The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life

237 Pages·2017·21.735 MB·English

by  Timothy C. Campbell

THE TECHNE OF GIVING
Fordham University Press New York 2017
Commonalities
Timothy C. Campbell, series editor
THE TECHNE OF GIVING
Cinema and the Generous Form of Life
Timothy C. Campbell
Copyright © 2017 Fordham University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Campbell, Timothy C., author.
Title: Th e techne of giving : cinema and the generous form of life / Timothy
C. Campbell.
Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2017. |
Series: Commonalities | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016013978 | ISBN 9780823273256 (hardback) | ISBN
9780823273263 (paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures— Italy— History. | Motion pictures— Moral and
ethical aspects. | Motion pictures— Philosophy. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE
/ History & Th eory. | PHILOSOPHY / Po liti cal.
Classifi cation: LCC PN1993.5.I88 C24625 2017 | DDC 791.430945— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2016013978
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
CONTENTS
Preface: Uncommon Grips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
1 Forms of Life in a Milieu of Biopower . . . . . . . 1
2 Freeing the Apparatus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
3 “Dead Weight”: Visconti
and Forms of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
4 Playful Falls in a Milieu of Contagion . . . . . . . 91
5 Th e Tender Lives of Vitti/Vittoria . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Conclusion: Attention, Not Autopsy . . . . . . . . . 161
Acknowl edgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
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PREFACE: UNCOMMON GRIPS
Th is book began as a refl ection on the pos si ble relation between Italian
cinema and con temporary refl ections on biopolitics. Sensing a connection,
I wondered if a number of classic Italian fi lms might tell us something
about con temporary life in both its po liti cal and less po liti cal forms.
Surely, I thought, if philosophical genealogies of biopolitics were pos si ble,
then just as surely, a reading of biopolitics and cinema was there for the
taking as well.
Aft er some time, my perspective on cinema and biopolitics changed.
I concluded that if fi lms such as Luchino Visconti’s Th e Earth Trembles,
Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Eclipse were indeed refl ections on the relation of (bio)power to life, then
they w ere also ethical enterprises. Th ese fi lms continually show us how
impor tant it is to extend the meaning of holding, be it of ourselves, our
ideas, or each other. Yes, these directors visualize the po liti cal conditions
of their time, and yes, for some of that time, it makes sense to frame those
conditions biopo liti cally. I came to understand, however, that just as
impor tant is noting how Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni model modes
of spectatorship that, when taken together, constitute a heretofore ignored
ethical horizon for postwar Italian cinema, that if I was going to write
about a number of fi lms from Italy that I love, I would have to propose
something resembling an ethic of grips: an ethic of how we hold and how
we let go. My hunch was that the commonalities among the fi lms could be
summed up in a series of questions. What is the relation of gratitude to fear
in the fi lms? How does the holding of one’s body, self, or objects in and
outside the frame allow occasions for reciprocity to become vis i ble? And
fi nally, how might we link these forms of holding (and letting go) to poten-
tial forms of life that could off er a response to con temporary biopower?
As I say, I began to describe the fi lms as biopo liti cal enterprises, but not
in the traditional sense with which we understand the term—as a conjunc-
tion between bios and politikos that Michel Foucault, among others, fi rst
saw as one of the defi ning biological thresholds modernity crosses at the
end of the eigh teenth century. For Foucault, and then more recently Gior-
gio Agamben, biopolitics has named what happens aft er notions of the
po liti cal drift away from the ideological. No longer based simply on
friend/ enemy distinctions à la Carl Schmitt, biopolitics and with it bio-
power name two con temporary movements in which the po liti cal grows
increasingly concerned with biology, health, populations, and how best to
secure them. As my research here suggests, as impor tant as the rise of bio-
power is, so too is the notion of grip and more broadly holding, which, if
we follow an etymological line, allows us to link holding to having, to pos-
sessing. Indeed, the impression that forced itself upon me was simply that
if biopower involved a kind of grip of biology over power, or for that matter
the reverse, then one could just as easily imagine another response, this one
based in reciprocity, forms of letting go, or what Émile Benveniste refers to
as the cir cuit of generosity.
It was here that D. W. Winnicott’s insights into “transitional objects” be-
came decisive as they made it pos si ble to pose a series of questions about
cinema and biopolitics that other wise might have gone unasked.1 What
happens when we center individual and collective forms of life on degrees
of possession? How might the proliferation of “transitional objects” change
our reading of a number of fi lms and so point us in the direction of an
ethical response to the unceasing search for objects possessed and exper-
tise mastered. It is this search, to lay my cards squarely on the table, that
anchors how I understand biopower. Th us, could these fi lms provide us with
modes of viewing more open to the non- possession and non- knowledge of
what we see onscreen?2 If so, how might we spell out the relation among
viewership, forms of reciprocity, and forms of life? Clearly, to do so would
require paying attention to those moments when grip becomes possession
onscreen and off b ecause it is then that possession functions as a lever for
power to capture life.
Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni off er the following instruction:
What counts more than anything else when viewing a fi lm is the common-
viii Preface: Uncommon Grips
ality that we as viewers have with the protagonists onscreen both in terms
of how we hold things and how we hold ourselves. Th ey do so by asking the
spectator to pay attention to how actors hold, sway, or drift in the frame;
how characters interact diff erently with landscapes made mobile by the cinem-
atic apparatus; how hands and the bodies they stand in for receive and
hold; and fi nally how bodies with hands learn how to take lightly and to
release. In such a constellation of diff er ent forms of holding, we are asked
to imagine diff er ent forms of reciprocity and to participate in making vis i ble
other pos si ble social forms of life. In the alternately tight or loose grip of
holding things, pos si ble forms of life and possibly diff er ent futures emerge.
It is thanks to that possibility that responses to con temporary biopower
and its one- dimensional view on possession can be fashioned.
Th e adjective “generous” may raise eyebrows as it oft en appears far re-
moved from the theoretical arsenal that many of us have at our disposal.
Slight and seemingly in eff ec tive, generosity fails to conjure up anything
like power, multitudes, or force. In a world that would, if some are to be be-
lieved, consist solely of dispositifs, captured humanity, and the longed- for
event, questions of how to imagine generosity, gratitude, and its off - shoots
as off ering any counter- dispositifs worthy of the name have oft en been met
with silence.
While not yet speaking in the tongue of apparatuses, Friedrich Nietz sche
did point out the importance of generosity. In the section “Learning to Do
Homage” in Th e Gay Science, he lays out the bodily conditions for express-
ing thanks:
Whoever goes in new paths and has led many persons therein, discovers
with astonishment how awkward and incompetent all of them are in the
expression of their gratitude, and indeed how rarely gratitude is able
even to express itself. It is always as if something comes into people’s
throats when their gratitude wants to speak, so that it only hems and
haws, and becomes silent again. Th e way in which a thinker succeeds in
tracing the eff ect of his thoughts, and their transforming and convuls-
ing power, is almost a comedy.3
With Nietz sche’s focus on silence and gratitude in mind, I return across
the following pages to the relation of gratitude to letting go, be it of objects
and of words stuck in the throat, and also the I, the ego, and the self. Th e
fi lms that I discuss can help us pinpoint the ways we attend to our sense of
Preface: Uncommon Grips ix