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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.

Published online: 27 Oct 2015.

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D espite being usually considered the fore-bears of diverging schools of thought

that 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 philosophers’ability to detect and resist philosophy’s“chronic 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 confidence 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.I’m already coming from somewhere else,or I’m 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 beaffirmed beyond the neutralizing form that an

apparent overcoming of the transcendental tra-dition has confined it to (finitude 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 TerrenceMalick’s films: “if in relation to objects capableof such self-manifestation human beings arereduced in significance [… ] 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 world’s 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 infi-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 configuration according tothe logic of “struction,” the passage between“more than one” and “less than one” withoutthe mediation of the One (What’s 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 firmly 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 prolificturbulence. 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 film.Cavell’s The World Viewed is explicitlywritten in this direction. How else is one toread the account of our age as one in which“our 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 film. 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: film enters philosophythrough a specific scrutiny of the question ofthe world, a scrutiny that attempts to illuminatethe question of the world’s sense without thisreferring to anything beyond this world here.At the same time film 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 film 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 film 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 film byclaiming that film exercises a resistance to world-views: taking views, in Cavell’s words; imposingvisions, in Nancy’s phrasing. In the expression“worldviews” one hears echoes of Heidegger’sThe Age of the World Picture (Cavell mentionsthe influence this text, once avoided, exercises onhis own). It is the very idea of an “image” or“picture” of the world that allows us to graspthe essential nature of our age. Heidegger speci-fies that the expression has to be understood inthe relation between its two constitutive terms.“World” indicates here the totality of “what is”and 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 a“world.” Thus “world-picture” means that“what 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 first is in being andonly is in being to the extent that it is set up byman, who represents and sets forth” (QuestionConcerning 130–31). Man essentially encounters“what 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 man’s role is limited to thepreservation of “the horizon of unconcealment”(147), with the world-picture man proceeds“into the unlimited sphere of possible objectifi-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 man’s 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, because“it 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 objectification it has usheredinto the world. Because of the priority accordedin this movement to objectification 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 first consequence, then, of film’s resist-ance to worldviews is that films 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 film: to recapture our relation to theworld as one that is not based on knowing as cer-tainty derived from objectification 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, filmreopens at once the question of the world andthe question of philosophy. What film 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 the

world

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 film 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 cinema’s 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 a“regarding.” As such, cinema (this cinema,but then possibly cinema as such) develops notan “image” of the world but a regard for theworld’s “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 world’s patency is never aplacing or being in view but rather the affirma-tion that, to borrow Gerard Granel’s words onKant, “to appear is by no means a ‘moment’

occurring to a reality posited somewhere else(or ‘in itself’)” (L’Equivoque ontologique 54;my trans.). The evidential force of the world isthe limiting of an unlimited reality, thesharing out of singular finitude. 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 definition of the real: it isnot what is to be signified, but what runs upagainst or violates signification” (Gravity 69).Cinema deals with the world as a force strippedof significations coming from elsewhere. Thusthe realism of cinema for Nancy does notimply the firm 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 Cavell’s idea that cinemaallows us to “guess the unseen from the seen”(Themes 14).

conditions of a life

In his account of film 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: “film’spresenting of the world by absenting us from itappears as confirmation of something alreadytrue of our existence” (226). Cinema’s 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 West’s 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 figure and strategy.

Cavell’s contention is precisely that this dis-tance or loss that film confirms does not (orshould not) mark or sanction our despair butinaugurate and rekindle our interest. The

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truth that Cavell’s philosophy wants for itself –in inheriting Descartes, Emerson, Thoreau,Wittgenstein and Heidegger among others – isthe acknowledgement that “the human crea-ture’s 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 film our relation to theworld is never at rest but taken up every timeanew. This makes of film not simply a figureof the conditions that have brought it about,but an active reorganization of these conditions.In other words, the world of film 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 clarification.The first 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 signification, 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 film has not provided the solution tothe problem of the world. This problem is notone for which it is possible (or advised) to finda 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 film 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 world’s 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 useGranel’s 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 thing’s 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). Thefilmmaker 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 fixed points in cinema – thereforeno signs to decipher. With film, 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 can’tmaster. The capturing of images in a film is acapture only inasmuch as it is a delivering[ … ] a realization of the real” (Evidence 39).In this sense Nancy’s 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 first 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, firmness, 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 that“everything refers back to everything and thuseverything shows itself through everything”(What’s These Worlds 54), without this referralelevating itself beyond this world here and thefortuity and contingency of its sense. Theaddress and response are never final, the worldis the very impulse of an unfinishable. Film’swork 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 after”because 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 reconfiguration of experienceand therefore of the world” (ibid.). A reconfi-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 filmmaker looks once and then he toobecomes passive and disappears betweenwhat he has rendered and what he didn’twant. (L’Exercice 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 satisfies for Cavellour wish, which modern philosophy hadplaced as our limit, to see “the world itself”and therefore to fulfil “the condition ofviewing as such” (World Viewed 102). Film’se-ducation lies in its disclosure of this condition:film forces us to face our yearning to frame theworld without our framing of it being revealedas ours.

The world of film 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 “film returns tous and extends our first fascination withobjects, with their inner and fixed lives”(World Viewed 43). From this Cavell con-cludes, then, that from film 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 film 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 Wordsworth’spoetry 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 final sceneof Rosemary’s 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 brother’s girlfriend or Chopin’s 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 itself“awakens 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.

Cavell’s interpretation of Frank Capra’s ItHappened One Night (1934) offers anotherinstance of this. It is worth mentioning thatCavell’s essay frames the film as an explorationof knowledge and the limits Kant set for it. Thefilm shows for Cavell that substituting knowl-edge for acknowledgement produces a specifickind 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 significance of itsspecific 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 one’saccess 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 flashes 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 subject’s 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 film (the passivity it is said to impose)as having an intrinsic force of philosophicalinstruction resonates with a specific aversioninternal to the work of philosophy. There is inphilosophical practice an inclination to viewthinking as grasping, making and clutching.The intolerance for film manifests philosophy’sintolerance 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 film 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 first its very rever-sal. Film’s 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 film, philosophy does not speakfirst 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 Emerson’s Experience onereads “Patience and patience, we shall win atlast” (310). Cavell responds that this “is thework of realizing your world” (Emerson’sTranscendental Etudes 136). This realizationis, like the one of film, the possibility toendure and bear the excess of the world’spressure. Cavell concludes the passage bywriting that “the recovery from loss is [… ] afinding 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 conflict of interest was reported bythe author.

note

1 It is worth stressing how in this term one should

also hear the “art of ‘deremption’ (dessaisie)” (my

trans.) invoked by Granel in his remarks on Rainer

Schurmann’s Broken Hegemonies (Apolis 123).

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Daniele Rugo106 Gaskell BuildingDepartment of Social Sciences, Media &CommunicationsBrunel University LondonUxbridge UB8 3PHUKE-mail: daniele.rugo@brunel.ac.uk

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