Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-pfhbr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-13T21:01:18.026Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii's Alive (2006)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2017

Vlad Strukov
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Contemporary Russian Cinema
Symbols of a New Era
, pp. 181 - 198
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×