Fog of War : What Yet Remains
- Fog of War: What Yet Remains
In memory of Jacques Derrida, this collaborative project reads Errol Morris's documentary Fog of War deconstructively--that is, according to the internal contradictions that characterize the film's protagonist and his discourse. Although McNamara intuits the structural limits of the concepts that govern his discourse, he does not know how to thematize these limits formally. Consequently, he remains caught between insight and blindness in a number of contradictions the implications (social, political, military, psychological, and others) of which he glimpses and struggles to negotiate, but finally cannot name. These contradictions and unnameables require the intervention of Derrida's deconstructions--of a nuclear logic, of voice, of sight, of narrative and filmic framing--to register the lessons of McNamara's lessons.
University of North Florida
tdonovan@unf.edu
skimball@unf.edu
jlsmith@unf.edu
Tim Donovan advances his interests in rhetoric and philosophy as well as print and media literacy at the University of North Florida. His writing has appeared in Philosophy and Rhetoric and The Journal of Advanced Composition.
A. Samuel Kimball is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida. He has published on American literature (Hawthorne, Melville, Morrison, Poe), on film (Twin Peaks, Chinatown, Pulp Fiction, and The Matrix, along with Terminator 2 and Alien Resurrection), and literary theory. His book on the infanticidal logic of evolution and culture is forthcoming from Delaware.
Jillian Smith pursues her interests in documentary film and text, the politics of spectacle, and materialist and poststructuralist theory at the University of North Florida, where she is Assistant Professor.
Notes
1. McNamara nearly gets the stanza right, but his memory slips on a couple of words. The correct citation is from Section V of Eliot’s Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.”
2. Errol Morris invented what he calls the “Interrotron” to help control the gaze of the interviewed subject. The camera works so that the interviewer’s image is directly over the lens, which structures a conversation between interviewer and interviewee that has the interviewee looking directly into the camera.
3. In “Four Protocols: Derrida, His Deconstruction,” John P. Leavey explains how, “in its most general sense, Derrida’s deconstruction can be reduced to a simple phrase: d’une certaine manière, in a certain way,” a phrase Derrida himself uses, in both Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, to describe his project (43).
4. Thus, for example, “Rationality will not save us” (lesson 2), and yet one must “maximize efficiency,” seek “proportionality,” “get the data,” and “be prepared to reexamine your reasoning” (lessons 4, 5, 6, and 8). Thus, too, “Belief and seeing are both often wrong” (Morris, lesson 7); however, not only is it that “There’s something beyond one’s self” (lesson 3) but that it is knowable that there is something beyond oneself. On the one hand, “To do good, you may have to do evil” (lesson 9) because, after all, “you can’t change human nature” (Morris, lesson 11); on the other hand, we must “empathize with the enemy” (lesson 1) and yet must not answer the questions the enemy asks “but the question you wish had been asked of you” (lesson 10)—which is to say that we must not yield to the enemy’s perspective but insist on our own.
5. The first two lessons involve divergent frames of reference. On the one hand, the future appears to be apocalyptic, for “the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destructions of nations” (lesson 2). On the other hand, we can mitigate this indefiniteness “by adhering to the principle of a ‘Just War,’ in particular to the principle of proportionality (lesson 1). According to the first lesson, the destruction of nations is unavoidable. According to the second, the destruction can be reduced and in any event rendered more rational and...
