Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Monday, 22 February 2010 The last reel: FacesJohn Cassavetes' grueling 1968 masterpiece Faces takes place
over about 18 hours in the life of an upper- The final reel takes place during a morning after a night in which both husband and wife have pursued adulterous affairs and the wife, in the immediate aftermath of hers, has taken an overdose of sleeping pills, only to be revived by the male prostitute who serviced her the night before. The film ends in the silence of recognition. In this last reel, Seymour Cassel is Chet, the gigolo; Lynn Carlin plays Maria Forst; and John Marley (who a few years later would play the film producer Jack Woltz in The Godfather) is Richard Forst: Posted in /Film Monday, 22 February 2010 A Critique of Tragedy 10Schopenhauer's radicalism did not lie in the metaphysics laid out in
the first book of The World as Will and Representation — it
is a distilled and corrected Kantianism that can be found there, and
Schopenhauer paid his debt to it. Apart from his personal example as
explored by Nietzsche in "Schopenhauer as Educator," it lay instead in three
things: first, his identification of the will as the thing-in-itself (as
dark and pessimistic as this was, it is not for that reason invalid or
untrue); second, his placing of aesthetic experience above that of science
or abstract philosophy as the means to experience of the noumenal; and
third, his integration of Eastern philosophies into his own Western
tradition. But it is the ironic fate of visionary radicals like
Schopenhauer that history has its joke: for it is necessarily incomplete
at the time of its writing. Schopenhauer had completed the first volume of
his magnum opus in 1818/19, a time during which the bloody recognitions of
the French Revolution were fresh in the European mind, and the Industrial
Revolution was just beginning. As newly industrialized cities experienced
their explosive growth in the following two decades, Modernism itself
emerged as a peculiarly democratic and urban response in the work of
Baudelaire and Büchner, both of whom were likely directly influenced
by Schopenhauer's philosophy (see, for example, Shehira Doss-Davezac's
essay "Schopenhauer according to the Symbolists: the philosophical roots
of late nineteenth- But this urbanization and industrialization also called for new economics and new psychology which emerged with the formal theory of communism and class struggle of Karl Marx and the exhilarating psychological findings of Sigmund Freud. The years 1818-1914 were a time of relative peace in Europe; Marx's surplus value (which Bataille would then reconfigure as excess or plethora) was absorbed by the growth of the cities and capital itself. But, as Bataille would suggest, this excess energy created by industrialism and capitalism would burst from their limits: too large for the cities and the banks, it would then emerge as war or in some other manner. Ultimately, in 1945, its energy would literally explode, laying waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Asia; its administrative energy in the system of the concentration and death camps scattered through central Europe. These were phenomenal manifestations of the Schopenhauerian
thing- In comedy the anxiety of the self is dissipated in laughter; in melodrama, in tears; in agitprop, in anger. In tragedy it finds a silence in which the self is forced to turn inward, its anxiety pure and complete; it is faced full, without escape. Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here. Posted in /Tragedy |