Cinema and the Meaning of "Life"

Introduction

If one were to ask about the role that the cinema has played in contemporary thought, one would discover it entangled in the complex struggle over the concept of "life." Cinema and the motion-picture technologies associated with it were invented and cultivated in a society whose moral, legal, economic, and semantic values organized themselves around "life." In modern times, biological life, understood as both pure survival and the potential labor power it implies, has become a human right, while questions of the quality of life have become sites of intense contestation. Transvaluation of "life" has been crucial to the emergence of contemporary social forms, as recent scholarship on the concept's genealogies has begun to show.¹ Like other reproductive technologies such as photography and gramophony, cinematography suggested to its first public the possibility of preserving a living image of the dead, appearing as an event in the history of the concepts of "life" and "death."

In what follows I will look at early journalistic accounts of cinematograph screenings in Europe and passages about cinema by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze in order to sketch the extent to which cinema has been involved in the transvaluation of life. These texts invoke life and death in original ways as they attempt to respond to the experience of cinema in writing. My readings will only be indications of the mutations in the genealogy of life, occasioned by writing about the cinema, in order to establish a particular field of genealogical investigation. I will follow uses of words associated with the concept "life," such as "living," "dead," and "ghost," attending to their differences from conventional usage "Meaning" appears under erasure in my title in order to focus on lexical variation, conceptual change, and contestation of values rather than static semantics.

Recent work by Giorgio Agamben has helped us to understand modern philosophies as philosophies of life by situating Michel Foucault's work on biopolitique within a network of post-Heideggerian thought. Agamben's essay "Absolute Immanence" begins by pointing out that the last articles Foucault and Gilles Deleuze published before their deaths were both about the concept of "life."² The correspondence between Deleuze's and Foucault's final texts exemplifies a turn in contemporary philosophy, which according to Agamben can only be a philosophy of life. Agamben calls for future philosophy to produce a genealogy of the concept "life" and to rethink it in ways other than those which enable contemporary forms of domination. Agamben's genealogy will be of the Nietzschean type as understood by Foucault, a genealogy that rearticulates values by showing them to be historical and by illuminating the ways in which values are the effects of an ongoing process of transvaluation.

Foucault describes the development of concrete problems that call for a philosophy of life in his biopolitical studies. Starting with the observation that the modern state transforms the feudal sovereign's power to end life into a power to control life, Foucault shows how contemporary governance justifies itself and regulates society by invoking "life" in ways which are, at least in part, philosophical.³ The contemporary concept of "life" implicit in governing institutions responds to concrete problems faced by the state. To be able to decide legal cases concerning the termination of life support or abortion, for example, the state refers to definitions of life developed by biology, theology, and philosophy. Since Foucault's death, the philosophico-theological dimension of contemporary discursive formations has clarified itself by producing the noun-phrase "culture of life," as the President and the Pope both say when invoking moral authority.⁴

In biopolitical regimes, a vague, largely unthought concept of life, pricelessly outside of any economy, confers worth on all other values. Thus the task of philosophy in such societies is to make explicit the appropriation of the concept of life for social control while producing another one that would resist such appropriation. I hope that this paper contributes to this project without negating the differences between, for example, Derrida and Agamben, by sublating each into the unity of a single discourse. Instead, I hope [End...