Philosophy Goes to the Movies, or How the West Was Won

I. Philosophy Goes to the Movies (To Find Redemption)

I have a fantasy about pitching a special late-night show to one of the major cable movie channels. Called Philosophy Goes to the Movies, the show would be co-hosted by Stanley Cavell and Slavoj Žižek. Žižek, I imagined, would appeal to the many Generation X-ers who are equally at home with Jacques Lacan as with David Lynch, and Cavell would draw the baby boomers, many of whom would applaud Cavell's choice of Groundhog Day – isn't Bill Murray the quintessential baby boomer? —as the one movie of the last quarter of the twentieth century that will certainly be considered worth viewing in one hundred years.¹Philosophy Goes to the Movies would no doubt provide many opportunities for heated debate. Stanley Cavell, a self-styled Emersonian "moral perfectionist" who joins Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy to his inheritance of American transcendentalism, would find a feisty interlocutor in Slavoj Žižek, a full-throttle Hegelian dialectician who preaches the Gospel of the Death Drive.²

I have even begun to fantasize about making a pilot for the show. The obvious choice for the movie most likely to elicit a lively exchange from Cavell and Žižek, would be Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), a film about which both men have written. For Cavell, Vertigo is about "the capacity to stake identity on the power of wishing, upon the capacity and purity of one's imagination and desire ...."³ Cavell sees the film's depiction of the hero's "quasi-hallucinatory, quasi-necrophiliac quest" to be the study of a man who has entered a realm of "magic and fantasy" where the earth's everyday stability is lost, but also where a hope for new forms of inhabiting the earth may be born. Vertigo, Cavell says, "is about the power of fantasy, and in particular about its power to survive every inroad of science and civility intact, and to direct the destiny of its subject with, finally, his active cooperation."⁴ For Žižek, however, Vertigo is about a man seeking to pull back from the brink of the Hegelian "night of the world," the "empty nothing" containing phantasmagoria, the "derealized apparitions of partial objects" before they have coalesced into any integral subjectivity.⁵ Cavell holds out hope that beyond the hero's quest is a recuperation of the everyday world in which fantasy may be the energizing source of "keeping soul and body together" (World Viewed 85); Žižek would encourage the hero to release his ties to the everyday world and give himself over to a free fall into the abyss of desubjectified part-objects.

However much I would love to watch Cavell and Žižek talk about Hitchcock and film more generally, I recognize that Philosophy Goes to the Movies is only a fantasy. Like all fantasies, it screens an unfulfilled (and perhaps unfulfillable) desire. In my case, the fantasy of Philosophy Goes to the Movies is not so much about a conversation between Cavell and Žižek as it is about seeking a resolution to a debate at the very heart of the Western master narrative, a debate about the conclusion of the biblical story of redemption, call it the story of how the West was won. In this paper I want to explore how philosophy's fascination with the movies, at least as it is played out in the writing of Cavell and Žižek, re-enacts a question as old as the Christian West: is redemption won through the Law or from the Law? This question is at the heart of Paul's Letter to the Romans. It asks whether the everyday structures of our lives can be re-enlivened with a new spirit, or whether these structures must be radically shattered in order that a wholly new life might emerge. But the question is not new with Paul. It goes back to the Old Testament's dual images of Israel's redemption, figured either as the nation's willing obedience to the commandments handed down at Mt. Sinai...