Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Abstracted Subjectivity and Knowledge-Worlds: Aleksandr Sokurov's Taurus (2001)
- 2 The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin's The Miracle (2009)
- 3 Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov's Morphine (2008)
- 4 Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev's Elena (2010)
- 5 Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki's A Tale About Darkness (2009)
- 6 The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov's St George's Day (2008)
- 7 A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova's Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)
- 8 Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor' Voloshin's Nirvana (2008)
- 9 The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii's Alive (2006)
- 10 Intentionality and Modelled Subjectivities: Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls (2010)
- 11 Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili's The Wild Field (2008)
- 12 Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel'dovich's The Target (2010)
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii's Alive (2006)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Abstracted Subjectivity and Knowledge-Worlds: Aleksandr Sokurov's Taurus (2001)
- 2 The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin's The Miracle (2009)
- 3 Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov's Morphine (2008)
- 4 Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev's Elena (2010)
- 5 Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki's A Tale About Darkness (2009)
- 6 The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov's St George's Day (2008)
- 7 A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova's Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)
- 8 Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor' Voloshin's Nirvana (2008)
- 9 The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii's Alive (2006)
- 10 Intentionality and Modelled Subjectivities: Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls (2010)
- 11 Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili's The Wild Field (2008)
- 12 Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel'dovich's The Target (2010)
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Litvinova's Goddess: How I Fell in Love presents a proposition of One existing as Two, which is the primordial fantasy of everyone being conceived as twins and born single. In his The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, Hillel Schwartz contends that:
We conceive of ourselves, from the start, as twins, then one disappears … The emergent legend of the vanishing twin makes of ourselves our own kin. Surrounded by forgeries and facsimiles, we look to that primitive twin for affidavits of faithfulness and apologies for faithlessness. In one body, at one and the same time, we may carry and confute our own nearest sister, closest brother. While vanished twinship assures us of a sempiternal human link, it affords us also the pathos of inexpressible loss.
(Schwartz 1996: 19–21)The self is both the I and the other I, or the twin who has disappeared but continues to appear as the I in the self as self-presence. Litvinova makes a transfer to the twin, the Two, to the posthumous subjectivity inhabiting the post-apocalyptic world which is possible thanks to dyadic deaths, or murder–suicides. The dyad, or Badiou's Two, does not denote symbiosis, but rather evokes an opening of the human horizon to the reaches of transcendental intimacy, whereby being as Two implies a series of transits and entrances towards trembling, vibrating subjectivity in the symbolic mode. Kalatozishvili's The Wild Field examines the inseparability of the I from the other I through a story of the Doppelgängers, the mirror-twisted twins who require a (symbolic) scalpel to be separated. In its imagery Kalatozishvili's Doppelgänger evokes romantic terror and gothic horror whereby the subject is structured according to intervals, intemporalities, or what Derrida calls khôra, that is, asynchronised vibrations of discourse. Khôra accounts for the type of subjectivity that ‘always takes a place which is not his own, and that one can also call the place of death, he does not have either a proper place or a proper name’ (Derrida 2004: 161). Kalatozishvili's Doppelgänger determines a type of ontology that privileges spacing as divergence, deviation and withdrawal.
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- Information
- Contemporary Russian CinemaSymbols of a New Era, pp. 181 - 198Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016