Examined Life

Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers

Astra Taylor, Astra Taylor

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781595585059
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Philosophy reconnects with daily life in these conversations with eight renowned thinkers—the uncut interviews from the documentary film Examined Life. Astra Taylor's documentary film Examined Life took philosophy out of the academy and into the streets, reminding us that great ideas are born through profound engagement with the hustle and bustle of everyday life, not in isolation from it. This companion volume features the complete and uncut interviews with eight influential philosophers, all conducted while on the move through public spaces that resonate with their ideas. Slavoj Žižek ponders the purpose of ecology inside a London garbage dump. Peter Singer's thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue's posh boutiques. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco's Mission District, questioning our culture's fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America's best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating the life of the mind can be. Offering exclusive moments with great thinkers in fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory to gender studies, Examined Life reveals philosophy's power to transform the way we see the world around us and to imagine our place within it.

AVITAL RONELL

Meaning

I had the good fortune to take a course co-taught by Avital Ronell and Jacques Derrida in the fall of 2000, so Ronell was always on my radar for Examined Life. Not long after I got the green light for the movie, I ran into her in the middle of a snowstorm in the East Village. I asked her on the spot if she would consider participating in the project. While meeting at a café some months later, we resolved to film without planning or predetermining the discussion to come. The walk took place in Tompkins Square Park, one of the rare public spaces in lower Manhattan that retains some of its distinctively quirky, gritty character.

AVITAL RONELL: So I was trying to figure out what you were getting me into here and how we are implicated or co-implicated in this walk, what steps we should take toward a work that sounds very intriguing. But also, given my high levels of hermeneutic suspicion, I had to wonder what you had up your sleeve. I tried to understand what I was being inscribed in by you, and with you, which is to say this walk is not just an off-ramp in terms of my own projects but has a very real place and, more generally, belongs to a history of thought in and besides the kind of work that I have been trying to do—not only in terms of what it might mean to “walk the walk” or “talk the talk” or to do both at the same time. I was going to interview you and ask you what you thought you were doing. Perhaps you want to say something and I could be responsive to that?

ASTRA TAYLOR: It occurs to me that there are in fact two answers to the question of why I’ve undertaken this project. There’s a public answer and a more private answer. Publicly, when I’ve pitched this film to people, I’ve struck a very confident pose and said I want to bring philosophy to the streets and show an audience that philosophy is relevant and important. That’s how I’ve framed the film in those contexts. But I think, on a more personal level, I’m challenging philosophy to see if that’s actually true. I haven’t articulated my private yearning for and doubts about philosophy’s relevance when I describe the film to others.

RONELL: OK, well, those are fighting words, and now I feel I have the upbeat and I can start to work with you in a rather authentic, if worrisome, way because I share your yearning and longing to get philosophy to show up, to present itself as something extremely relevant, poignant, irreversible, necessary, and desirable. And yet, certainly, in our culture, the culture we share—I’m sure we share many cultures and subcultures—but in the dominant culture, ever since Socrates was pummeled to death by the state and told to shut the fuck up, essentially, philosophy has been terrorized by powerful structures and shoved into a kind of place of irrelevance. I would like to see us transvaluate that into a kind of sacred irrelevance, because what counts as relevant is often scored from business interests, is asked, very violently, to yield results and to reduce or simplify things by articulating them in a purportedly clear and intelligible way.

From the place that I am speaking to you now, anyone who has asked for clarity or transparency or relevance has kind of been on the enemy side of things. When a politician says, “Let me say something very clearly,” it has that right-wing scary machete edge to it. Or “Read my lips.” The clearer and simpler the things around us appear to be and the louder the spokespeople advocate for “clarity,” the more insidious, dangerous, and outright pernicious this demand turns out to be. So there is a problem; we now find ourselves in a kind of snag or impossibility because I cannot, unless I were to translate this into a sort of dissimulation or something dishonest, I can’t speak for relevance or for the kind of fulfillment of longing that we both nonetheless share.

TAYLOR: That’s exactly why I used the word yearning, because I thought you could speak to the longing or desire for absolute meaning or for wholeness that always eludes us. I suppose I can’t help but relate things to the challenge of making this film. I imagine that some people in the audience will respond to this project with frustration because it won’t provide any answers—it will just raise more questions.

RONELL: I can understand your concern. We should remember and summon all sorts of hermeneutic helpers right now. First of all, the reception end of this film is of importance. The audience has to be brilliant, open, vulnerable, prepared to co-produce genius. If something’s to happen here, that something and that happening can’t be grasped ahead of time, or we can’t be certain to be able to program it ahead of time. We don’t know when, in a speculative sense, the film is going to come out, when people are going to receive it, or even where—where in their orifices, on their bodies. Because Lacan has said, for example, that every word of an intense analytical session—which this may be, for all we know—enters the body and becomes body. We don’t know where this film is going to land, whom it’s going to shake up, wake up, freak out, or bore. But even boredom as an offshoot of melancholy interests me as a response to these dazzling utterances that we are producing. [Laughs.]

Don’t forget that Heidegger ditched philosophy for “thinking” because he thought philosophy as such was still too institutional, academic, too bound up in knowledge and scientific results, too cognitively inflected. So he asked the question, What is called thinking? And he had a lot to say about walks, about going on paths that lead nowhere. One of his important texts is called Holzwege, which means “a path that leads nowhere.” In Greek the word for path is methodos. So we’re on the path, we’re following a method that isn’t determined or entirely programmed.

[Ronell points to a trash can our film crew is about to crash into.] Except there’s garbage, which is part of what we are trying to include in our work and our thought, which is to say, we are attentive still to what remains, what gets tossed away and off. We want to include the trash in many ways, thinking of this refuse according to all sorts of disposal systems.

TAYLOR: Maybe we can begin with the central relationship of speech to writing. And then, I was wondering if you have any thoughts about film as a form of writing, as something that evokes a person’s presence, but of course that person isn’t there. This seems like a subject that may be appropriate given your background both as someone associated with deconstruction and one who has written a lot about technology.

RONELL: Thank you. I’ve been concerned about film and video, in particular in terms of television and different levels of feed, whether live or dead. I have many subpersonalities, a number of intellectual profiles, and one of them involves trying to work on questions concerning technology and media. So certainly I’ve been thinking about transferences and translations into different media and what film inscribes and enacts, and what kind of exteriority it promises in relation to an outside, so I’d have to think about that surprise question.

In regard to film I would say, very provisionally, that what interests me is the medium as something that sustains an “interruption in presence” as it produces the illusion of immediacy and presence. What speaks to me is how film is on the haunted side of things and the way it participates in a kind of mourning disorder, a failure to mourn, to let go, and is at the same time only ever in mourning over its objects.

TAYLOR: I am curious how you feel about the prospect of being represented in that way or to be something that’s haunting?

RONELL: You mean our project now? Oh, it’s very distressing; it’s a disturbance. If I can allow for an autobiographical trace, I think one reason that I took to writing in the way I did was in order to avoid all those empirical scandals that go into getting up in the morning and trying to put oneself together. Each time I teach a class, I am cursing and upset and practically crying because I have to suddenly present my so-called self in front of an audience. Writing (so I tell my so-called self) promised me that I could hide under her skirt, in a way. And thus coming out to talk and work with you is really a personal homage to you, because I tend to avoid this sort of thing, the extreme exposure to which you are subjecting me.

TAYLOR: It’s funny, I’m feeling suddenly relaxed. I’ve been in a state of panic since we started walking. I think it’s good for me to feel what it’s like to be in front of the camera and what a terrifying experience it is to be recorded while having to think on your feet.

RONELL: Or to think with one’s feet. As Nietzsche has said, one must learn to read him by taking one’s boots off.

TAYLOR: Let’s go back to writing and speech and the central status of that relationship in the kind of work you do and in philosophy more generally.

RONELL: Well, writing is what continues to be massively repressed and rejected, as my mentor and friend Derrida pointed out in his sustained reflections on the predicament of writing. Writing has always been associated with the excremental, the secondary. There’s the discussion that Plato has about drugs and writing and how worrisome the introduction of writing is; he sees the invention of writing as a peril. The same way we talk about video games or anything that is related to violence and mimetic impulses, like kids miming or imitating what they see on television, writing was seen to be extremely dangerous when first presented to the king. The king said, If I allow writing into my kingdom, then people will forget everything. Writing, a kind of secondary supplementary device, effaces as it inscribes. It promotes forgetting.

I am reminded of something that happens in Hamlet, something altogether scandalous. After their first interview, which is traumatic and shocking, the ghost of Hamlet’s father says, “Remember me,” which could in English—glorious luscious English—also mean “bring me back my phallus”: re-member me. Hamlet, the son who has just heard the atrocities revealed by his ghost father, is supposed to, according to the codifications and conventions of drama and tragedy, whip out his sword and say, “I will avenge you, Dad!” Instead Hamlet agrees to remember his father but whips out a little writing pad and writes it down, which is a scandal. This kind of shift to writing that Hamlet enacts suggests that he has to put a Post-it on his refrigerator to remember the revealed crime. It’s a note to self: “Your father was murdered by your uncle” or something like that. In this moment there’s the irony of Hamlet forgetting his father, maybe killing his father—maybe this is another parricidal moment—because he whips out the writing pad or his little technoberry.

TAYLOR: I’d like you to continue to articulate this division between speech and writing and the historical privileging of speech over writing. Again, it relates to something I’ve been thinking about in regard to this project, which is film’s relationship to the written word and the fact that filmic language often condenses or simplifies things compared to writing.

RONELL: If I were your analyst I would wonder what makes you say that, because it sounds like it comes from a place of self-humiliation or despair. So if this were an analytic session, I would ask you to say more about the place from which the denigration of filmic writing is coming from because I would differ in this regard: I see film grammar or its particular syntax as something that explores the limits of what can be said and what can be shown. But you may want to say more about why you want to subsume it under other types of writing.

TAYLOR: I’m specifically thinking about the challenge of making a film about philosophy, which obviously has a spoken element but is typically written. Book form allows you to explore something so in depth: three hundred, four hundred, five hundred pages exploring a single concept. Whereas in a feature-length film you have eighty minutes in the form of speech that has been recorded, and in the case of this film, each person has ten minutes.

RONELL: Yes, that is an outrage. I would understand that the others would have ten minutes but to bring me down to ten minutes is inadmissible, there’s no doubt about it. [Laughs.]

But let me say that it’s a matter of a different temporality, a different approach or way of attacking similar problems or issues of, for example, phenomenological import. The film does ask: What can I show? What can I tell? How can I try to make a narrative or destroy a narrative and deconstitute it?

[We begin to pass through the corner of the park where the punks hang out. They don’t respond very warmly to the presence of our camera.] And here you are, opening up to the public’s face our linguistic pollutants. This is also a response to the work we are doing, which is to say that there is some fascination—people are turning their gaze toward this project right here. Very kind, very curious, very intellectually alert, as you can see. Very high on what we are doing. [Some people on the park benches make obscene gestures at the camera; others hide their faces, though a few don’t seem to notice us at all.]

But let me get back to what we were discussing. First of all, for my part, I tried to destroy the sovereignty of the book many years ago, though books have certain claims and pretensions and I’m of course addicted to them, cathected onto them irreversibly. But the hierarchies that begin with the difference you evoked between speech and writing are very dangerous and quite pernicious. Speech is considered to be on the side of presence and fullness and immediacy; by contrast, writing is what always lags behind, needs to be denied. Rousseau always railed against writing. Others railed against writing and always made it part of a logic of substitution: I’d rather be with you than write to you. Then there’s Goethe, who wrote on his mistress’s back, meaning that he already confused those differences and separations. So speech was the living Logos. Writing was always considered to be on the side of death and techné and so on and so forth. It was always the degraded one in any binary standoff. [In the distance a few kids in the background yell “Fuck you” at us.] I think we have a great audience! [Laughs.]

[A teenage punk jumps up and starts skipping alongside us, holding up a bottle of beer for the camera.] When I used to teach at Berkeley, the administrative assistant said she always knew when my seminar was up because these were my students. So you see we’re being squeezed from all sides, including this debilitated side of those who are completely wasted and couldn’t care less. Though I assure you that when they get high and stoned they can have serious and deep reflections about the meaning of being!

TAYLOR: Well, you have written about addiction in your book Crack Wars, so maybe we can take this opportunity to say something about that.

RONELL: I was interested in different types of memory, which is something that we’ve already started to talk about. In Hegel there’s the difference between Erinnerung, which is the internalizing memory when you have something at heart or in your heart and you don’t need to write it down the way Hamlet did. That, in contrast, would be on the side of what he calls Gedächtnis, which refers to the more mechanical and technologically driven prompters. When you have to prompt yourself or remind yourself or write a memo to yourself, that means, as you’re remembering, you’re forgetting or you will have already always forgotten. But then there are other types of memories that have to do with getting high or...