut, temporally montaged Muriel, or The Time of Return (dir. Alain Resnais, 1963), Bernard, who lives with Hélène who is not his mother but his late father’s second wife (“I was already here.”), leaves the dinner table to cook himself eggs in the kitchen because, he says, he doesn’t like the chicken being served. So, it appears that the answer to the question, “which came first, the chicken or the egg,” is “the chicken,” unless it is “the egg,” because what is being served comes after and with a foreknowledge of a preference for eggs. It is only Bernard’s serving notice that he will eat eggs instead of chicken that comes later. Who was late—Alphonse who is visiting or Hélène whom is being visited? Perhaps neither one. They were just in different places (during the war when they were an item), like the chicken and the egg. Which is Hélène wearing first—the half-sweater or the half-coat we see her putting each of her two arms through before departing for the train station where she appears to arrive too late to meet Alphonse? (“Were we too late?”) Old but not “ancient” history, as they say—a pattern of behavior that has neither been forgotten nor forgiven. “Is Muriel better?” Hélène later asks Bernard, whose response, “Who said she was sick?” again presents us with a first that will not last and a last that does not admit to having been first. It was Bernard who earlier told Hélène that his possible fiancée Muriel, whom we never see, is sick and then, in the next breath, not sick, no longer sick in the moment after he said it, in the not-now. Muriel, the metonym for all those in the film and in the French war in Algeria in which Bernard fought and from where Alphonse has also just returned, exists in the spectral posthumous state of being that is not so much dead as disappeared—toward-death rather than dead as such, the former perhaps signaling a more profound actuality than the latter. Better never than late, appearing but only as a name in a sentence, although the import of this flipped coinage will be more important than what it represented. “Muriel,” Hélène remarked at her being mentioned in conversation with her not-stepson Bernard, “her name’s not from around here.” But then, as Alphonse remarked upon departing the train station

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