Film, Between Nihilism and Hyperobjects

Abstract

The only filmic work bequeathed by Samuel Beckett, Film (1965), as its self-reflexive title suggests, problematizes the ontological implications of sensory perception in various registers including sight, hearing and touch. The work also stands out in the writer’s oeuvre in that the story’s setting is, unlike his other literary texts, openly acknowledged (“about 1929” New York city), and that exceptional aspect merits analyses in its own right. Yet, the more pertinent bearings of Film come into view when juxtaposed to Derrida’s remark regarding Beckett’s signatory ambivalence vis-à-vis nihilism. How to make sense of the succeeding acts of ‘double apprehension’ (chasing/chased, seeing/seen, touching/touched, etc.) in which E and O seem to be indissociably caught? Do they attest to the ineluctable double nature of nihilism circumscribing the modernity or point instead to a way out, an exit strategy perhaps resembling Nancy’s account of ex nihilo? By tracing Film’s narrative movement in relation to the shifting sense of “we” in the deconstructive discourse of Derrida and Nancy, my paper suggests that the ultimate quandary we find ourselves as Film’s audience in the 21st century rather turns out to be the penetrating undulations of hyperobjects, which immobilize the sense of critical distance vouchsafed by such concepts as différance and exscription.