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Showing posts with label Kenzaburo Oe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kenzaburo Oe. Show all posts

Monday, June 25, 2012

Review: Sound Of My Voice at the MOXIE in Springfield MO

Is She From The Future?
Or is she heralding the future?
In her interview with Interview Brit Marling discusses her time at Georgetown where three people met and became friends, deciding to make the documentary:Boxers and Ballerinas 2004
Brit Marling
Mike Cahill
Zal Batmanglij
Directing, Producing, Writing, Acting, Shooting, Editing
They collaboratively took Another Earth to Sundance and won two prizes there. What is wonderful is that they work together equally. There is no big Other involved in the making of their films. Zizek! Take notice please!

Once again Brit Marling is exploring Alterity

From her earlier film Another Earth

We can recall moments in the past when we had equal chances of living or dying - in a car crash, for example.... Every time someone finds himself at a crossroads of this kind, he has two worlds before him... It is the same with each decisive moment, both with birth and with death. Just as the virtual dead man that I am continues on his way on the other side, carries on with his existence which runs just beneath the surface of mine, birth is that dividing line where on the one side I exist as myself, but on the other I begin, at the same moment to exist as other Such is the form of alterity...(Impossible Exchange 82)

Kenzaburo Oe in A Personal Matter  opts for a choice-centered cosmology, and puts this in the mouth of one of his characters:
Every time you stand at the crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you...  

A lovely review of this film: Sound of My Voice


Sunday, April 8, 2012

Kairos: The Decisive Moment for Katniss


Kairos - Volunteering: the Moment of Choice for Katniss


One must take into account the particular circumstances, and also what the Greeks called the kairos, or "the critical moment." The concept of the kairos  - the decisive or crucial moment or opportunity - has always had a significant role in Greek thought for epistemological, moral, and technical reasons. What is of interest here is that since Philodemus is now associating parrhesia with piloting and medicine, it is also being regarded as a technique which deals with individual cases, specific situations, and the choice of the kairos or decisive moment.
(Fearless Speech - Michel Foucault p. 111)

Kenzaburo Oe: Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you...(A Personal Matter)

At all events, this duality governs us. Each individual life unfolds on two levels, in two dimensions - history and destiny - which coincide only exceptionally. Each life has its history, the history of its successive events, its twists and turns - but elsewhere, in another dimension, there is only one form, that of the absolute becoming of the same situation, which occurs for everyone in the form of the Eternal Return. The form of destiny, which Nietzsche also calls 'character', to distinguish it from any psychology of the ego and its successive changes. (p.79 Impossible Exchange - Baudrillard)

Here's Rand from Fountainhead: 

....Howard, when you look back, does it seem to you as if all your days had rolled forward evenly, like a sort of typing exercise, all alike? Or were their stops - points reached - and then the typing rolled on again?

"There were stops." 

"Did you know them at the time - did you know that that's what they were?" 

"Yes." 

"I didn't. I knew afterward....."(F 25th ed p. 542-3)
This is the first conversation between Howard and Gail. In Foucault's language a stop can be seen as a CUT, although he saves the term for a more elaborate genealogy rather than a personal instance in a life. IMO it is the micro, so I will use it.

The typing rolling on is linear time. The cut or stop is the Event, when time stops, a discontinuous "cut". This is the position of post modernism. Time is no longer linear, progressive, historical. Time is discontinuous, filled with Events that come from elsewhere (seen again in the Cortland dynamiting), unpredictable, without causes, and having consequences spiraling out into the world that astonish.

Why I keep asserting that Rand is the fictional herald of post modern philosophy. Or the canary in the coalmine depending on your preference.

What if this CUT or Event can be considered as the exceptional coinciding of the individual's historical life and Destiny, as kairos?