BEST OF 2008 LIST

So the year is almost over and it is time for my annual list. I hope the following is useful to those looking for new film and music. I would very much like to check out others' lists and would be happy to burn a mixtape with some of my top music of 08 on it if anyone is interested. Comments and discussion are always fun too.

My 10 Favourite Films of 2008:

Amongst my favourite films in 2008, none are quite alike. For quite some time now I have been drawn to minimalism in all mediums of art and my favourite film of the year demonstrated the extent to which narrative cinema is able to strip itself down while remaining powerful and affecting. The opposite of pared down was the latest Bond installment, which is ideally watched after reading Juan Cole's essential commentary on its Bolivarian undertones. Schroeter didn’t think his body of work was crazy enough so he outdid himself again. Kaufman showed himself to be as talented a director as he is a screenwriter. And Haneke attempted the task of Borges’ Pierre Menard and decided to remake his exact film in a different time and arguably to different results. Kurosawa and Denis offered us something of departure from their usual work. Du Welz’s film was not perfect but served as a fascinating follow-up to Calvaire and Béart was absolutely fantastic in it. And Reygadas and Garrone gave us a very raw and unromanticized look at two very different -- but in another sense extremely similar -- cultures centered on the family.

10. Michael Haneke – Funny Games (US)

9. Matteo Garrone – Gomorrah

8. Charlie Kaufman – Synocdoche, NY

7. Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Tokyo Sonata

6. Claire Denis – 35 Rhums

5. Marc Forster – Quantum of Solace

4. Carlos Reygadas – Silent Light

3. Fabrice Du Welz - Vinyan

2. Werner Schroeter – Nuit de Chien

1. Albert Serra - Birdsong (El Cant des ocells)


My 20 Favourite Albums of 2008:

2008 marked a further departure from the rockism that had plagued much of my past. This move, however, hadn’t been intentional. Most of the heavy-hitters failed to impress and I wasn’t able to spend enough time with the new Deerhunter or New Age to really appreciate them. Though my indie choices are far from challenging, I must admit to initially hating Vampire Weekend, a band who has since turned New England into my personal utopia. I was also surprised to find myself really liking the new release by Kings of Leon, a band I hadn’t ever liked before.

In terms of electronic music 2008 was a curious year for me. I could not help but feel that the oft-cited sound Cut Copy, Crystal Castles, and Hot Chip were offering was nothing more than the Michael Crichton airport novels of the electronic music world. But Minimal, more now than ever, proved that it was not going anywhere. Having not heard Sool before seeing Ellen Allien play with Sascha Funke, I was quite surprised to hear that she had taken a very large step in that direction. In the more experimental corner of the electronic world, there was also Jeck and Fennesz who, well, have a tendency to make my list every year they put something out.

2008 was an especially bad year for stubborn purists of any stripe, as the good stuff was all over the map. On one end of the musical spectrum Jacaszek’s album was the most beautiful thing I heard in 2008 and on the other end of the spectrum I think it would be safe to say that our collective patience was well rewarded with the eventual release of the equally impressive Tha Carter III (especially the tracks with Babyface and Bobby Valentino).

20. Paavoharju – Laulu Laakson Kukista [Fonal]

19. Luomo – Convivial [HUUME]

18. Fennesz – Black Sea [Touch]

17. Manuel Zurria – Repeat! [Die Schachtel]

16. Marcel Dettmann - Berghain 02 [Ostgut]

15. Ellen Allien – Sool [BPitch Control]

14. Sten – The Essence [Dial]

13. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes [Sub Pop]

12. Chromatics – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack IV…Night Drive [Italians Do It Better]

11. Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Hommage à Messiaen [Deutsche Grammophon]

10. Philip Jeck – Sand [Touch]

9. Ricardo Villalobos – Vasco EP [Perlon]

8. Clark – Turning Dragon [Warp]

7. Kings of Leon – Only By The Night [RCA]

6. M83 – Saturdays = Youth [Mute]

5. Lil Wayne – Tha Carter III [Cash Money]

4. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend [XL]

3. Jacaszek – Treny [Miasmah]

2. Justus Köhncke – Safe and Sound [Kompakt]

1. Sascha Funke - Mango [BPitch Control]


My Favourite Reissue of 2008:

Narrowly edging out Basic Channel’s BCD-2 is the comparably important reissue of Wolfgang Voigt’s extremely influential ambient/drone project. Beyond its seminal stature in the history of electronic music, I would also venture to say that the sublimity of this collection finds its true peers in the sacred minimalism of Tavener and Pärt.

1. Gas – Nah und Fern [Kompakt]


My 10 Favourite Songs of 2008:

These were the tracks that stood out in 08. Two tracks come from the latest installment of the always reliable Kompakt Total series. The remixes here are all great improvements on their original tracks. Of the songs here, I believe only the Alex Smoke track wasn’t released on its own as a single, but can be found on his three-track Vaporub EP. It was very difficult to nail down a single best track featuring T-Pain (with ‘Can’t Believe It’ representing Mr. Najm at his catchiest and "Chopped and Screwed" at his most innovative) but 'She Got It' won as his strongest song to date. The R&B tracks on Lil Wayne’s album are also excellent, but I’ve recommended his entire album in my top 20 albums.

10. Ne-Yo – Closer [Def Jam]

9. Alex Smoke – Clapface [Hum and Haw]

8. Sascha Dive – Deepest America (Moodymann Remix) [Ornaments]

7. Spencer Parker – Improvised Minotaur [REKIDS]

6. 2 Pistols ft. T-Pain – She Got It [Republic]

5. The Whitest Boy Alive – Golden Cage (Fred Falke Remix) [Modular]

4. Dubshape – Droplets (Early Night Mix) [Kompakt]

3. SoundStream – “Live” Goes On [Sound Stream]

2. Morgan Geist - Detroit (Carl Craig’s c2RMX2) [Environ]

1. Jonas Bering – I Can’t Stop Loving You [Kompakt]


My Favourite Blog of 2008:

I learned a great deal from this blog in 08. It is clean, current, updated regularly, and is a reliable source for discovering (and attaining) new electronic music and viewing cutting-edge, contemporary art. I met the mind behind the blog this summer and she’s good people.

1. Basic Sounds


My Favourite TV Show of 2008:

In recent years television has been getting better and better and this year was no exception. Strong candidates included the recent season of FX’s The Shield and AMC’s Mad Men and interesting newcomers HBO’s True Blood and FX’s Sons of Anarchy. But, ultimately, the final season of the Best Show on TV remained the best show on TV:

1. The Wire – Season 5.

My Favourite Magazine of 2008:

With articles centered on a single topic but culled from various first-rate sources throughout history and across all disciplines and cultures, this journalhas something to offer everyone while remaining rigorously academic. As magazine readership continues to fall, this journal, with its ability to bring Foucault together with Peter Abelard, Seneca with Stanley Fish, Don Delillo with Helen Keller (and that is all within one issue), stands as a publisher’s answer to the hypertextualized internet age. That there even existed a single magazine that was at once readily available at your local bookstore and also intellectually stimulating came as a pleasant surprise to me.

1. Lampham’s Quarterly

10 films of the year

10 films of 2007

If last year was the year of the documentaries for me (The Ister and When the Levees Break both ranking high on my top 10) this year is the year of duos with 3 of 10 films coming from two person teams (No Country, Europa, and Darkness). While I was less than enthusiastic about Battle in Heaven, I'd be very surprised if Silent Light (a story about infidelity in a Mexican Mennonite community that is apparently a revamp of Dreyer's Ordet), when I eventually get to see it, doesn't rank with the best of 2007. The disappointments of the year were Andrey Zyvagintsev's The Banishment, two large steps back from his formidable debut, The Return, and Monte Hellman's short, Stanley's Girlfriend (although a friend, well-versed in the work of Monte Hellman, ranks this with the best of the year, so I wouldn't discourage anyone from checking it out).

Here are my personal favourites:

1. Cristian Nemescu: California Dreamin' (Endless)
A humourous but never infantalizing look at contemporary Eastern European geopolitics (something in itself an accomplishment) and the pervasive effect globalisation via interventionism has on ordinary lives. I reviewed the perfect balance of social commentary with bittersweet humour of this film earlier in the year (on this blog), and my memory of the powerful impact this film had on me still resonates loudly many months after.

2. Paul Greengrass: Bourne Ultimatum
Preempted by two excellent forerunners, Greengrass completes his subversion of machismo with a complete desouvrement of the action-thiller genre via the very foundational aspects of the genre -- the most Hegelian (and thereby greatest) of all action films in virtue of being the exact opposite of the action film.


3. Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet: Europa 2005 - 27 Octobre
Significantly departing from the original specified thematic premise of re-envisioning Rossellini's Europa '51, Straub-Huillet decide to instead focus on the immediacy of the original with their own exploration of the final straw that led to the recent French suburban riots. A meditative yet ugly piece, Straub-Huillet take us to the high-voltage electrical transformer park where two youths met their death at the hands of French police (consequently starting the riots of the summer) and slowly and repeatedly show us the place of death in a manner meant to evoke both anger and mourning.

4. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen: No Country for Old Men
(Almost) every critic has applauded the innovative way the Coens have given us two films and they all predictably prefer the second, more serious, subtler of the two. But the strength of No Country is not in it being two films, but in the very fact that it (specifically in the third act) disallows this binary set-up, entirely excluding the possibility of choosing to simply watch the former, cat-and-mouse thriller version, leaving only the one film. Appropriate to the sense of helplessness -- or at least death of the belief in teleological progress - driven home in this film, this screencap seems to reference Marker's Grin Without a Cat.

5. Jacques Rivette: Ne Touchez Pas La Hache
Previously underwhelmed with this Rivette entry, most likely due to the unfair expectations of wanting to see Rivette at his most experimental, after sitting with me for awhile -- and in the meantime reading not Balzac, but Marquez's tale of sexual tension, Love in the time of Cholera - I came to appreciate the rich detail and the decidedly prissy caution of the characters, all of which contributed to a charmingly funny tale of unsatisfying lives lived adjudicating desire.

6. Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne: Dans l'Obscurité (Darkness)
In this short for Chacun son cinéma the Dardennes offer their homage to Bresson, but in their characteristic Levinasian manner, evidenced by their phenomenology of the ethical call of the face and the violence of focusing on/describing (objectifying) the parts of the body. This shift of relation to violence and then back to relation, ad infinitum, is seen here to never be anticipated (we don't know what the child is doing or why) and always only seen after the fact.

7. Anton Corbijn: Control
The autistic, cold look at Ian Curtis's life excels in focus and in delivering a tightly-woven film that presents to every fan exactly what they already know. Never, for a second, is there an exploration of Thatcherism, the underlying factors that might have contributed to an epidemic of apathy in the youth, Joy Division's lasting legacy, nor a concrete answer to the question posed by the final act of suicide. Corbijn does not make Curtis into a saint, excusable in his actions, nor even likeable. Instead we are offered a story that affords us (as close as is possible) that confused, unilluminated coldness of 1980.

8. Tony Gilroy: Michael Clayton
This is as close as we are likely to get to Hitchcock nowadays. It is hardly surprising that the mind behind Michael Clayton is the same man behind the Bourne series who, once again, takes the structure of the thriller, ups the standard level of intensity, literacy, and intelligent social criticism, and ends up with something much more.


9. Judd Apatow: Knocked Up
Far better than its overrated brother, Superbad, Knocked Up is a believable and heartwarming comedy. Its crudeness never lends itself to the depravity and nihilism of many contemporary comedies and, instead, it opts to be one of the most humane and personal films of the year. A major departure from the stock characters of most comedies, Knocked Up offers us real people who we can feel for and laugh with.

10. David Fincher: Zodiac
In many ways Zodiac feels like a filmic version of HBO's The Wire (itself a television show of filmic proportions): we are led into another world -- no, an ultra-specialized allegorical slice of our world -- that comes to represent our word in its entirety, a world that can hardly carry itself under its own weight of endless facts and prematurely-ending hunting paths, from which, underneath, escapes a pieced-together narrative, (a) life. This film, one we might dare to call simple or minimalistic, sure goes a long way in attempting to shed light on what we might (overzealously?) call the human condition.

10 Albums of 2007

10 Albums of 2007



1. Pantha du Prince: This Bliss
The best techno of the year -- think of cold, minimal, technical beats underneath warm, illustrious chimes and you have a rough idea.




2. Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew: Spirit If...
Wasn’t as immediately likeable as previous BSS releases but slowly built its way into some of my favourite songs of the year and maybe my favourite BSS album. Once again, the songs come together to almost form one epic, multidirectional song.

3. Ne-yo: Because of You
The best thing to happen to Soul/R&B since Gaye (and even since Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On) puts out his best album yet.




4. Gui Boratto: Chromophobia
To steal Mallory O’Donnell’s accurate formula at Stylus: “minimal + maximal = magical”




5. Björk: Volta
There is, regrettably, a track or two that shows Björk here not at her best (“Declare Independence” stands out in this department), but the rest of the songs make up for it with their over-the-top energy and experimentation, proving that she still has a lot left to give (evidenced by the most amazing concert I have ever been to, this September). Volta is one of her best in quite awhile ...unfortunately it didn’t include her breathtaking recent “Boho Dance”cover.

6. The Field: From Here We Go Sublime
Axel Willner steps up with an acutely constructed album that proves he is ready to meet the hype of his previous singles with diversity and a perfect ear for innovative samples.



7. Justice: †
There was a new Radiohead album with a sales gimmick and a return to the game by a bunch of bands that broke through (and died) in 2003, but what the year will really be remembered for is the year of Justice and their ubiquitous “D.A.N.C.E.” Lucky for us, the rest of the album not only equals, but actually exceeds their internet-hyped hit single (which, for the record, has produced some even greater remixes), with the apex coming with the Goblin samples and with the track “Stress,” a brutal spy-movie-car-chase-scene theme song.

8. M.I.A.: Kala
M.I.A. shows us that she is more than just beats and gunshots (which are most definitely here, and in full force) and that the true, unrelenting political power of her music comes from her lyrics and her powerful voice.


9. James Blackshaw: The Cloud of Unknowing
A short acoustic 12-string symphony that is somehow paradoxically both soothing and eerie.



10. José González: In Our Nature
My first run-in with González, like many, was his cover of The Knife’s “Heartbeats,” a track I instantly fell in love with. Not letting me down with these expectations, this album, full of all-original material, might be one of the main reasons I asked for all my birthday and Christmas gifts this year to be combined in order to buy a new acoustic guitar.

Choses Secrètes

Choses Secrètes (2002) Jean-Claude Brisseau

Choses Secrètes seems to hail itself as the death of the notion of sexual liberation, in the Marcusean sense of sexual politics as an alternate ‘erotic sense of reality’ at odds with late capitalism. Instead, Brisseau’s film posits the claim that sexuality in no longer viable as a means of subversion and, instead, the perverse has, in fact, been nicely co-opted into liberalism, given a niche where it can play with itself while turning a profit. We, here, have Brisseau defending a very anti-Makavejevian thesis -- at completely odds with the Reichian ideas concerning sexuality on display in WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie -- a thesis rarely presented in film, or elsewhere (especially in France), where sex is made banal, or worse, into a powerful tool for, not against, capitalism. For better or worse, the sheer radicality of such a statement is impressive.

The story concerns two women, Sandrine and Nathalie, who spend a great deal of time using their looks and public displays of affection (or, raw material) to perfect their craft of sexual seduction (or, means of production of capital). When finally confident enough in their skill, they take their game to the corporate world in an attempt to “climb the social ladder”, as Nathalie (at home in a role perfectly suited for Isabelle Huppert) puts it, sleeping their way to the top. The game of sexuality turns out to be as cut-throat as that of the corporate one, where love of another is a great expense, as Christophe, the banking magnate, quickly shows them. The tension between the two women and their sexual conquests, especially once Christophe is introduced, turns the film into an almost comedic tragedy of operatic proportions. Earlier in the film Nathalie described her sexual intentions as strictly personal fulfilment of pleasure but, as she strays from this goal, she sacrifices her power and falls out of the game. What becomes striking, in the third act especially, is the lack of any taboo at this point on the social ladder – there is nothing off-limits or in any way shocking to the wealthy elite, so, at this point, to phrase sexuality as something holding the power to disrupt seems embarrassing outmoded. The femme fatale, here, for the first time, to my knowledge, has lost her privileged position as something glorified. The sexual prowess of the femme fatale is instead shown as an instantiation of an appetite, which, being no different than entrepreneurial ambition, is synonymous with the motivation that drives all capitalistic enterprise: the violent will to control one’s surroundings to achieve an unmediated position.

Brisseau captures this sentiment with a final orgy scene (which puts Eyes Wide Shut to shame in terms of excess) depicting something of a sexual royalty, where sex has become the new economics, but the rules of the game are the same and they all concern a love of power. But perhaps the stakes are higher this time around, for while capitalism has easily made room for different sexualities, it still cannot accommodate different economic alternatives (where the true power of subversion still lies). This needn’t be taken as fatalistic but, instead, as a necessarily provocative alarm for contemporary identity politics in an attempt to wake it from its complacent high opinion of itself as something more than merely excessive individuation, very at home with 21st century liberalism. For better or worse, Choses Secrètes drives this home harder than any film before it.

The Missing Dialogue in Hegel's Dialectic

In his discussion of finitude leading to the bad infinite and finally to the true infinite, Hegel was interested in articulating the continuity of discourse in the move from, in the words of Blanchot, “undeveloped interiority to the exteriorization that alienates it, and from this alienation that exteriorizes up to an accomplished and reinteriorized plenitude.” (1) It is here where many have been concerned with the possibility of the other being reduced to the same.

It seems that it is in the move from the bad infinite to the true infinite that certain contemporary Continental philosophers have wished to declare themselves at odds with the self-mastery aspect of the true infinite, and, instead, move to ensure a place for the speech of another. This désoevrement (unworking) of the Hegelian position has taken the form of an “infinite conversation,” at home in the bad infinite. For Gadamer, this infinite conversation is dialogue, which is infinite in virtue of it being unendingly finite. That is to say that dialogue always suspends the end or perfection of understanding. But such need not take the form of a messianism, where the end (the final interpretation, the reinteriorization of the finite) is currently a lack, that eternal possibility of a yet-to-come. The defense of the bad infinite need not be configured, as Caputo has claimed of Gadamer(2), as the optimistic holding out for that which cannot yet be said. Instead, the lack of completeness can be seen as further determined by the limit of situatedness and temporality that is assumed in Gadamer’s ontology of human understanding. On temporality, Gadamer writes that “the truly experienced man knows that he is master neither of time nor the future.”(3) Both language and history have prefigured, or effected, in the sense of Wirkungsgeschichte, any potential telling of history we might partake in and any language we might speak. Conceptual thinking has a blindness towards language, and it is here that effective history is forgotten.

For Gadamer, language, as dialogical, takes the form of the question-and-answer, which has the effect of turning each of our interpretations into an answer, whose sense is already determined by the pre-given question it is responding to. The dialectic of interpretation, then, is already predetermined by the dialectic of dialogue (question-and-answer). The self-movement of language – as question-and-answer – seems neglected in Hegel’s consideration of language as merely statements. This neglect can be seen to have led Hegel’s Logic to ignore that which precedes its beginning. Said differently, Gadamer gives us reason to be skeptical about the purity of the Logic’s starting-point. For Gadamer, the infinite dialogue precedes the beginning.

A few questions present themselves at this point: Has Hegel neglected the conception of language as dialogical and, in so doing, neglected the primordiality of language and the finitude it implies? And, what effect does seeing language as inherently dialogical and, thus, every beginning as a response, have on Hegel’s starting point to the Logic? This is all to ask: must Hegelian dialectic retrieve itself in hermeneutics?

(1)Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, 15.
(2)John D. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), chapter 2.
(3)Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 320-321.
-See James Risser's "In the Shadow of Hegel" in Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 2, 2002, for a deeper analysis of this very topic.

TIFF 07

Due to the fact that the start of classes happened to fall on the Toronto International Film Festival, I was only able to take in two films. But, given the importance of choosing wisely under these circumstances, I don't at all regret the ones I finally ended up with. And it was especially nice to be able to catch the second film with Doug Cummings (who has written some of his own thoughts on the films he was able to take in on his always thought-provoking blog, filmjourney).

California Dreamin' (2007) Cristian Nemescu


As is well known, the director of California Dreamin’ (Endless), Cristian Nemescu, died in an untimely car accident cutting short his career along with his feature debut. As unfortunate as this is to the future of Romanian cinema, this story surrounding the film seems to have had the effect of overshadowing the film’s own merits. On the other hand, this news might draw some otherwise overlooked attention to this amazing piece of filmic cultural commentary.

I have often found the certain brand of humour employed in recent Eastern European films to be confusing, often uncomfortable and, at its worst, self-deprecating. An example of what I mean can be found in Kusturica’s Underground. In the case of Underground, I got the feeling that here was a film that seemed to be trying to reach out for recognition beyond Yugoslavia and thereby decided that self-mockery was the best way to do this. While not at all a film which panders to be anything but Yugoslavian, as there are a great deal of cultural subtleties on display, it felt as if it were less a celebration of Yugoslav culture and more an intentional parody of its distinctions, pandering for the purposes of pan-European acceptance. I raise this example to distinguish it from the humour Nemescu brings to his film, which serves the exact opposite purpose at heart. This is simultaneously a deadly serious film and an incredibly funny one.

Hans-Georg Gadamer said something to the fact that satirical inversion (of meaning) presupposes the world will recognize its own perversion in its inversion and, subsequently, see its true possibilities. Satire, then, shows the wrongness of the world as it is, exposing its moral hypocrisy.(1) Nemescu uses satirical humour in two ways: first, to show the differences between the American and Romanian approaches to war; two, to comment on Romania’s own willingness to buy into the myth of America.

In the first case we have Doiaru, a railway station chief who, for reasons slowly revealed to us throughout the film, chooses to act the role of the bureaucratic legalist, who decides to delay a train full of American soldiers indefinitely, with deliberate self-satisfaction. Captain Doug Jones, of the American army, is completely distraught about the possibility of his cargo (communication equipment at one time referred to, by the Romanians, as glorified phones) not making their strict deadline. This dichotomy is set up in a way which is intended to poke fun at the self-seriousness of the Americans, once again involved in a war which in no way concerns them, of which they have no real attachment or understanding, taking on the familiar role of world-saviours. The apparent differences in response to war marks this first type of humour, here applied, as social criticism, to the grave self-seriousness of American meddling.

In the second case we have a village of Romanians, led by an enterprising Mayor, shown as being capable of doing anything in order to get close to the American soldiers, to vicariously live through them in their previously unimagined, but for the moment fully realized, proximity to the ‘land of the free.’ And out come generations of pent-up fantasies waiting to be let out: the American flags are set up in town hall, that star-spangled tie the mayor owns finally comes to life, an oversexed reenactment of a Hammer-style Dracula performance is able to be shown to an appreciative audience, a small-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower serves its once ill-imagined tourist purposes. And of course, those with limited English quickly move up the social strata to be used by those attempting to communicate to the American soldiers. Here, Nemescu pokes fun of the lengths to which a community will go in order to hide their own culture in order to seem more American. The local boys are forgotten for the handsome soldiers and promises of being whisked off to the never-neverland of the USA.

This particular instance of American interventionism has the effect, in the film, of dividing the community, as is often the case. And the message we take from this is that while interventionism might be disastrous for the world, its horror is heightened after a lengthy period of isolationism. But that there was a period of true isolationism cannot even be rightly said, because while it is true no one came for Doiaru, as promised, when the Soviets were stripping him from the Romania he knew and loved after the Second World War, the myth of America was still sold, making its presence felt every day. We sense, from this second application of sorrowful humour, the lasting effect of intervention by way of globalization.

Only recently have I discovered that the parenthetical addendum at the end of the film’s title, Endless, generated from a mistranslation (the Romanian addendum would be better translated as unfinished, indicating the fact that Nemescu was not able to cut his own film and we are presumably seeing a different film than the one the director had intended). Despite this new knowledge, I still hold to my original thought that Endless is a perfect title for the film, albeit for entirely different reasons than those intended by the term unfinished. Endless is the impact of America on our world, be it through globalization, military presence, or absence after a promised appearance, passed on from generation to generation, sheathed in hollow dreams of that imaginary place called California.
(1) Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hegel’s “Inverted World,”” in Hegel’s Dialectic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 48-49.


Ne Touchez Pas La Hache (2007) Jacques Rivette

I have less to say about Jacques Rivette’s Ne Touchez Pas La Hache, as it failed to touch me like California Dreamin’ had earlier that day, or any Rivette I had previously seen, for that matter. I shouldn’t like to sound harsh right off the bat, but Ne Touchez Pas La Hache struck me as the least engaging of his films, a departure of sorts from his avant-garde works or romantic comedies. That said, the film still possesses a flavour identifiably Rivette’s. An impenetrable conversation between the friends of General Armand de Montriveau feels like a long-running inside joke much like the battle of intellectual wit between the main characters of Va Savoir had. The film is extremely contained and sparse in terms of characters, but richly detailed in terms of sets and plot development, a style which reminded me of Joan the Maid.

Although I have not had the chance to read Balzac’s Duchess de Langeais, I feel that I would have benefited immensely from a reading, as the film is extremely literary in style. In fact, if I have one complaint it is that the literariness of the film could be interpreted as limiting its cinematic possibilities. In fact, a great deal of humour, cleverness, as well as plot development is developed through the use of intertitles. At the heart of the film is a enjoyable tale of sexual tension between separated lovers, always occupying the unfortunate position of speaking past one another. Misinterpretation and its consequences inevitably follow, as is expected, which give the film some charm and free it from the musty effect an over-literary film can sometimes take.

So elaborate are the sets that the two protagonists seem to walk around with a self-aware, cautious prissiness that gives the impression that they are not only lost when it comes to each other, but lost in the enormous rooms of their own abodes. Every floorboard squeaking, the leather of every boot crunching under the friction, violating the silence of its surroundings has the effect of (as ironic as it may seem) giving the film a whimsical feel, as if Rivette was laughing at the effort Armand and Antoinette put into presenting oneself in a seemly manner. Admitted, there is a lot to appreciate here, but I think a second viewing, after spending some time with Balzac, might afford me with a more engaging experience.

Bad Infinity |Vis-à-Vis| True Infinity

Hegel characterizes finitude as the quality of negation in its extreme form. This finitude is determined by its possession of a limit. In the sense that the finite has a limit it is also admitting to ending somewhere – at the barrier of the limit – and points to something beyond the limit. In this way the finite is defined by what lies outside the limit – a product of its environment. For the finite, the infinite is its limit. The finite is defined by its limit, the infinite, and, described in this fashion, the infinite is distinct and limited by the finite. So, here, we have the infinite as characterized as limited and, thus, dependent on the finite. Insofar as the infinite is limited by the finite, the infinite is not truly infinite but, rather, a finitized infinite.

The genesis of this conception of a finite infinite is described thus: The finite has the seed of death in itself and it is in finitude’s negation of finite things where this death is brought about and, consequently, the demise of the finite thing. This move would, at first blush, appear to have brought us to pure nothing. Yet Hegel has proven that we can no longer posit pure nothing (including here, in the place of this finite thing) for, as we have seen earlier, pure nothing does not stay pure nothing but becomes becoming and determinate being. Thus, another determinate, finite being is introduced to replace the finite thing negated by finitude. This death, its ceasing-to-be, of the finite is its very determination (i.e., the finite is determined to pass away). But as soon as it passes away it is replaced as described above. This movement of change, or alteration, of continual death and resurrection, goes on endlessly and is, therefore, infinite. This is infinity as endless finitude, a cycle of finitude, or an infinite regress. Depicted in this way, the infinite is finite, but unbounded, like a line, endless in both directions.(1) Hegel describes this infinite as a spurious infinite or (in some translations) a bad infinite.

Adversely, the true infinite is the infinite security of the very being of the finite and thus affirmatively contrasted to the continual cycle of finitude’s negation of itself. Hegel’s model for this true infinite is the circle that is itself always what it is(2), contrasted with the line which implies infinity by way of an endless series. That is, in finitude’s endless negation of negation it has found its being-in-itself and coming into its own, for in ceasing-to-be finitude is what it is. Another way to put this is through the finite’s endlessness (bad infinity) it forms an unending identity which constitutes self-related infinity (true infinity). Finitude affirms itself, here, as the one-in-the-other as opposed to merely the continuous cycle of one-against-the-other --> death --> resurrection as one-against-the-other, ad infinitum. Now, all otherness is in and for it; “being in and for itself”(3) as independent being. Thus, finitude (determinateness through another) presupposes self-determination (true infinity/independent being) in the form of a return-to-self or self-relation. This coming-to-be what one is is what characterizes true infinity as both becoming and being.

In the true infinite we have the infinite as defined not as separate from the finite, or beyond the finite but, rather, as a type of residency (versus a transcendency), a process of development by which being is united with itself through the death of finite things and comes to its own in-itself. According to Hegel, the understanding (and the philosophers of the understanding) cannot think of infinity as anything but in a one-sided way as a transcendent beyond, an eternal separation.

The insight Hegel aims at establishing is one which curbs our tendency to think that everything is a thing opposed to another thing but, instead, as being in some way intricately connected as moments of a larger process, a process that cannot exist in separation from its parts. It is this framework of interconnectedness, or intersubjectivity, that can be seen to have influenced a great deal of Continental thought thereafter. Nevertheless, we might point out that at odds with Hegel’s critique of transcendence sits Levinas (amongst Gadamer and Derrida who have also defended a ‘bad infinite.’). Like negative theology, Levinas defends the infinite as a wholly transcendent other (in his case God or the face of another human), beyond the reach of the finite.(4) Insofar as the infinite is not a (finite) object at all, Levinas might argue, it is in no way finite and, thus, is pure exteriority which we, as separate from this pure other, cannot understand, control, or even think, and, therefore, cannot reduce to ourselves (we as finite cannot become infinite nor vice versa).

In the face of Levinas’s criticism, Hegel might ask how, in this case, it is that the infinite can be related to finite things if it were not conceived as the finite coming to its in-itelf via a process of self-negation (and thus, not an infinite beyond the finite as Levinas argues for). Hegel might argue that Levinas’s infinite is limited and insofar as it is limited and thereby determined by its limit and environment (its other, the finite), it is not truly infinite at all. The Hegelian criticism of this transcendence rests on the notion of limitation and argues for the conception of infinity as existing in and through finitude. If certain post-Hegelians wish to establish the task of setting up infinity as beyond the reach of the finite (or, put another way, wish to defend the status of our own finitude, as has often been the case) they must first respond to the logical fact that the limit they propose actually finitizes the infinite. This must be addressed if finitude or the bad infinite are to be defended.(5)


(1) G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. Arnold Miller (New York: Humanity Books, 1969) 148.
(2) Ibid., 149.
(3) G.W.F Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, trans. Gustav Emil Mueller (New York: Wisdom Library, 1959), 107.
(4) Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) 49.
(5) This is something I shall like to work on in the next year, especially as it concerns Gadamer's wish to "save the honour of the bad infinite."