Naxos

jujutsu-with-zizek:

Hiroshima, Mon Amour - Deleuze on the second death: Beyond all the sheets of memory, there is this lapping, … this death from the inside which forms an absolute, and from which he who has been able to escape it is reborn. And he who escapes, he who has been able to be reborn, moves inexorably towards a death from the outside, which comes to him as the other side of the absolute. Je t’aime je t’aime will make the two deaths coincide, the death from the inside from which he returns, the death from the outside which comes to him. L’amour à mort … moves from the clinical death from which the hero comes back to life, to the definitive death into which he goes down, ‘a shallow stream’ separating the two (it is clear that the Doctor had not been mistaken the first time, it was not an illusion, there had been apparent or clinical death, brain-death). Between one death and the other, the absolute inside and the absolute outside enter into contact, an inside deeper than all the sheets of past, an outside more distant than all the layers of external reality. Between the two, in the in-between, it is as if zombies peopled the brain-world for a moment: Resnais ‘insists on preserving the ghostly character of the beings he shows, and on maintaining them in a society of spectres destined to be included for a moment in our mental universe; these shivering heroes … like to wear warm, out-of- date clothes’. Resnais’ characters … are philosophers, … who have passed through a death, who are born from it, and go towards another death, perhaps the same one. They themselves believe that they are dead, that they have passed through death; and they also believe that, although dead, they continue to live, but in a shivering way, with tiredness and prudence. According to Pauline Harvey, this would be a double mistake, which amuses her. According to us, it is a double truth, although this is cause for amusement as well: the philosopher is someone who believes he has returned from the dead, rightly or wrongly, and who returns to the dead in full consciousness. The philosopher has returned from the dead and goes back there. This has been the living formulation of philosophy since Plato. … We are not saying that these characters talk about philosophy, or that Resnais ‘applies’ philosophical ideas to a cinema, but that he invents a cinema of philosophy.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour - Deleuze on the second death:
Beyond all the sheets of memory, there is this lapping, … this death from the inside which forms an absolute, and from which he who has been able to escape it is reborn. And he who escapes, he who has been able to be reborn, moves inexorably towards a death from the outside, which comes to him as the other side of the absolute. Je t’aime je t’aime will make the two deaths coincide, the death from the inside from which he returns, the death from the outside which comes to him. L’amour à mort … moves from the clinical death from which the hero comes back to life, to the definitive death into which he goes down, ‘a shallow stream’ separating the two (it is clear that the Doctor had not been mistaken the first time, it was not an illusion, there had been apparent or clinical death, brain-death). Between one death and the other, the absolute inside and the absolute outside enter into contact, an inside deeper than all the sheets of past, an outside more distant than all the layers of external reality. Between the two, in the in-between, it is as if zombies peopled the brain-world for a moment: Resnais ‘insists on preserving the ghostly character of the beings he shows, and on maintaining them in a society of spectres destined to be included for a moment in our mental universe; these shivering heroes … like to wear warm, out-of- date clothes’. Resnais’ characters … are philosophers, … who have passed through a death, who are born from it, and go towards another death, perhaps the same one. They themselves believe that they are dead, that they have passed through death; and they also believe that, although dead, they continue to live, but in a shivering way, with tiredness and prudence. According to Pauline Harvey, this would be a double mistake, which amuses her. According to us, it is a double truth, although this is cause for amusement as well: the philosopher is someone who believes he has returned from the dead, rightly or wrongly, and who returns to the dead in full consciousness. The philosopher has returned from the dead and goes back there. This has been the living formulation of philosophy since Plato. … We are not saying that these characters talk about philosophy, or that Resnais ‘applies’ philosophical ideas to a cinema, but that he invents a cinema of philosophy.