Not an Easy Vitalism

Spinoza’s philosophy places a radical importance on the present, the now, for any form of politics. Politics incurs violence, change or decaying sustainability in the present–not the past, nor the future. And yet, many political philosophical discourses get lost, mired in the past or planning for a future on which it has no jurisdiction.

In Political Treatise, Spinoza privileges the now of existence in opposition to two other philosophical modalities, perhaps: pessimism and optimism. Nostalgia hides or indulges on latent sense of defeat, whereas the messianic future hinges on an irrational sense of optimism that can never justify itself. According to Spinoza, the optimists are those who strive to eliminate the passions and thus establish action on the opposite of the affects. He considers that ilk of philosophy to be less ethics than satire. The pessimists, on the other hand, declare that when it comes to human affairs the vices of private persons interacting in public will never be effectively suppressed. Spinoza denounces the moralistic entrenchment of the pessimists’ position.

Rejecting the pessimists’s emphasis of the past or the optimists’ blind bet on the future, Spinoza focuses on the present and declares that in the space of the now ethics comes into being.

Just recently, Dmitris Vardoulakis published a collection of essays on the 16th century philosopher, Spinoza Now, co-edited by Christopher Norris (University of Minnesota Press). A must read for those who want a concise and persuasive historical narrative of the current body of knowledge on Spinoza and his philosophy.

The presence of non-existence

Great cinema elicits complaint: why can’t all films be as good; reproduce such a terrifying experience; represent banality in such a wondrous way? Great cinema cannot be adequately described in one word. Thus, we resort to facile qualifiers such as the one that begins this paragraph. After all, what does great mean? Whatever it is, it is unfailingly sticky. It sticks precisely because it denies simple categories and easy explications.

La moustache, is both a metaphysical and phenomenological feast, all complexity and delight wrapped in a little more than 90 minutes of film rolling against any logic that attempts to unravel the film as such. La moustache builds one scene upon another scene of intense possibility as well as sheer impossibility. And in the ecstasis that engulfs that protagonist, the spectator begins to feel equally trapped, timidly hoping for a quick resolution that will shed forgiving clarity on everyone, the protagonist, his wife, and most importantly, the viewer him or herself. Clarity and certitude, the troubled viewer seems to believe at some point during the film, will cause relief and pleasure. A hoax. Relief and pleasure seldom coexist. And the maker of La moustache shows to be acutely aware of that. By not facilitating relief, by constantly shooting down it rearing head, the writer and director of the film insures uncomfortable, extreme pleasure that generates a chaotic stream of thoughts. Stream of thoughts, multiple and diverse, flows and clashes with no resolution in sight.

Forget names. The particularities of the narrative, in some ways, prove to be merely accidental. It matters little or nothing that he is an architect of the privileged upper class. That his girlfriend has a suspect past ought to mean no more, no less than that. The physical details scattered throughout the film, however, are not. They matter for the say exactly what they keep quiet about. The details in the film do not speak symbolically or allegorically. They stand exactly for what they are. And when we attempt to force them to say more, the narrative in its filmic form breaks down as pleasure begins to dissipate, slowly but definitively. The photo submerging in the ocean must be only that, a photo submerging in the ocean. The reason the protagonist throws the photo, however, demands interpretation, which, nonetheless, must remained unfinished in utter dissatisfaction. Why he throws the photo becomes a question simply because he had first chosen to keep it. There is no psychology. Simply a choice.

Not a thriller. Not just a drama. The film is, instead, a philosophical quest. What does it mean to be oneself? What are the external and internal forces that delineate and substantiate one’s sense of self? What are the modern conditions that permit me to declare….”therefore, I am”? What are the ever shifting predicates of today? La moustache does not answer any of these questions. It becomes great cinema precisely because it limits itself to posing the questions rather than configuring answers that would inexorably betray the impossible profundity of the questions? One could say that if the film offers any semblance of possible answer is that any answer resides in the interrogation itself. That is, the extent of the answer does not exceed the tenuous domain of the query itself.

La moustache will leave you dissatisfied–deeply. But you will find almost obscene pleasure in that dissatisfaction. You will become the site in which Cartesian and empirical processes will clash and reveal their insufficiencies. In those moments during and after viewing the film, you will return to the visuality of the film rather than its narrative per se. To the photograph. The ship. The crowed. The ugly jacket. To the non-present moustache. And if good fortunate meets you halfway, you will find yourself wondering: what is the meaning of something’s non-existence?

Linearity

It has been my experience for the past ten years that producing thoughts that bear a linear, methodical and consequential coherence involves excruciating pain. I blame the technological epoch we live in. If Benjamin thought that the Parisian arcades represented the architectural fracture of a society that no longer coalesced a homogeneous, cohering culture, I say that the situation has not gotten any less so or simpler. Everything around us, sensorially, points to fracture. Fragmentation is the aesthetics, as well as ethos, by which we socialize and even attempt to define ourselves and the person next to us. Fragmentation reveals, empirically, the deep relatedness among things and persons by which everything we know and can speak of, attains meaning, material presence, metaphysical presence. Fragmentation refuses linear ordering or codifying. Benjamin spoke of constellations, but ultimately his constellations subscribed to a linear composition. That is, things in Benjamin’s constellation adopted significance by becoming ruins that by necessity re-iterated the historiography of past, present and future. If linearity was the method that organized social phenomena and epistemology before the 20th century, well, linearity no longer holds hegemony. What is the current codifying method that turns nothing into something, that manages to skirt around origin and end in order to sustain duration as such and the duration of things, a process that in itself becomes a politics of things?