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AngelakiJournal of the Theoretical Humanities
ISSN: 0969-725X (Print) 1469-2899 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20
The Patience of Film
Daniele Rugo
To cite this article: Daniele Rugo (2015) The Patience of Film, Angelaki, 20:4, 23-35, DOI:10.1080/0969725X.2015.1096628
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2015.1096628
2015 The Author. Published by Taylor &Francis.
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D espite being usually considered the fore-bears of diverging schools of thoughtthat take each other as the very negation of phil-osophy, Heidegger and Wittgenstein can be saidto deploy similar ideas to disperse the mist thatadumbrates our intellectual lives. The agree-ment between the later Heidegger and thelater Wittgenstein becomes even more apparentwhen, as a number of scholars have alreadynoted (Granel, Etudes; Mulhall; Braver), onefocuses on the renewal of thinking that theirwork is predicated on and calls for. As Braverwrites: their basic objection is that philosophyhas been practiced in a way that is fundamen-tally inappropriate for creatures like ourselves(9). Similarly, Stanley Cavell articulates theproximity in terms of the two philosophersability to detect and resist philosophyschronic tendency to violence (Philosophy231) perpetrated against the ordinary world orwhat Heidegger would call the heart ofthings. The question could be put by sayingthat whilst philosophy has never stopped beingafter the heart of things its way of bringingthis heart closer has deformed and violated it.Thinking has always directed itself towardsthat which exceeds it, to the point of construct-ing out of this excess the principle of creationand the world. As heartless as it is, Reason hasnot thought for a moment that this principlewas in fact nothing else than its own heart, itsability to be affected beyond what it couldreduce to an object. Taking things to heartmeans, then, at least this: not to reduce theworld to an object but to be carried into a move-ment that discredits and unsettles reduction.
Discarding this as its opposite, Reason hasinsisted in positing a principle of all things, aOne, which it then craved to know but couldnot. Philosophy ended up wanting what it wasnot ready to accept.
The impulse to resist this violence continuesto inform the possibility for a different articula-tion of the tectonic rift that splits philosophyinto two, so that at times philosophy will recog-nize itself as motivated by a single demand. Itis this very call for a renewed resistance of think-ing to its own inherent violence that animates thework of Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Nancy.
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ANGELAK Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 20 number 4 december 2015
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/15/040023-12 2015 The Author. Published by Taylor & Francis.http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2015.1096628This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, dis-tribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed,or built upon in any way.
daniele rugo
THE PATIENCE OF FILMcavell, nancy and a thoughtfor the world
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Retracing paths opened by Heidegger and Witt-genstein, this renewal is produced through andwith the concept of the world. The world is inexcess of knowledge and this impossiblemastery over the heart of things is for both themost productive incentive to thinking, under-stood as a way of taking things to heart.
For both, the gaps opened by an irregularbeating of the heart have provided an impulse,an occasion for thought. Cavell opens his philo-sophical diary with these words:
The catheterization of my heart will no longerbe postponed. My cardiologist announcesthat he has lost condence in his understand-ing of my condition so far based on reports ofwhat I surmise as symptoms of angina and ofthe noninvasive monitoring allowed by X-Rays and by the angiograms produced instress tests. We must actually look at whatis going on inside the heart. (Little Did IKnow 1)
Nancy approaches it this way:
A heart that only half beats is only half myheart. I was already no longer inside me.Im already coming from somewhere else,or Im not coming any longer at all. Some-thing strange is disclosed at the heart of themost familiar but familiar hardly saysit: at the heart of something that never sig-naled itself as heart. (Corpus 163)
The texts that record this gap, a time of waiting,suspended, are irrevocably biographical andphilosophical, or better one because of theother. There the heart of things trembles withthings taken to heart, and philosophy is set towork by an enforced patience. The sense thatemerges from these two exemplary parallels isthat philosophy is always written as the autobio-graphy of our relation to the world.
The world thus requires to be liberated forthinking to get on its way and this liberationtakes place on two sides of the concept. On theone hand, the world requires to be freed fromthe Western tradition that in various forms hasdisplaced its sense towards an otherworld ortowards a more satisfactory reality. On theother, the thinking of the world needs to beafrmed beyond the neutralizing form that an
apparent overcoming of the transcendental tra-dition has conned it to (nitude as intellectualprivation, failure of human knowledge, desirefor a more convincing grasp on reality). ForCavell and Nancy it is a question of thinkingthis world here on both sides of the tradition,interrupting the judicatory authority of divineprinciples and resisting the reduction of theworld to an object. The demand that the twothinkers share is the recuperation of the excessof reason from the elsewhere in which our tra-dition has projected it. This recuperationimplies not a new reduction but the acknowl-edgement (a master tone in Cavell) that ourknowledge of the world is not the knowledge ofa fact and that this awareness does not lessenour involvement with the world, but at the oppo-site makes it decisively more acute. In TheWorld Viewed Cavell writes of TerrenceMalicks lms: if in relation to objects capableof such self-manifestation human beings arereduced in signicance [ ] perhaps this isbecause in trying to take dominion over theworld [ ] they are refusing their participationin it (xvi). These words anticipate the centralquestion that for Cavell and Nancy thinkingneeds to ask: what would it mean to see thatwhat assures our relation to the world is notdominion over the totality of objects but theacceptance of our inexhaustible participationwith them? In his work on Romanticism Cavellformulates it as follows: what is our relationto the case of the worlds existence? Or shouldwe now see that there is nothing that constitutesthis relation? Or see that there is no one some-thing? (In Quest 136). Nancy, on the otherhand, writes that it is up to us to seize the in-nite chance and risk of being in the world,although we know (but is this a knowledge?)that there is nothing to seize (Sense 26). Thestarting points from which one can see thepressure that the world exercises on thinkingare then two: there is no knowledge of theworld that would conclude our knowing theworld; there is nothing we can grasp about theworld, no particular thing that will provide uswith the key to master the rest. Every singularinsurgence of the world is already the exhibitionof all the world there is, and yet this insurgence is
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simply a modulation that resonates through allthe surface of the world. Most recently Nancyhas expressed this conguration according tothe logic of struction, the passage betweenmore than one and less than one withoutthe mediation of the One (Whats TheseWorlds 20). In designating our experience as lib-erated by Kant from the dominance of rationalthought, Heidegger invokes the idea of a circularhappening, between us and the thing (What isa Thing? 242) and calls this the Open. Theworld is what is constantly strange (243).According to Cavell and Nancy our task is thusto install thinking more rmly within this stran-geness: the world is strange, irreducibly so, it is amatter of accepting this, and this acceptanceleads to testimony, creation and responsibility,rather than grief and resignation. When Cavellwrites that with Wittgenstein it is not a matterof refuting scepticism but of setting its truth inmotion (our relation to the world is not one ofknowledge, when this implies certainty), hemeans precisely to reject the idea that the limit-ation of reason leaves man in a position of immo-bility and intellectual despair. Once the truth ofscepticism is acknowledged our possibilities areunbounded, our embarrassments and inhi-bitions shaken off. For both Cavell and Nancythe emergence from these limits introduces anew chance for thinking.
the world and the viewfinder
The fact that the world no longer has any sensebecomes the acknowledgement that the world issense. On the one hand, then, we have nothingto adhere to, neither Divinity nor Reason,neither ultimate goal nor organizing principle;on the other, this situation forces us to enjoyall the possibilities and demands of sense. Thewithdrawal of sense presents both the terminalexpenditure of the idea of destination and theintroduction of a constant agitation, a prolicturbulence. The world as the essentially inap-propriable and inextinguishable is the world inwhich our possibilities become our responsibil-ities and vice versa, where every parcel ofsense, every seam in experience contributes tothe sense of the world. To this effect Nancy
writes that the thought of the sense of theworld is a thought that becomes indiscerniblefrom its praxis (Sense 10).
This praxis implies that the world is not atotality one can envisage or represent, but pre-cisely that which escapes representation. Forboth Cavell and Nancy an insistence on thisimpossibility leads to an emphasis on lm.Cavells The World Viewed is explicitlywritten in this direction. How else is one toread the account of our age as one in whichour philosophical grasp of the world fails toreach beyond our taking and holding views ofit (xxiii)? This passage seems to signal thatthe philosophical way out of this deadlockpasses through lm. To reach beyond world-views would mean to reach once again towardsthe praxis of sense, as that which worldviewsblock and exhaust. For Nancy, cinema is a wayof taking care of that which resists, precisely,being absorbed in any vision (worldviews, rep-resentations, imaginations) (Evidence 18);cinema takes care of the world. Whilst thisexpression carries an inevitable Heideggerianmark, it should also be heard as an invitationto a more radical dispossession.1 Inasmuch asphilosophy has understood itself as producerof worldviews, systems and principle, philos-ophy has constantly suppressed the thinkingof the world, for any worldview absorbs and dis-solves the world in its vision.
Two further methodological points can bemade to bear on this: lm enters philosophythrough a specic scrutiny of the question ofthe world, a scrutiny that attempts to illuminatethe question of the worlds sense without thisreferring to anything beyond this world here.At the same time lm does not simply illustratea moment of this scrutiny. In other words, thethinking of cinema for both philosophers struc-tures a way to articulate an original thinking ofthe world, rather than simply providing asketch, an image of its development. ForNancy and Cavell the thinking of lm must beable to resist being absorbed within a more orig-inal gesture and must be seen as opening up anopportunity for thinking as such.
What is at stake in lm is not the order ofsimulation and dissimulation, the pervasiveness
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of simulacra absorbing reality within their reach.It is rather a question of the exposure of sense, anexposure that cuts through the simul and its orig-inal. Both thinkers begin their analyses of lm byclaiming that lm exercises a resistance to world-views: taking views, in Cavells words; imposingvisions, in Nancys phrasing. In the expressionworldviews one hears echoes of HeideggersThe Age of the World Picture (Cavell mentionsthe inuence this text, once avoided, exercises onhis own). It is the very idea of an image orpicture of the world that allows us to graspthe essential nature of our age. Heidegger speci-es that the expression has to be understood inthe relation between its two constitutive terms.World indicates here the totality of what isand the meaning attributed to this totality(nature, history and man). By picture, on theother hand, Heidegger understands not thereproduction of what is but the framing ofthe world into a system. Picturing names theact of framing existents within a plan conceivedin advance. What is stands before us systema-tically and only as such a system does it become aworld. Thus world-picture means thatwhat is is understood only as that which is sys-tematically represented in advance, according toa design conceived prior to any encounter with it.Heidegger writes: what is, in its entirety, is nowtaken in such a way that it rst is in being andonly is in being to the extent that it is set up byman, who represents and sets forth (QuestionConcerning 13031). Man essentially encounterswhat is as that which can be representedaccording to a fundamental design that is at thesame time the opening of a realm of knowledge.This projection, Heidegger says, decides essen-tially and in advance of how what is will beknown: only within the perspective of thisground plan does an event in nature becomevisible as such an event (120). Whilst forGreek philosophy mans role is limited to thepreservation of the horizon of unconcealment(147), with the world-picture man proceedsinto the unlimited sphere of possible objecti-cation, through the reckoning up of the rep-resentable that is accessible to every man andbinding for all (ibid.). The expression world-view becomes the name for mans power to
decide what the world is. Furthermore, accord-ing to Heidegger, since representation hasdecided of the world in advance philosophy isalso abandoned. A world absorbed within aworldview is in no need of philosophy, becauseit has already taken over a particular interpret-ation and structuring of whatever is (140).Withthe thinking of man that follows from Descartesbegins the setting aside of all philosophy(replaced by what Heidegger calls the laboriousfabrications of such absurd offshoots as thenational-socialist philosophies (ibid.)). TheCartesian worldview replaces man as limited byBeing with man as essentially limiting Beingthrough a gesture of representative mastery.The new freedom of self-legislating Reasonvanishes in the objectication it has usheredinto the world. Because of the priority accordedin this movement to objectication itself, to rep-resentation, to the original plan one also losessight of how, as Cavell puts it, different differ-ent things are (World Viewed 25).
The rst consequence, then, of lms resist-ance to worldviews is that lms operate undera different regime than that of representations;the second is that this regime renews a call forphilosophy. Two gestures intertwine in thinkingthe world of lm: to recapture our relation to theworld as one that is not based on knowing as cer-tainty derived from objectication but on thereception of the singular; to recapture thinkingas that which is attracted and called for by theinsurgence of the singular, by the seam(s) inexperience. Understood in this way, lmreopens at once the question of the world andthe question of philosophy. What lm nameshere, then, is the return to the strange, the inter-esting, the differentiating pressure of the singu-lar, which cannot and should not be masteredbut exposed, worded, acknowledged (as Cavellputs it) and adored (as Nancy phrases it).
retouching the world with theworld
Nancy and Cavell decidedly reverse the idea ofcinema as completing the regime of represen-tation (an idea expressed perhaps most famously
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by Bazin), stressing how cinema produces a stepaway from thinking as representation, in view ofwhat I will call thinking as patience.
Nancy frames his discourse on lm throughthe idea that cinema today cannot be understoodas installing anew the problem of represen-tation. This shift envisaged in particular inrelation to the work of Abbas Kiarostami andClaire Denis is not merely a new developmentbut signals cinemas return to its most crucialquestion: the release of a look on the worldand the reception of the pressure the worldexercises.
Cinema should be understood here as proble-matizing the act of looking not in the directionof a representing but in the direction of aregarding. As such, cinema (this cinema,but then possibly cinema as such) develops notan image of the world but a regard for theworlds generating force (Nancy, Evidence13). This generating force, of cinema and ofthe world with and through it, is possible onlythrough what Nancy calls evidence: the pressureof a blind spot that withdraws, becominghollow. Evidence is for Nancy the withdrawalof what makes evident, the subtraction of whatgives birth to an experience of the world.Every evidence is irreducibly singular, apressure at the same time applied and received,emptying the looking position of any opportu-nity to gather a vision onto itself. The onewho looks is emptied out and is emptied out pre-cisely in receiving and generating the force thatmakes possible a look on the world. That whichmakes evident is also that which withdraws fromvision, from imaginations: it opens the world inopening itself up to it. As Alexander GarciaDuttmann writes, this self-evidence exertspressure on the gaze urging it to [ ] observethe world in order to realize the real (107).The preoccupation, then, is not how adequatecinema is to the real or to a particular visionof the real but how cinema contributes to whatis proper to this world here: the distension ofits patency, coming from nowhere and goingnowhere. The worlds patency is never aplacing or being in view but rather the afrma-tion that, to borrow Gerard Granels words onKant, to appear is by no means a moment
occurring to a reality posited somewhere else(or in itself) (LEquivoque ontologique 54;my trans.). The evidential force of the world isthe limiting of an unlimited reality, thesharing out of singular nitude. The fact thatcinema directs itself to a safeguarding of thereal means that cinema cuts through the unlim-ited reality and generates that which it receives:the circulation of the singular.
One can then understand why Nancy writes:such is indeed the denition of the real: it isnot what is to be signied, but what runs upagainst or violates signication (Gravity 69).Cinema deals with the world as a force strippedof signications coming from elsewhere. Thusthe realism of cinema for Nancy does notimply the rm subsistence of something andits subsequent mimesis but the opening up ofan otherness within the world (in this sensehorror, fantasy or melodrama is as effective asthe most austere dramas). Cinema addressesthe world as the non-given that must besought through the given. This very same move-ment can be heard in Cavells idea that cinemaallows us to guess the unseen from the seen(Themes 14).
conditions of a life
In his account of lm Cavell sees a unique oppor-tunity to test the very conditions that structureour relationship with the world. At the end ofThe World Viewed, Cavell voices in concisefashion the overall purpose of the book: lmspresenting of the world by absenting us from itappears as conrmation of something alreadytrue of our existence (226). Cinemas abilityto provide access to the world depends on andis made possible by a loss of intimacy (call it aloss of given sense) that has unfolded over thecourse of the Wests intellectual history. Atthe same time cinema does not simply reinforcethis distance but articulates it, making this with-drawal of given senses and therefore of givenpositions its very gure and strategy.
Cavells contention is precisely that this dis-tance or loss that lm conrms does not (orshould not) mark or sanction our despair butinaugurate and rekindle our interest. The
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truth that Cavells philosophy wants for itself in inheriting Descartes, Emerson, Thoreau,Wittgenstein and Heidegger among others isthe acknowledgement that the human crea-tures basis in the world as a whole, its relationto the world, is not that of knowing (Claim241). Our work begins precisely from the accep-tance of this truth and not from a stubbornrefusal of it. If the truth of scepticism is thuswhat works through us, and therefore whattruly needs to be worked through, the situationthat cinema makes evident is neither just asymptom of our malady nor a sign of our recov-ery. In the world of lm our relation to theworld is never at rest but taken up every timeanew. This makes of lm not simply a gureof the conditions that have brought it about,but an active reorganization of these conditions.In other words, the world of lm is not a matterof images and likeness but a gesture that end-lessly invokes, convokes, provokes and acknowl-edges the conditions of the world. In aparenthetical remark from Knowing andAcknowledging Cavell writes that acknowl-edgement is an existentiale (Must We Mean263). Since for Heidegger an existentiale formspart of the ontological (rather than ontical)structure of Dasein, it becomes clear thatCavell is here using the parallel to illustratehow the concept of acknowledgement puts inplay the entire relation of the human creaturewith the world. Acknowledgement is the exis-tential possibility of our relation to the world.This can take the form of an acceptance of theworld (accepting it cannot be simply known)or of a refusal of it (refusing it because itsimply cannot be known). In aligning the ambi-tion to rewrite the human back into the worldwith that of Romanticism, Heidegger and Witt-genstein, Cavell stresses the centrality ofacknowledgement by inviting us to wrestlethe world from our possessions so that we maypossess it again (World Viewed 22). Thisdouble use of possess calls for a clarication.The rst occurrence (our possessions) indi-cates that we must let go of the world, forgothe desire for total intelligibility after thedesire for an omniscient God has been dissi-pated. The second use of the word possess
(may possess) points towards a renewal andreversal of the very idea of possession. Thesecond possess does not restore what hasbeen wrestled away, it radically changes thesense of possession, in a direction that aims tosolicit a new relation with the world. In thisrelation what we have to possess is the powerto be possessed, to make our experience of inter-est to us, available. The fact that we no longerpossess a world on the one hand points to ourpresent condition (sense is not given to us; asNancy says, there is no longer a world), andon the other it addresses our opportunities toarticulate this absence: we can now possess it,as long as we become possessed by it. Ourroute back into the world does not lead to agiven signication, a new ultimate order but tointerest, the possibility to be called andseduced by strangeness and the ability and auth-ority to express this interest. To be seduced by aclose-up means to be able to see it as part of anobject supported by and reverberating the entireframe of nature (World Viewed 25). In otherwords, the close-up calls for the ability toinstall oneself in this reverberation channelledby the object itself. This perhaps becomesmore convincing once one emphasizes how forCavell lm has not provided the solution tothe problem of the world. This problem is notone for which it is possible (or advised) to nda solution. Film does not provide in any sensea possibility of complete intelligibility. Itreleases the world once again from our wishfor complete intelligibility complete becauseexhaustive but also because independent of us and it is in this sense that lm realizes theworld, making the sense of the world itself theimpulse and drive of our interest and quest.
To realize the world, bringing its evidenceinto view, implies that we rest, as if arrested,on its force, a force that by its own naturerevokes the model, the possibility of confor-mity. It is then a matter of drawing this evidenceout whilst remaining submitted to it, addressingthe form received from it as the birth every timesingular, every time new of the world. Takingcare of the world does not mean representingit, copying or reproducing it but opening up astance towards it, a gesture that is at once
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ontological, epistemological, aesthetic andethical, collapsing the distinction between thefour modes of philosophical enquiry. Takingcare of the real implies the arduous effort toinstall oneself in the worlds formative prin-ciple, which never donates a completed formone can conform to but a relation, one whoseoutline is in every case to be made again, to berealized. If cinema takes care of the real it isbecause it can establish a relation with whatGranel calls the Nemesis of philosophical impa-tience, the reticence [pudeur] of the world(Apolis 9; my trans.). The world, to useGranels words once again, does not have aform, since it is not something given: it is theformality of the gift, which is somethingaltogether different (11; my trans.). Thisarchi-formality is precisely what cinema turnsitself to, by insisting on the given. If, asNancy implies, cinema has exhausted all its pos-sibilities by working through them, this alsomeans that it has rejoined its initial demand:not to exhaust the resources of the image butto explode our relation with the world theygrant access to. Thus it is the very idea ofimage that changes. It does not name a compo-sition but the agitation of a look, not the thingcaptured but the things release; not a completeproximity with the world but distance, ameasure through which something like accessis possible. In his Notes on CinematographyRobert Bresson writes that the task of cinemais to retouch the real with the real (24). Thelmmaker seeks the point of pressure that agi-tates it so that it can carry us (the audience) inthe same direction. The look thus is thisregard not for the sign it produces but for theengagement and interest it solicits, for thepatience it demands. Nancy sees a transitionhere of cinema from representation to presence.This presence is not a matter of vision: it offersitself to an encounter, a preoccupation or a care(Evidence 31). Where Cavell writes that cinemahas brought the problem of reality to a head, byaddressing it automatically, Nancy says thatthere are no xed points in cinema thereforeno signs to decipher. With lm, then, nothingneeds to be deciphered, what is on the screenasks us to become interested.
Since the given is withdrawn (and this is theoriginal situation cinema installs itself onto;Cavell calls it our displacement) the given is tobe given again. Nancy writes: to look meansin the end nothing else than to think the real,to test oneself against a sense that we cantmaster. The capturing of images in a lm is acapture only inasmuch as it is a delivering[ ] a realization of the real (Evidence 39).In this sense Nancys insistent evocation of thephenomenological lexicon (evidence, gaze,eyes) serves to mark his departure from this reg-ister even more explicitly. Opening the eyes isnot a gesture that seizes the phenomenon butthe possibility to deliver oneself to a chiasm,so that my eyes and the world are openedtogether, the rst included in the second,which, at the same time, penetrates them(Adoration 47). This look that is commandedand penetrated is in turn commanding, renew-ing the command it receives. Film shows usthat we are always passible to the world,carried to the moment where a pressure exer-cises itself without remainder. Nancy insiststhat the crossing of looking with the evidenceof the world is a consequence of having beenlooked at, therefore of addressing that whichalways already shows itself. The intimacyachieved here does not exercise itself as theproximity of a grasping of the given but as thepressure that, whilst imposing a distance, pro-duces a stance, an ethos. Evidence and looktranslate not into certainty, rmness, assurancebut as regards and conducts, ways of being inthe world. Cinema takes care of the real and rea-lizes it, precisely because this real is not what isalways already there but what in what is thereawaits acknowledgement and expression. If theworld is without sense, then this (and onlythis) is what cinema can address: the fact thateverything refers back to everything and thuseverything shows itself through everything(Whats These Worlds 54), without this referralelevating itself beyond this world here and thefortuity and contingency of its sense. Theaddress and response are never nal, the worldis the very impulse of an unnishable. Filmswork begins just before and immediately afterthe given. It addresses the just before
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because no capturing captures the world, nocomposition can complete and enclose itssense. It addresses the immediately afterbecause capturing is not the right pose, theworld demands rather to be made tocirculate once again, looked at and shaken,addressed and responded to. The world is nota given but the reticence that comes with thegiven.
Nancy says it explicitly: cinema structuresthe world of today because in its looking at apassage without direction it re-cognizes thatis, it acknowledges the order of this worldthat catches itself in its own passage, withdraw-ing from every kind of visionary seeing, fore-seeing and clairvoyant gazing (Evidence 20).It takes care of the real in this sense, eachtime it is about a reconguration of experienceand therefore of the world (ibid.). A recon-guration of the whole world implies theacknowledgement of the inherent singularityof our many encounters with it. Before anychoice, gesture, camera movement or frame,cinema must bring itself to the point where ithas to acknowledge a resistance from theworld and in this resistance a sort of partici-pation with it. Serge Daney captures this inter-ested resistance with usual eloquence:
because it is impossible to predict every-thing, what one needs to do is accommodatethe more that comes from the real [ ]The lmmaker looks once and then he toobecomes passive and disappears betweenwhat he has rendered and what he didntwant. (LExercice 60)
a scene of instruction
Cinema can teach us, as Cavell writes, howdifferent different things are (World Viewed19). This instruction, however, does not orig-inate from a mimetic power, it is rather amatter of what Nancy, playing with the etymol-ogy of education, calls a bringing out, agesture according to which the look learns toattend to the world and therefore is ledtowards that which escapes it. What in theworld instructs the look is also what imposeson it a certain immobility, what pushes it not
to penetration but to arrest at the just distance.This distance produces a stance, a way of regard-ing things.
Cavell insists on a similar point in order toreach this very measure, the acknowledgementof distance. Cinema is of the world and itsframes produce a resonance onto the worldthat is therein implicitly included (becauseexplicitly excluded). This satises for Cavellour wish, which modern philosophy hadplaced as our limit, to see the world itselfand therefore to full the condition ofviewing as such (World Viewed 102). Filmse-ducation lies in its disclosure of this condition:lm forces us to face our yearning to frame theworld without our framing of it being revealedas ours.
The world of lm is of the world and as suchour relation to it shows that our relation to theworld as such is self-defeating. In a passage onBaudelaire, Cavell writes that lm returns tous and extends our rst fascination withobjects, with their inner and xed lives(World Viewed 43). From this Cavell con-cludes, then, that from lm we learn the worlditself, which in practice now means learningto stop altering it illegitimately, against itself(102). Film thus invokes our situation in theworld in two ways: on the one hand it tells usthat a certain powerlessness is natural to usand on the other it invites us to think that it isnot natural to assume that we are always natu-rally powerless. In other words, our displace-ment from the events on screen tells the storyof our responsibility towards the world. Thisstory has two sides: our displacement isnatural inasmuch as our attempts to possessthe world are constantly and inevitablyrebuked (the world is not to be possessed, notsomething we can possess by perfecting ourknowledge), unnatural if following the failureof these attempts we feel free to decline respon-sibility for what we say and do. Cavell insiststhat our inability to know is dictated always byour unwillingness to know, in particular whenthis takes the form of wanting to know toomuch: the problem arises not from wantingtoo much from our knowledge but fromwanting knowledge too much. We wish to
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overcome our displacement from the world, butwe do so in the wrong way and therefore we keepreinforcing the displacement.
On the one hand lm enlarges our fantasy ofpossession and on the other it shows us that pos-session of the world is precisely our own fantasyand that from within this fantasy we can givepossession over (and be possessed), wrestle theworld away from us so that we can possess itagain. Similarly in his analysis of Wordsworthspoetry Cavell regards participation in the splen-dour of the everyday as achievable only after wehave foregone the grief that follows our inevita-ble departure from childhood. As the nal sceneof Rosemarys Baby (1968) reveals, onlyRosemary herself is in a position to give thechild over to the Devil, for it is only fromwithin a fantasy of possession that the childcould (logically) have been given (WorldViewed 89). In the very different Five EasyPieces (1970) Bobby Dupea (played withsubdued solemnity by Jack Nicholson) dis-covers that it is entirely up to him to let a newpossession take hold (in the form of a father,his brothers girlfriend or Chopins Prelude inE Minor) and, perhaps unsurprisingly, decidesagainst it. In other words, he accepts toremain somewhere between his successful dis-possession of the world and the incapacity toexpress anything different (be possessed). Thetruck driver who picks him up at the petrolstation after he has left his girlfriend behindsuggests that this somewhere, this placebetween, is colder than hell (and Dupea isnot adequately attired). Another place existswhere we can express the world after havinglearned how not to alter it illegitimately,against itself. In this place we are interestedand cinema reaches for it naturally. AsCavell writes, the camera left to itselfawakens the self to the unnatural naturalnessof its lack of interest. Left to itself, the camerabrings us outside and educates, claiming ourattention wholly for that thing now andshowing that it is not novelty that has wornoff, but our interest in our own experience(World Viewed 122). If this is the case, if thecamera can produce this turning when left toitself, it can also make evident how the world
left to itself, not manipulated illegitimately,against itself, can elicit this interest.
Cavells interpretation of Frank Capras ItHappened One Night (1934) offers anotherinstance of this. It is worth mentioning thatCavells essay frames the lm as an explorationof knowledge and the limits Kant set for it. Thelm shows for Cavell that substituting knowl-edge for acknowledgement produces a specickind of violence on the world (and thereforeon others). Renouncing this violence impliesforgoing the ambition for a position outsidethe world, from which to view and arrange ourfate. In these matters there is only one option,to make things happen, but to make thingshappen, you must let them happen (Pursuits109).
Without this acceptance of loss there is noknowledge whose grasping would be worth theprice of waiting. What puts the camera in a pos-ition to educate is its power to disperse not theloss but the terror of loss, our inability to losethe sense of loss, the paralysing dread at the for-feiture of propriety implied by our emergencefrom innocence. To allow propriety to vanishmeans to put oneself in the position to attendto the world, the reception of actuality thepain and balm in the truth of the only world:that it exists and I in it (World Viewed 117).For something to be so received one has to beable to let things be, to act without performing,to allow action all and only the signicance of itsspecic traces (153).
The equivalent philosophical practice thatcan produce this turn to and return of theworld would move from the idea that what isof philosophical importance, or interest whatthere is for philosophy to say is happeningrepeatedly, unmelodramatically, uneventfully(This New Yet Unapproachable America 75).It is a practice that for Cavell is based on themost unpromising ground, a ground ofpoverty, of the ordinary, the attainment of theeveryday (77). Nancy uses the same termpoverty to designate the ethos of our (needfor) abandonment by and to the world as away to reopen its sense beyond what we knowof it, call it a movement from knowledge tointerest. If philosophy is still awaiting (itself),
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if for it the moment of this practice is still tocome, cinema can be said to anticipate agesture philosophy wants for itself.
This gesture registers a different passion ofthinking, or better a power of patience, necess-ary to thinking: in order to have the world oneneeds to let it be, and the fascination thereinproduced is always to be accompanied by parti-ality, outsideness, contingency. It is a limitedaccess, but it is this very limitation that ulti-mately awards it its singularity. A power ofpatience, at once an attentive reception and anintense leap, is needed in order to open onesaccess to the world, to open it in the only wayit can be opened, as something going beyondmyself, extending the reach of my words andactions, pushing them beyond my reasonablecontrol, beyond my epistemological doubts.The world is received on this condition or elseit is missed. Unless we can open and maintaina connection with the world from the fragmentsof it that we are given, accepting its survivalbeyond the reach of our actions and acceptingthat responsibility for it extends beyond theprivacy we wish upon ourselves, the world willdrop out, an inert object.
Then cinema becomes a condition more thana technique of representation: patience directedtowards the refractory singularity of the world,its sense both received and expressed, neitherturned into a project nor into a purpose. Filmrealizes the fact that the sense of the world isevident, turned towards us, whether or not wewant it. This evidence that we confrontwithout mastering calls us to vigilance andattention, to regard and respect. Like any evi-dence it is not something secret but completelyrevealed. Nancy writes: one cannot not see it[ ] even if not everyone looks out for it orpays attention to it (Adoration 46). We call evi-dence that which exhausts itself in its presen-tation; it is not referable to any outside andyet produces a commotion of sense. We can allsee it, we cannot avoid it, it ashes in front ofus and yet it arrests us only if we pay attentionto it. Only in this moment of attention, in thisarrest, do we start articulating, picking up theshaking it produces. Evidence does not bringsomething forward, does not let a particular
object or person stand in front of us moreclearly, it reduces the object to nothing, tosomething that can neither be grasped norassimilated.
Nancy calls the gesture that receives andaddresses, this evidence that welcomes andsalutes, adoration. This salutation affords usaccess to the sense of the world as a relationnot to a something but to that which solicitsour responsibility to respond. Our access tothe world, then, appears where forces precedeand follow us, where forces are not concernedwith a subjects calculation and projection, butwhere one might rather say that a subject, bywelcoming these forces, by espousing theirimpetus, might have some chance of shapingitself (Adoration 47). Our longing for theunconditioned can turn from the desire to befreed of every conditioning into the patience tobear the condition of the world, its presentationof the nothing it comes from and goes to.
It might be, then, that a certain reluctance toaccepting lm (the passivity it is said to impose)as having an intrinsic force of philosophicalinstruction resonates with a specic aversioninternal to the work of philosophy. There is inphilosophical practice an inclination to viewthinking as grasping, making and clutching.The intolerance for lm manifests philosophysintolerance for reception and seduction, as ifphilosophical thinking could not be interested,could not account for its beginning otherwisethan as a movement of self-generation. ForCavell and Nancy an embracing of lm wouldalso show to philosophy its own repressions,illuminate within philosophy the denial ofreception, a tendency to violence and resentful-ness. So to take attentiveness and patience as thevery founding of philosophy means somehow toopen reason to what seems at rst its very rever-sal. Films ability to tell us how differentdifferent things are is an invitation to patience,at once reception of the singular and salute ofthe incommensurable value of the world. Fromthen on, after lm, philosophy does not speakrst and its virtue (thus its force, for that iswhere the word comes from) becomes patience.For Emerson the conversion to thinkingdemands that we understand thinking as
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accepting, receiving existence, so that our con-version is not the preparation for great deedsbut the unfolding of a patient abandonment. Itis this abandonment to our romance with theworld, abandonment to the response it claimsfrom us, its always initial contestation of ourattention, that gets us on the way to thinking.
For both Wittgenstein and Heidegger,getting on this way means letting things be,leaving everything as it is, being vigilant to theheart of things. In Emersons Experience onereads Patience and patience, we shall win atlast (310). Cavell responds that this is thework of realizing your world (EmersonsTranscendental Etudes 136). This realizationis, like the one of lm, the possibility toendure and bear the excess of the worldspressure. Cavell concludes the passage bywriting that the recovery from loss is [ ] anding of the world, a returning of it, to it.The price is necessarily to give something up,to let go of something (138). Thinking has noremedy for this loss of grasp;our curse is wanting one wherenone is needed. Patience andpatience, we shall lose (and thisloss will be a thought for theworld).
disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported bythe author.
note1 It is worth stressing how in this term one shouldalso hear the art of deremption (dessaisie) (mytrans.) invoked by Granel in his remarks on RainerSchurmanns Broken Hegemonies (Apolis 123).
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Daniele Rugo106 Gaskell BuildingDepartment of Social Sciences, Media &CommunicationsBrunel University LondonUxbridge UB8 3PHUKE-mail: [email protected]
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the world and the viewfinderretouching the world with the worldconditions of a lifea scene of instructiondisclosure statementnotebibliography
