Obstruction:Limit and False Movements of Cinema

Pragmata: Journal of Human Sciences

http://journal.tumkuruniversity.ac.in/

Vol. 2. Issue 2, June 2014, pp. 114-151 ISSN 2349-5065

Obstruction: Limit & False Movements of Cinema

Sana Das

Doctoral Scholar, Humanities and Social Sciences Department, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

[email protected]

Abstract

Are rules as ‘obstruction’ a hurdle or girdle for spectatorial experience? This essay attempts an

answer through a discussion on Lars von Trier’s film “Five Obstructions”. The film’s provoking

method explores the relation between the rules as constraints and conditions determining the

structure of creative and spectatorial experience. Allowing for a navigation of discourses that have

helped conceptualize the limit of art and the limit of experience in the different domains of film-

philosophy, aesthetics, cultural studies, and philosophy of science, the essay explores whether

aesthetic experience is norm-saving or experience saving.

In his “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy” Livingstone gives an example of creativity under constraints1.

Livingstone reminds us of Jon Elster’s distinction in the film “Upshot” between imposed and chosen

constraints, and the relatively uncharted gray zone in which artistic constraints are negotiated in a shifting

mixture of co-operative and competitive relations. In politics, Elster tells us, people want to bind others’

choices. This is true in the arts as well. People sometimes want to be helped along by constraints others provide,

as long as these are not too inflexible2. Livingstone states that the constraints within which artists work can be

‘multiply motivated’, and some of these motives and choices of constraints involve creative responses to the

socio-political and economic conditions under which films are made. In addition, many of these constraints are

embedded, as Plato, Kant, Hegel and others have shown us, in the imaginings about the nature of art, nature of

reason, idea and concept, and nature of presentation or stoff, nature of imagination made available within

various aesthetic regimes that have from time to time disciplined or permitted art to be art.

Danish film Five Obstructions (De fem benspaend, 2003) invites a discussion on ‘obstruction’ and the

structure of aesthetic experience not merely by virtue of its title, but its pondering on the ideas of ‘limit’ through

‘rule-following’, concept and constraint, thought and obstruction ‘means-ends’, the purpose of art, being human,

‘perfection’ versus ‘mastery’, as they might have been theorised in various orders of aesthetic regimes.

Lars von Trier asks his mentor Jorgan Leth to remake his classic film The Perfect Human (1967) under

a set of five ‘obstructions’, each one separate and more difficult than the last, each with multiple obstacles,

virtually demanding five new films, four of which are made by Leth, and the last by von Trier. But, of course,

not without a rule-based role for Leth.

The Perfect Human could be seen as a poetic fragment of ‘movements’ of body and thought

aesthetically etched to show the solitary, wounded beauty, yet confidence and supreme composure, of the

perfect human, while Five Obstructions is strongly inclined to test the resilience of the idea of the perfect

human, its limit, the nature of art and in fact, whether art permits one to be human!

With the didactic rigour of the Platonic regime of Anti-Art or Art as Not-Truth, Art as Non-Thought, its

distrust of the pure charm of art, its lure of forgetful pleasure, and the intrinsic goodness of art, the film, Five

Obstructions, sets out to banalize, with charming ‘sophistry’, as it were, the Idea of the perfect human, and

proceeds to push its maker, Jorgan Leth, towards the fait accompli of mimesis wherein he must reproduce The

Perfect Human five times but with different rules and contexts. So a plot to de-Platonize Leth of his method of

perfection ensues.

The film is presented as a pedagogical mission guided by ‘obstructions as rules’ and ‘rules as

obstructions’ set by von Trier, rules that are intended to expose Leth’s trueness if not truth, the ethics of his

filmmaking practice and to test his belief in the idea of the perfect human, as well as to teach him

‘imperfection’, to teach him to be human instead of perfect, all intended to cure Leth of a depression!

Rules appear as necessary obstruction. Here we can see this ‘obstruction’ working as ‘annihilation’ in

the film leading us into a brilliant meditation on ‘limit’, ‘method’ and ‘structure’ of aesthetic experience, in this

exercise of both therapy and expos`e of the true nature of cinema, its ontology of false movements, and the crisis

in which it lands us.

Alain Badiou has presented three movements of cinema that are its false movements3. Firstly, global

movement (wanderings of the entire group; idea is its passage); secondly, local movement (this involves

1/38

2/38

reader’s/spectator’s self-abolition in the text; spectatorial wonder; idea is other than what it is, other than its

image); and thirdly, impure movement (here, poetics, supposed to underlie the poem, is wrested from itself).

Rule following and rule-breaking, taken together, constitute the ‘game-design’ of the film, providing

the axiomatic structure for spectatorial experience, with each rule appearing as an obstruction, and both von

Trier and Leth aiming to outdo each other. While Leth remarks again and again in the film that it is a game, a

sophist game that is impossible, von Trier takes over the making of the last film as he believes that Leth has

turned his uncomfortable obstructions into gifts and inspiration!

But can obstructions and obstacles be a possible method for structuring experience? Can obstructions

really be gifts for creativity and aesthetic knowledge? Do they not hamper knowledge and experience, and

hinder the progress of being? In other words, are obstructions a hurdle or girdle for experience? These are

troublesome questions which we try answering through the discussion on Five Obstructions which enables us a

detour through discourses from the history of aesthetics, culture and philosophy of science.

The idea of a study of ‘obstructions’ to objects of enquiry that possibly explain ‘our’ ‘experience’ is

taken from Vivek Dhareshwar’s paper, “Anubhava and Anubhaava: Towards a Theory of Experience?”4 Here

he discusses the clue to formulating a theory of experience as a theory of obstacles to understanding. This idea is

further elaborated in S.N. Balagangadhara’s paper, titled ‘On Experience Occluding Structures’5. Here

Balagangadhara presents experience itself as an obstacle to further experience. Gaston Bachelard uses the idea

of ‘epistemological obstacle’ to draw attention to prior and primary experience as obstacles to scientific

knowledge in The Formation of the Scientific Mind6. These theorizations on obstructions and occlusions as

structures of experience, from the domains of culture and that of philosophy of science provide a richer

understanding to the application of the concept in the domain of aesthetics.

Before proceeding further let us outline the five obstructions laid down by von Trier.

1. Leth must remake the film in Cuba (but with no set) with no shot longer than 12 frames, and he must

answer the questions posed in the original film which are about the perfect human, how he eats, sleeps,

dances, loves, attires himself for the world.

2. Leth must remake the film in the worst place in the world but not show that place onscreen; additionally,

Leth must play the role played by Claus Nissen, the protagonist actor in The Perfect Human. The meal

scene of the perfect human eating decorously at a table must be included but without the woman.

3. Redoing the second obstruction in the same place or remaking the film in any place of Leth’s choice as

punishment for failing to complete the second task perfectly.

4. Leth must remake the film as a cartoon, a form hated by Leth.

5. The fifth obstruction is that he must model as a ‘self-critical’ himself in the last film von Trier has already

made which is to be credited as Leth's, and Leth must read a voice-over narration ostensibly from his own

perspective but in fact written by von Trier.

Five Obstructions remarkably exposes the ‘false movements’ of cinema the ‘impurities’ which

constitute the ontology of cinema, all of which cinema keeps secret and invisible. It is able to demonstrate how

the idea of ‘constraint’ as obstruction operates dynamically, and thereby, how film can ‘do’ philosophy, with

the revelation of this ontology that places cinema experience and cinema itself at stake. By setting ‘conditions’

of creative, ‘Idea’ oriented filmmaking that intends to breakdown both stylistics and the concept, significantly

for us, Five Obstructions makes film as medium and film making come to the surface with a certain purity and

distillation, as much as the ‘process of thought’ which itself is a dwelling on ‘structure’ and ‘limit’ of aesthetic

experience.

A brutal game of obstructions in the form of rule-following ensues. As is confirmed in the fifth episode

on Obstructions, both are shown as having obstructed each other - von Trier trying to make Leth ‘human’ by

exposing imperfection, tripping him, distracting him from the idea of the ‘perfect’ human, and Leth refusing to

be banalized, refusing the destruction of the Idea of perfect human and its possibility, and turning obstructions

into gifts, becoming surer with every new obstruction, every new limit. Yet, no one is more aware than he of the

manipulation of art that has to be resorted to inorder to achieve this. In this tussle between the filmmakers and

their respective rules, the film helps us to witness a contestation between the different regimes of aesthetics and

their mechanisms of obstructions that force Leth into a trap of ‘unrepresentability’ as limit.

A Tale of Two Regimes & the Crisis of the Aesthetic: A tale of two dominant regimes unfolds, the

Representative or Platonic Regime and the Anti-Representative or Aesthetic Regime of the Romantics. A

dramatization of the battle between their different approaches to representation enters invisibly into the film.

The tension between the Platonic Regime’s conceptualisation of art as ‘Non-thought’ and the Aesthetic

3/38

DAS: OBSTRUCTION: LIMIT & FALSE MOVEMENTS OF CINEMA

Regime’s of anti-representation mark the dialectical opposition between The Perfect Human and the Five

Obstructions.

In his essay, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?”7, Jacques Ranciere discusses what

‘unrepresentability’ might mean as ‘limit’ in the two different regimes. He clarifies that two things render some

things ‘unrepresentable’ – that is, it cannot be brought before our eyes: (1) Lack of a form of material

presentation adequate to the idea or conversely, a scheme of intelligibility equal to the material power (2) Art’s

inability because of the very means it uses in artistic presentation - in fact Badiou points to three such means to

challenge art’s exercise of its power: surplus of presence, surplus of material presence, interplay of surplus and

subtraction. Badiou, in The False Movements of Cinema provides a dialectical definition of cinema. ‘Film is

what is withdrawn from the visible’ not only by editing but also by framing. It is a subtraction….The image is

‘not what is visible’.

In the Representative Regime of Platonic art, if anything is un-representable it is by the logic and rules

of this regime and relative to the order of events, appropriateness of subjects/actors, visibility and intelligibility,

distance between knowledge and audience, relationship between knowledge-effects and pathos-effects. The

norms operating in the Representative Regime as regulatory of experience are those of ‘constraint’ principles –

of what is to be spoken, shown, and seen and who is eligible in this and in what preparedness. Representation

regime concerns mimesis as a relationship between two terms: poiesis, i.e. a way of making, and an aesthesis,

i.e., economy of affects8. Representation, says, Ranciere, is not about Art per se, but about rules of different

types of image and imitation, rules that outline determinate forms of relation between presence and absence, the

material and the intangible, exhibition and signification, as well as the distance been the image and the

viewer/spectator.

Alain Badiou too points to a ‘threefold’ mechanism of ‘obstruction’9 operating within the Platonic

Regime of Representation that places mimesis/representation and its co-relation with experience under

‘constraint’ and under subordination to Truth, Thought and Pure Idea. Firstly, in the form of art itself as an

obstacle to truth where art becomes an obstacle for the experience of truth. Secondly, art could only mean not

any imitation but correct and ‘appropriate imitation’ - appropriate subject, appropriate effects of both knowledge

and pathos.10

Thus, art itself to be obstructed or restrained by the Rules of Thought. Obstructing, constraining

both art and experience is the governing principle of the ‘appropriate’, in order to arrive at the truth and the

sensible. The third way in which the idea of obstruction operates is through the insistence on a ‘detour’11, a

procedure for truth that was possible only by subordinating representation to Thought, Truth and Pure Idea. For

Plato the ‘detour’ means that truth has to be ‘arrived at’ through ‘method’ and not by an immediate sensation.

Here the idea of ‘obstruction’ operates as a logical graduating method of ‘reaching up’ to truth, whose function

it would be to block ‘excess’ of expression and experience, be it the excess of pathos, comic, music, speech,

visibility, or knowledge.

Under this regime of art, these obstructions become the necessary ‘frame’12 for ‘appropriate’

experience. Here, the Rules of Art must consent to the Rules of Thought.13 A model of spectatorship emerges

where the control of excess and distrust of immediacy present themselves as necessary constraints for

‘appropriate’ experience or for aesthetic experience as knowledge.

On the other hand, the second regime, the Aesthetic Regime, marked by the Romantic movement,

occurs under ‘boundlessness’14. Here, there are no rules except that of the Genius15. As Ranciere puts it,

Aesthetic Regime bestows upon itself a self-governance whereby production and demonstrations are not

regulated by external norms, which is opposed to all norms, best captured in the Kantian idea of the ‘Genius’.

What the Aesthetic Regime would normally consider ‘obstacles’ to art and to experience, the Representative

Regime formulates into ‘rules’ so that there is a management / prevention of the surplus of the visible over

speech, and the surplus of the intelligible or knowledge.

Five Obstructions brings out the tension between the two regimes, von Trier’s representative system of

rules and Leth’s Genius in treating each obstacle and constraint as a methodical device to arrive at the Concept.

In so doing, the film invites a dwelling on these rules of thought and limits of representation.

We witness a regime of subtraction in The Perfect Human versus a regime of multiplicity in The Five

Obstructions. Five Obstructions attempts to breakdown The Perfect Human, what was already a bare film

stripped of ‘excess’ where pathos was generated not from any emotional drama in depicting the wounded beauty

of a man who is shown smiling incongruously into the mirror as he watches his own heart bleed out, but in the

dialectical and contradictory presentation of composure, and appropriate effects kept under restraint, almost

mathematical precision. Rather, we are made to observe each of his everyday gestures of eating, sleeping,

dressing, dancing, closely to the match of the idea of perfection, showing how the perfect human carries out

every act with moderation and meditation within an economy of constraints. Gesture, in which pure existence is

both condensed and revealed16

, becomes the true offering of the frames of The Perfect Human.

4/38

5/38

While we will revisit the unique functions of constraints as obstructions in the aesthetic domain, one

can, at this point, go so far as to say that the creative violence evident in Lars von Trier’s obstructions seems

directed at forcing cinema out of its ‘false movements’17

, as if that were possible. By forcing rules of

impossibility that will break the perfect economy of Thought and Representation in The Perfect Human’s

structure of experience, von Trier forces him into banalization.

In the first regime, representability itself is made possible and necessary through obstacles,

obstructions, constraints that build a system of ‘appropriateness’. It is “thwarted revelation”18

. Ranciere points

to three constraints to explain “thwarted revelation”: (a) representation is first of all a dependency of the visible

on speech; (b) representation is an ordered deployment of meanings, an adjusted relationship between what is

understood or anticipated and what comes as surprise, according to the paradoxical logic analysed by Aristotle’;

(c) the third representative constraint defines a certain adjustment of reality – this is the ‘empirical’ issue of the

audience to which the autonomous logic of representation is linked.19 In other words, the access to ‘appropriate’

experience presupposes the prevalence of obstructions and constraints marked by ‘rules of representation’.

Everything cannot be represented.

Anti-representation regime, on the other hand, does not mean the opposite, which would be a regime of

non-representation. Anti-representation means that there are no longer rules of appropriateness, of subjects,

between subject and form. In other words, no rules means no limit to representation. In the anti-representation

regime, Ranciere points out that the break with representation in art is not emancipation from resemblance, but

the emancipation of resemblance from triple constraint20

. This operates firstly, as a model of visibility of speech

that at the same time organizes a restraint of the visible; secondly, as an adjustment of the relations between

knowledge effects and pathos effects, governed by the primacy of the ‘action’, identifying the poem or painting

with a story; and thirdly, as a regime of rationality peculiar to fiction, which exempts its speech acts from the

normal criteria of authenticity and utility of words and images, subjecting them instead to an intrinsic criteria of

verisimilitude and appropriateness. This separation between the rationale of fictions and the rationale of

empirical facts is one of the representative regime’s main elements.

Ranciere shows how in the Aesthetic Regime there is no limit to representation because there is no

limit to thought. Everything is representable. Nothing is unrepresentable within the artistic order of the

Aesthetic regime, not even the ‘inhuman’, not ‘holy terror’, not the extermination of the Jews or the Shoah, not

the ‘sublime’.

It marks the loss of representative proportions and properties...Everything is equal, equally

representable. This is the ruin of the representative system. The ‘disorder’ that the representative regime

‘problematized’ and ‘rejected’ as an ‘obstruction’ to ‘appropriate’ experience becomes emblematic of all the

properties that the new regime of art - the aesthetic regime – attributes to artistic phenomena itself.

Thus we see that the ‘obstacles’ of the first regime of Representation, for instance, ‘form/visibility’ and

‘excess’, become the form/frame/structure of experience in the second one, the Aesthetic Regime.

In fact, we see the ruin of the Platonic system of perfection attempted by von Trier through a deliberate

and merciless shuffling of the rules, an attempt to thwart Leth’s ability to move forward without trivializing,

without transforming the risks of mimesis into poiesis, as is possible under the Anti-Representation regime

where there are no limits.

He aims for a method where ‘obstruction’ through rule keeping becomes Leth’s own ‘annihilation’ as

well as that of the symbolic perfection and beauty of the perfect human. Leth too walks into this self-

annihilating method by which von Trier strikes to demolish him, his Idea, his perfection. Leth likens this to a

Faustian pact which with its diabolical nature represents the ‘limit’ of self-preservation, compelling a ‘letting

go’ of the stable structures of past experience and methods.

But in the same breath of facing the instability of annihilation, Leth is able to demonstrate that nothing

is un-representable. Even the absurd banalizing rule in the fourth obstruction to force him into making a cartoon

film on Perfect Human, a technology he feels contempt for, is also converted into a work of art through superior

animation technology drawing upon the images of the prior films. He breaks another limit presented to him by

the rules of representation.In this sense, the film symbolically identifies with the clear departure that the

Aesthetic Regime made from the Platonic Regime of Representation wherein everything was guided by limits of

who was saying and what could be said, seen and shown.

This annihilation that is to be Leth’s therapy, is crafted as an investigation into himself, his truth, the

truth of his being and experience, his belief in the perfect human through what one is tempted to call a

contextual empiricism. On the other hand, von Trier tries to break the concept of the ‘perfect’ through the

‘human’ as available in all its imperfections in spaces of impurity, forcing Leth into an additional trap of

6/38

7/38

DAS: OBSTRUCTION: LIMIT & FALSE MOVEMENTS OF CINEMA

‘unpresentability and not only that of ‘unrepresentability’. Here we land in another regime of aesthetics – the

Kantian.

We see von Trier constantly placing ‘matter’ as obstacle before Leth, mainly in the form of ‘place’ or

‘prop’. For instance, sending him all the way to Cuba (a place of excess) or to a red light area of Mumbai

(impossibly sub-human) whose ‘contaminated’ conditions he believes will surely lead to Leth’s failure in

fulfilling the conditions for the replication of the ‘perfect human’, or even the rules he sets. These tests bring to

the surface the ‘crisis of the ‘aesthetic’, reminding us of the threat of loss of ‘appropriateness’ or

‘unrepresentability’ to which Plato reminded and significantly, the loss of donation or loss of presentation to

which Kant originally pointed in the Critique of Judgment21

. The ‘retreat of donation is in fact, the crisis of the

aesthetic”. For Lyotard, the crisis of the modern is that there is nothing left but space and time, and the crisis of

the postmodern is that “we no longer have even space and time left”22. To be noted is the mixing up by Ranciere

of two different experiences, ‘unrepresentability’ and ‘unpresentability’. The essay elaborates later on the

distinction.

While the problem of representability is about appropriateness, underlying the problem of

‘unpresentability’ is the problem of loss of destiny in two ways. One, marked by the loss of donation, the loss

of space and time, and the other, when nothing further happens, that is, the fatelessness of the hero. Lyotard

draws upon Holderlin’s Remarks on Oedipus that his true tragedy is not so much that god has turned away from

him, but that fate is accomplished, “when nothing more happens to the hero, nothing is destined for him any

more”23

. The avant-garde arts have responded to this crisis of foundations – that there is no time and space, what

exists is fatelessness, Oedipus without fate, and therefore, they get to work on the conditions of space and time

as witnesses to this loss – this is the drama that they stage, the loss of fate rather than the staging of ‘plots’. This

is the crisis of the aesthetic, the limit, and one of the central features of the problematic of art and

communication.

The idea of “when nothing more happens to the hero, nothing is destined for him any more”, is what

von Trier plays upon as he sets out to banalize the Perfect Human as a character who is over and done with,

creating within the film a deliberate force-field of instability. Leth, on the other hand, valiantly endeavours to

stabilise the successful continuation of the Perfect Human as well as the perfect filmmaker who rescues the

Concept and is also saved by it.

In the domain of philosophy of science, the idea of ‘nothing happens’ versus ‘it happens’ is an

important area around which ‘limit’ and ‘nothingness’ have been conceptualized by Gaston Bachelard as a

temporal duality and negation of continuity of thought24

. Bachelard says “we need to give ourselves the

temporal alternative that can be analysed by these two observations: either in this instant, nothing is happening

or else in this instant, something is happening. Time is thus continuous as possibility, as nothingness. It is

discontinuous as being. (Discontinuity seems to be an ‘interior’ feature for Bachelard.) He starts from temporal

duality, not from unity. “We base this duality on function rather than on being. When Bergson tells us that

dialectic is but the relaxation of intuition, we reply that this relaxation is necessary to the renewal of intuition

and that, from the standpoint of meditation, intuition and relaxation give us proof of the fundamental temporal

alternative”.

Bachelard provides a critique of Kant at two points. One, in critiquing his immediate transitiveness of

the feeling and the judgment of taste, indirectly, by a distrust of first experience. Two, he provides it by his

critique of time and temporal possibility as an a priori form25.

Time as hesitation, annihilation and repose emerge here to indicate a pause in thinking and a rupture in

the ontological success of being. Five Obstructions presents a meditation on this ontological structure of our

experience - continuity or discontinuity, on the lines of ‘to be or not be’. Will Leth withdraw from these tests to

preserve the structure of his past experience, will he plunge in, will he survive them, will he fail them to ensure

continuity?

Bachelard critiques the Bergsonian limitlessness of thought and, like Kant, presents a ‘discontinuous’

view of thought and ‘structure of experience’ as compared to Bergson. In Relaxation and Nothingness26, he

breaks the homogeneity of time and life presented by Bergson. Here it might be pertinent to point out that while

Bergson has seen ‘experience’ itself as ‘limit’ to thought and action - that ontological stability of the being has

remained successful by affirming future action and thought by past experience and memory, and by the ‘unity’

of time27, Bachelard points to ‘annihilation’, ‘hesitation’ and ‘repose’ as the limit of thought. These are

moments where matter retreats.

Though strong differences exist between Lyotard and Bachelard, both do draw attention to a certain

‘discontinuity’28

. While Lyotard gives cognisance to the overstepping of the permitted or the legitimate,

Bachelard draws attention to the ‘yes-no’ within which action occurs, as a way of breaking out of a pattern of

8/38

9/38

‘affirmation’ to past experience, in other words, ‘continuity’. Furthermore, Bachelard asserts that Being does

not necessarily wish to maintain its own success, as for instance, in ‘adaptation’ or ‘the need to lose’ where the

being has curiosity for the new and wishes to change.29 Such a view of Being and experience as what

philosophy of science demonstrates with regard to the preservation of experience is in stark contrast to what we

see happening in Five Obstructions.

While in the fashion of Bachelard, von Trier pushes Leth towards rupture and discontinuity, Leth,

manages, in part Bergsonian manner and as is symptomatic of the Aesthetic Regime, to continue with the

representation of the perfect human in boundless manner. In the filmic answers to von Trier’s five obstructions,

Leth provides a continuity of thought to The Perfect Human even as it is ‘adapted’ to changing rules of frames,

style and context in each episode of the Five Obstructions. Moreover, Leth prefers not to see these tests and

rules as material obstacles, but their new form and conditions as stoff30 that furnish the imagination, even if the

Concept of perfect human were, perchance, to fail. Such an approach is very much a dependence on the

Aesthetic Regime which does not accept rules as obstacle to continuity.

So Leth continues while it is von Trier who gives up rupturing the series of perfection that seems to

have no limit. Does Leth admit to any limit? Is there no limit if you have understood the formula or principle,

or concept, in this case, the concept of the perfect human which Leth shows, can be re-created endlessly? Is he

being guided by his ‘intuition’ that will not let him be misled into bad practice, even though he has been asked

by von Trier to make a film that resembles an actor ruining a scene? Yet, ironically, it is precisely this very

‘limitlessness’ and ‘infinity’ of the application of the ‘Concept’ that Leth calls the ‘cheap trick of art’ in the self-

critical commentary written by von Trier in the last of the five episodes on obstruction.

Leth’s films made under ‘constraint’ show both the struggle with ‘obstruction’ as well as the ‘genius’,

where Leth struggles against his own rules set in The Perfect Human, his own experience, through the pact of a

new ‘rule-following’ that von Trier invites him into, for a philosophical and creative ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’,

‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ that so characterizes the idea of dialectic thinking. So if Leth takes us to Gesture and

Thought in The Perfect Human, he is forced back into Image through Re-presentation in the act of mimesis in

Five Obstructions.

The five obstructions, as the film on the last obstruction shows, have used rules as rules of a game of

flagellation imposed by von Trier on Leth, by asking him to banalize himself, to make rubbish. It is an

interesting surprise when von Trier, in the last film, (wherein he himself prepares a script that is to be read out

by Leth) calls it his own ‘self-flagellation’ and not just Leth’s. Yet von Trier’s designed flagellation through the

‘method’ of annihilating obstructions, rises above his own and becomes a flagellation of the entire medium and

art of filmmaking. An annihilation of cinema art itself.

What starts as a ‘breakdown’ of ‘concept’ and ‘medium’ and ‘mastery over technique’ through

‘context’, ‘interrogation’, ‘investigation’ and ‘visibility of technique’, becomes its ‘continuity’ instead, less

defeated than anticipated. As though to show that the ‘series’ will go on, if the formula has been understood. As

though, the principle, being true, would be unaffected by change in conditions - the principle would survive. In

other words, the question that von Trier has posed, whether the perfect human is a possibility under any

externality, however ugly, any imperfection of technology and setting – a question that is aimed both to concept

as well as medium, is answered by Leth - the perfect human is capable of being perfect anywhere, under any

circumstance, and the medium and its mastery can grasp the principle anywhere. While von Trier tries to

distance the ‘human’ from the ‘perfect’, Leth struggles in this game of combat to minimize the distance. While

von Trier tries to show the inherent imperfection of the medium that could fall short of the concept, Leth always

proves to the contrary in his films. Every attempt of von Trier to nosedive the aesthetics of The Perfect Human

into banality only pushes Leth into the strengthening of the concept.

A structure of “I believe” is forced to rise in this film through the responses to the five obstructions, as

‘assertion’, ‘affirmation’ of Leth’s beliefs as opposed to von Trier’s attempts to falsify or erode them. We see in

Five Obstructions Leth providing ‘answers’ to ‘questions’ about the perfect human, questions that held the

structure of experience of the spectator in The Perfect Human. In fact, we see ‘belief’ being forced to emerge in

the film where ‘method’ is forced to adapt to new ‘rules’, where method is questioned. This draws our attention

to ‘continuity’, ‘belief’ and ‘fear of falsification’ as the a priori structures of our experience to which thinkers

like Vivek Dhareshwar and Balagangadhara have pointed in other contexts, largely drawing attention to

experience as understood in the domains of the Indian philosophical traditions and philosophy of science,

respectively.

Five Obstructions begins with instilling head-on the ‘fear of falsification’ and continuity of past

experience as predominant structures of experience, but towards the end falls into the very trap it wants to

challenge. In fact, that is precisely what the filmmakers want to show us, that falling into the trap of continuity is

attractively possible with all the offerings of the Aesthetic Regime of endless representations, but the liberation

10/38

11/38

DAS: OBSTRUCTION: LIMIT & FALSE MOVEMENTS OF CINEMA

from rules might land the structure of aesthetic experience in the ‘cheap trick of art’. Unsurprisingly, von Trier

is the founder of Dogme 95, an avant garde film movement that upholds specific rules of filmmaking under a

‘vow of chastity’ that reduce the artifice of props, external lighting, unnatural effects, and music to the

minimum.

In an essay, On Experience Occluding Structures, Balagangadhara says that experience is a “structure

hugging fabric”. He draws upon several interesting analogies from the philosophy of science to establish this

idea of experience as structure hugging - one, from Imre Lakatos on the idea of ‘falsification’31

; second, also

from Lakatos, on the idea of ‘protective belt and immunisation’; the third from the ‘frame problem’32 in

Artificial Intelligence explained by Daniel Dennett; and the fourth from Otto Neurath about the ‘leaking boat on

the high seas’33

.

In his post-Popperian phase, Lakatos developed a ‘methodology of scientific research programmes’

Lakatos speaks about the growth of science in terms of competing research programmes. Lakatos’ notion of

research programme included, besides a succession of theories, a common ‘metaphysical core’ surrounded by a

protective belt. This protective belt immunized the programme against falsification; it encouraged the

formulation of ad hoc hypotheses as immunizing strategy. Deriving from Lakatos, Balagangadhara states,

“Experience has the structure it has because of the explanation that has gone into it”. The explanation for

experience, he says, is structured by previous accounts and cognitive schemes, and it is the fear of its

falsification that obstructs the creation of knowledge and it is this fear that creates ignorance and takes the form

of a ‘protective belt’ or an ‘immunisation’ against contrary or new knowledge, or against ‘threats to experience’.

All structured experience derive their structure from the structure of cognitive schemes, be they theories,

accounts, implicit beliefs, or whatever else. In fact, he describes ‘fear of falsification’ as the ‘appeal to

experience’ in order not to accept accounts which appear contra-experiential, the cognitive attitude being to

‘save the experience’. Thus it is the explanation for experience that creates the obstacle to its own replacement,

acting as an ‘immunisation’ force against the ‘new’.

As seen in the partial changing of planks in the leaking boat analogy drawn from Neurath, experience

creates a ‘localisation of problem’, says Balagangadhara, so as not to destabilize the whole of experience, and to

carry forward the structure of experience as long as it works, no matter the leaks. The resistance, to change and

its ensuing knowledge, in other words, ignorance, acts like a ‘safety belt’, a ‘learning strategy’, a ‘plugging’

against criticism, and lands us in the ‘frame problem’. In Five Obstructions we see Leth straining to

innovatively effect such a localisation so as not to let the Idea of the perfect human crumble in toto, but to

preserve it through various excesses and exigencies, as long as it can go on.

Balagangadhara’s theorisation helps to provide an explanation for the tension we see in the film around

the imaginary protective and immunising belt of Platonic aesthetics that marks the prior experience of The

Perfect Human, which is under risk of being vanished by von Trier with his new rules of falsification. The

appeal to experience and the fear of the contra-experiential emerge as limit and this limit as structure of the new,

grafted, adapted experience of the Five Obstructions. This is what lands Five Obstructions in Dennet’s ‘frame’

problem to which Balagandhara draws our attention. In his essay “Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of

AI”, Dennet describes an experiment where a robot is being taught the difference between relevant and

irrelevant implications of actions and their side-effects, in order to separate them before acting to detonate a

bomb. As thrice he fails, Dennett refers to it as suffering from ‘frame problem’.

As Dennett describes it, a frame problem emerges where within a given set of manifest constraints, a

defined action is impossible. The cognitive wheel is simply any design proposal in cognitive theory. But it is

rudimentary, rhetorical, gestural, indicative only, and not always microscopic down to the finer details and

multiple levels to which its implementation is to follow. Often, he says, we may have conscious access only to

the upper surface of a multi-level system of information processing, more through disguised aprioristic

reasoning about what ideas and impressions have to be to do the jobs they obviously did, than with actual proof.

But we continue with the myth of the cognitive wheel. Like the experimenters of Robot R1, R1D1, R2D1,

R2D2, we persist with the ‘frame’ out of habit, though we are expected to fail or abandon the hypothesis to save

ourselves instead, as Popper would have expected34

. We understand here what Balagangadhara meant in saying

that experience is structure ‘hugging’. It clings to the schema of explanation, to the cognitive wheel, though the

wheel may no longer suffice the experience itself.

Thus in Five Obstructions we see that no matter the new rules intended to alter or deviate the structure

of prior experience, there is a rigorous, though disarming, attempt on Leth’s part to preserve the sanctity of the

past experience, as if to show the fullness of the cognitive wheel embodied in the idea of the perfect human.

Balagangadhara points to ignorance both as enabling and masking force of experience as understood

within the Indian traditions. He points out how concepts of ‘self’ and ‘agency’ actually hinder the emergence of

self knowledge, and how the idea of ‘error’ operates within the explanations for ‘experience’ and ‘experience

12/38

13/38

occluding structures’ in the domain of science and Indian tradition. On the one hand, knowledge is an obstacle

to experience, and on the other, ignorance is an obstacle. Indian traditions, he says, seem to see non-knowledge

as preventing you from attaining self-knowledge. He highlights the predicament thus. Considering that

explanatory avenues from Indian traditions are not really open to us any more than our resources were theirs, the

predicament is that firstly, on the one hand, ignorance not only prevents knowledge acquisition, it is also pre-

condition for information. Secondly, ignorance is both the absence of information and its presence. How do we

conceptualise ignorance so that these two contradictions can be satisfied? Are there two kinds of ignorance, or is

this a dialectical presentation of ‘ignorance’ as both obstacle to experience as well as stabilizing force for

experience? These are the questions asked by Balagangadhara35

.

While Balagangadhara argues, that in different ways, the idea of ‘ignorance’ is used, preserved or

exterminated to ‘save the experience’, I argue that something similar happens to the idea of ‘obstruction’ within

the aesthetic domain, and this is done not only to ‘save the experience’, but to ‘save the norm’. This is the point

where we turn to Vivek Dhareshwar’s analysis of the concept of ‘stereotype’.

Stereotypes, says Dhareshwar, are oblique action heuristics, and they preserve and transmit practical

knowledge. Stereotype is a concept in which experience is either obliquely present or altogether occluded.

Normative concepts are stereotypes in the latter sense. “What stereotypes manage to achieve is actually

something truly mind boggling: they try to make truth and norm one36

. If and when the process is successful

stereotypes become experience-proof.” Thus Truth (that is, Truth as norm), becomes attached to stereotypes and

makes them experience-proof!

According to him, the all-important but often neglected functional property of stereotypes is “making

true”. “Unfortunately we obsess about the lack of truth-value of stereotypes, rather than their ability to make

true”. He adds, “…stereotypes make true in an epistemic sense domains that they create or take over.”

But how do they manage to do so? Dhareshwar turns to the Indian traditions to answer this. Adhyasa,

he says, in the Indian philosophical traditions, defines wherever experience gets covered over and misidentified

with occluding structures37

. Thus adhyasa as ‘occlusion’ becomes a significant point to theorise the idea of

obstruction.

What the above discussion makes visible is the burden on the ‘stereotype’ to ‘save the norm’ whereby

experience is protected. Integrating the learnings from Balagangadhara and Dhareshwar we may proceed to say

that the ‘norm’ and ‘norm as Truth’38

operate as the ‘protective belt’ for prior experience, though norm and truth

are not one and the same.

What Leth effects in the film against the destabilisations attempted by von Trier is the effort to ‘save

the norm’ of the Concept, whereby experience is protected, the Idea of the perfect human is secured in the form

of norm as Truth, and the same operates as the ‘protective belt’ for the experience, though the Concept of the

perfect human in Leth’s original film and what is later re-created as self-same incarnations, are not one and the

same. Perhaps, that is one of the reasons why we have Leth calling this preservation of experience the ‘cheap

trick of art’.

The desire to falsify, negate the Idea versus the fear of its falsification results in Leth tightening the

‘protective belt’ however ingeniously, however aesthetically, resulting in co-opting every rupture as continuity.

This tension places cinema at stake, but rescues it in the end, salvaging the cinema experience from its

inherent ‘impurities’, at the last minute, by precisely exposing the same. Leth saves the experience from

‘falsification’ as would be rendered by Platonic charges of ‘impurity’. While embracing the Hegelian norm of

the ‘Idea’ and the Hegelian sovereignty of Thought as Concept, he succeeds in preserving the Platonic norms of

‘effects’ of art and ‘reminiscence’. This he does by bringing the attention to how a film summons us to such and

such an Idea through the force of its loss.

The ‘Concept’ and the ‘Idea’ are known to be representative of the Hegelian framework of aesthetics.

As Hegel says in Aesthetics, Idea in determinate form is the Ideal. “Now the Idea as such is nothing but the

Concept, the real existence of the Concept, and the unity of the two. For the Concept as such is not yet the Idea,

although ‘Concept’ and ‘Idea’ are often used without being distinguished. But it is only when it is present in its

real existence and placed in unity therewith that the Concept is the Idea…In this unity the Concept is

predominant.39

A further explanation of the Concept is provided thus by Hegel:

“For in accordance with its own nature, it is this identity implicitly already, and therefore generates

reality out of itself as its own, therefore, since this reality is its own self development, it sacrifices nothing of

itself in it, but therein simply realizes itself, the Concept, and therefore remains one with itself in its objectivity.

This unity of Concept and Reality is the abstract definition of the Idea”. (pp 106). However, often use is made of

the word ‘idea’ in theories of art, still vice versa extremely excellent connoisseurs of art have shown themselves

14/38

DAS: OBSTRUCTION: LIMIT & FALSE MOVEMENTS OF CINEMA

particularly hostile to this expression….never touching at all on what we call the Idea…what we mean by the

word ‘Idea’ is in every respect free, for the Idea is completely concrete in itself, a totality of characteristics, and

beautiful only as immediately one with the objectivity adequate to itself (pp 107)… we find in the Idea, as we

saw, the concrete unity of Concept and Objectivity… Consequently the Concept is the universal, which on the

one hand negates itself by its own activity into particularity which is the negative of the universal. For the

universal does not meet in the particular with something absolutely other; the particulars are only particular

aspects of the universal itself, and therefore the universal restores in the particular its unity with itself as

universal. In this returning into itself the concept is infinite negativity, not a negation of something other than

itself, but self-determination in which it remains purely and simply a self-relating affirmative unity. Thus it is

true individuality as universality closing only with itself in its particularizations…The Concept is distinguished

from the Idea by being particularisation only in abstracto, since determinacy, as it exists in the Concept, remains

caught in the unity and ideal universality which is the Concept’s element.”40

This unity of Concept and Idea we behold in The Perfect Human. But this is precisely what is

attempted to be dialectically broken in Five Obstructions, so as to show both the sovereignty and the caprice or

even the redundance of the Idea. In The False Movements of Cinema, Badiou discusses the struggle between the

internal movements of cinema and the Pure Idea that according to him makes its passage through a film (or any

image) in the form of a ‘visitation’. Earlier in the essay we mentioned the three movements of cinema that are its

false movements41

. Yet it is these false movements that can be said to constitute the ‘poetics of cinema’42. It is

precisely these movements, which as ‘poetics’ permit, what he calls, the ‘visitation’ of the Idea. These

movements not only pertain to representation but also its effects (Platonic) that have the impact on structure of

spectatorial experience, how the spectator stands and speaks and remembers about the film…

Badiou presents cinema as the great impurifier, as inaesthetic. For Badiou the ‘obstruction’ to the

passage of the Idea in the film, to its visitation and its rising to the level of a Concept to which (good) art

aspires, and the obstruction to its reception and summoning, lies in the ‘impurities’ of cinema. Cinema as the

great ‘impurifier’, believes Badiou, prevents the purity of the Concept from emerging by closing the required

distance between the action and the viewer through forgetful pleasure…43

. In fact, every step of the way, this

bridging of objective distance, between filmmaker and the filmed objects who are part actors, part spectators

themselves, is attempted to be transgressed in the rules set by von Trier. Therefore, the concept of the

‘falseness’ of cinema, that cinema itself, in its definition, is ‘obstructive’ to aesthetic experience, in so far as it

fails to maintain this appropriate distance, and is deceptive in any ‘intrinsic’ properties to become or hold Idea.

Yet, notwithstanding the ontological deficiencies of cinema to reach Truth or Idea, Leth, as with the cognitive

wheels analogy, keeps on trying to make every film on obstruction a holder of the Idea of the perfect human.

The concept ‘inaesthetics’ carries with it the Platonic suspicion of art and the risk of its impurity for the

soul as well as for the rise and movement of the Idea. In Platonic terms, he presents cinema as an ‘impure’

movement, cinema as an ‘impurifier’ as it risks being liked too much and thereby becomes a source of

abasement; cinema space as an impure space with cinema being the falsest of all arts because of the mixing of

all other art forms, because of being created out of the ‘negation of the visible’44

. This impurity is because

cinema, as the ‘plus-one’ of the arts is parasitic and inconsistent; it is the only art which effectively organizes

the impossibilities of operating the movement from one art to another. Further, that the cinema image is

precisely ‘not’ what is visible because of a system of ‘purging’, the ‘idea’ of cinema as ‘subtraction’, is what

lends to both impurity and falseness. Five Obstructions, of course, turns this on its head by revealing to the

spectators the system of purging, how the ‘visible’ is created out of a system of negations and subtractions, and

the tussle to demolish, tame the Idea or alternately to show its dominance.

The spectator is made witness to the painful process of thought that is forced to move from ‘question’

(queries already posed in The Perfect Human and those that von Trier imposes on Leth between the films) and

‘sense’ (for instance, in the form of interpretations made by Leth of von Trier’s rules) to ‘belief’, towards

wrenching out a hypothesis of ‘this is the case’ through the filmic answers provided by Leth – ‘this’ is who the

perfect human is, ‘this’ is why he does what he does. Leth is forced to draw conclusions from what he himself

has said in The Perfect Human. A process of breaking, dismantling, disassembling the hypothesis, the process of

both thought and cinema, becomes a making, refining of the spectator, while alternately breaking and shaping

both Leth and von Trier.

Yet the arrival at the creation of ‘affirmation’, ‘assertion’ and ‘belief’ makes apparent the

uncomfortable violence through which ‘belief’ in the perfect human is generated and sustained and made a

peaceful ‘structure’ that can now hold experience. At the same time, this is made to happen in a way that allows

‘duration’ to come to the surface in its ‘hesitations’ whereby the ‘disposition’ of the two friendly adversaries

become known to us as they combat and struggle for/against obstructions and the overcoming of ‘limit’.

15/38

16/38

Leth and von Trier bring out the various connotations of ‘limit’ not only in the form of rule as limit, but

also what might constitute the ontological limit of cinema and cinema experience. Does the latter lie in the

filmmaker’s ethic as/of ‘observer’ – in deciding the distance or closeness to places and things that are the

objects of enquiry, how far and how near to harrowing things can film and the filmmaker go before breaking

down as distant observer; this distant observer who also reflects on how the perfect human makes a film. Or

does it lie in appropriate experience, pleasure or displeasure? What could be the possible ‘ground’ of cinema,

representation or presentation or presencing, and the role of time and space, as witness to the ‘loss of fate’ and

‘the loss of presentation’ to which Kant and Lyotard remind?

Leth says instinctively he is an observer; there is no limit, by physiological or physical law of limit;

even by the rules of the game set by von Trier, one can go as close and still show that distance between

filmmaker and the filmed is possible. “It doesn’t bother me to play the perfect human against any background”.

Thus he comes up with playful responses to von Trier’s idea of minimizing distance between him and a group of

slum dwellers in Bombay’s red light area where he shoots the second obstruction using a translucent screen to

shoot the ‘meal scene’ where he eats a full meal at a table surrounded by people from the slum kept out of the

scene.

Rule following: In a very obvious way we may see this game as ‘obstruction’ operating through ‘rule

following’ in Wittgensteinian fashion. But rule following is complicated by several features. One, that rule

following is not only about understanding and knowing the construction of the apparatus, i.e., mastering a

technique in a sense so as to say “Now I know!”, “Now I understand!”45

but it is also about ‘being able’ to

continue the series that takes the form of “I can go on”, and this happens only ‘under particular

circumstances’46

, and not necessarily linked with prior ‘experience’.

According to Wittgenstein, an action is understood by its rules, and where do the rules lie?

Wittgenstein gives the example of chess – that experience provides the clues to understanding the consequences

of the act. The intending of a word, or its meaning lies in its ‘use’/expression of its use. Wittgenstein asks,

“Where is the connection effected between the sense of the expression, ‘Let’s play a game of chess’ and all the

rules of the game? – Well in the list of rules of the game, in the teaching of it, in the day-to-day practice of

playing. At the same time he says, ‘I can go on’ means ‘I have an experience which I know empirically to lead

to the continuation of the series’. And yet having the prior experience, knowing the formula may not prevent

unknowing a rule, i.e., a situation of “‘yes’ I could do it, only now I can’t!” 47

Thus Wittgenstein points to the philosophical paradox of rule-following, for ‘fitting’, for ‘being able

to’, for ‘understanding’ which are not mental processes but also ‘family of language games’ (pp 103)48

, which

brings attention firstly, to ‘interpretations’ of a rule, and secondly, to a new insight – of ‘intuition’ which needs

to be factored in to understand the understanding of rule.

Here, do we arrive at the idea of ‘language as limit’ for understanding, action, and continuity of action

– language that provides the meaning of uses of words and utterances? And yet we see Leth trying to subvert

Triar’s rule through their loose interpretation, to which Leth admits. We turn to Wittgenstein. To obey a rule, to

make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess are customs (uses and institutions)…Grasping the rule is

not about its interpretation, but about ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases….(pp 110) (Here

custom is marked by regular use of sign-posts.) …And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a

rule….Following a rule is analogous to obeying an order (pp 111),… where ‘order’ , or ‘rule’ are defined by

means of a system of reference (pp 111) involving ‘concepts’ and if they have not been grasped, then ‘examples

of practice’ by which ‘regularity’ or ‘rule’ may be conveyed. (111-112) Wittgenstein says, “When I obey a rule,

I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.’ (pp 116) And if there are several possible interpretations what makes us

doubt others and choose one? It must have been intuition...Not only that rule following can happen without

understanding, it can also happen without reasons…If intuition is an inner voice, how am I to obey it? How am I

to know it will not mislead me? For if it can guide me right it can also guide me wrong. Intuition is seen as an

unnecessary shuffle. This questioning and affirming of intuition is quite in contrast to the distrust of Bachelard.

Intuition, says Wittgenstein – “is needed at every step to carry out the order of “+n” correctly”49, i.e. continuing

the series correctly to the point of infinity. How is it decided what is the right step to take at any particular

stage?” He goes on to say, “…not that an intuition was needed at every stage, but that a new decision was

needed at every stage.

Is Leth to be seen as continuing the series of the perfect human, under any condition, by overturning

rules and obstructions that are actually intended to break the series, that are intended to obstruct the “I can go

on” experience, by intuitively proceeding not only with the rules provided by von Trier but by the ‘invisible’

rule of the ‘concept’ underlying The Perfect Human which permits him its unlimited application50

, not

withstanding a turn away from prior experience? Or is it the Genius of the Aesthetic Regime of Non-

Representation that we see, the regime opposed to the Platonic, which does not require any rule or constraint to

17/38

18/38

DAS: OBSTRUCTION: LIMIT & FALSE MOVEMENTS OF CINEMA

arrive at the Concept? Thus in Five Obstructions we see rule following as obstruction and this obstruction

appearing as method, to expose the truth of the auteur, and the medium, where rule following is also

simultaneously made into ‘unknowing the known rule’, ‘undoing the previous knowledge and past experience’.

Leth, having to overcome the limit of representation embodied in the rules of Platonic perfection he

established in The Perfect Human still does not land in inaesthetics perhaps due to the transcendental nature of

aesthetic pleasure itself, that can create pleasure out of displeasure, and the idea of limit/limitlessness as ‘finality

without end’51

. The transcendental trait of aesthetic pleasure is to be located in the soul. Kant makes soul (geist)

the animating principle that animates thinking by supplying material (stoff) to faculties of knowledge; stoff that

has pure capacity to regulate, to present, brings faculties into play, a play that is commanded by a “finality”. The

finality is perceived in the object judged beautiful – what Kant calls, “finality in an object…perceived in it (an

ihm) apart from the representation of an end52. Leth transforms every rule of von Trier’s into stoff from the

context that furnishes his imagination and the Concept of the perfect human, helping him to go on. Thinking

continues without retreat, racing from initial displeasure experienced by a new rule towards the creation of

delight, the aesthetic Idea.

For Kant, limit is the thing that cannot be “read” by the feeling of the beautiful53

. Limit comes either

from nature (sublime) or it must be of the mind, or the Ideas of Reason. The Limit is also the failure of

analogous experience as provision of ‘second nature’ is withdrawn in the case of the Sublime. The sublime

object goes beyond/against the affinity of ‘taste’ and ‘genius’. Von Trier continually poses his new rules as the

Thing that is the limit of aesthetic Idea, which Leth shows to be otherwise. Kant posed the Thing as the thing of

awe before which reason and imagination fail, and a feeling of displeasure emerges (and is only later converted

into pleasure with the help of the supersensible faculty). In this case, the Thing appears as the ‘Banal’, as the

modern symbol of horror in Art that the aesthetic mind cannot accept and so from which Leth flees. He flees

towards the Concept. Just as pleasure of the sublime is negative to that of beauty, this displeasure of the Banal

involves a recoil. This negative pleasure is assimilated into a higher finality, that of an Idea, in order to avert the

hideousness of banality. In the case of awe, this assimilation is subverted into admiration (Bewunderung) and

respect (Achtung) for an unpresentable Idea, while in the case of Five Obstructions the displeasure is

assimilated into the pleasure and comfort of the Concept, and the pleasure of the very inconsistency of cinema

medium.

What happens to aesthetic feeling when ‘calculated’ situations are put forward? As Kant pointed out,

aesthetic feeling does not depend upon concepts, yet when calculated situations are put forward, such a

dependency comes about. Lyotard has pointed out that aesthetic feeling has to do not with concepts but with

modes of presentation of matter - the materials of time and space. Re-presentation obstructs immediacy and

originary feeling that is capable of testing us as it does not follow after a concept that has already worked itself

on us. We thus arrive at an opposition between cognitive Idea/Concept and feeling, between image and feeling.

That image, re-presentability, is the forgetfulness of the conditions that produce feeling, namely time and space,

is reminded to us in a dynamic way. Leth is forced to enter the space of such a forgetfulness, forcing back the

Concept in the form of Image, in order to obey the imposed constraints of the five obstructions.

The free-floating forms which aroused the feeling of the ‘beautiful’ in The Perfect Human, which

enabled ‘presencing’, are deliberately withdrawn by von Trier to bring about a lack of matter that will result in

obstructing immediate beauty, the experience of pleasure, and ensure that nothing further happens with the idea

of the perfect human. In the fourth episode, even the cinematic medium is itself withdrawn and form is shrunk to

animation.

Calculated re-presentation destroys the structure of experience of aesthetic pleasure as conceived

within a Kantian framework. It is not a receptiveness but is ‘managed’. The new technologies and art often

obstruct the material conditions, the matter or substance required for ‘aesthetic judgment’ by their hegemony of

the Concept54

, taking the short-cuts through pragmatics and professionalization of intellect, creativity and

exhibition. Again we confront what Leth possibly means by the ‘cheap trick of art’, the crisis of the aesthetic in

which he thinks he has landed himself and us, the spectators.

The last of the five films deserves particular mention where Leth only has to read out a self-critical

commentary written by von Trier who takes over the filmmaking, as though he can ‘no longer go on’ to use the

Wittgensteinian term55

, as though the ‘formula’ he set out with, of exposing the ‘false movements’ of cinema,

has suddenly met with a dead-end, the spade has turned. Is it because Leth seems to still arrive at answers, or

insight/knowledge through ‘intuition’?

We could see the designed ‘obstructions’ in Five Obstructions as a Hegelian ‘negation’ of Leth’s The

Perfect Human, so as to render fragile ideas of both ‘perfection’ and ‘human’ available in it, attempting to

obliterate the apriori of Concept/Idea/Thought with Image and Representation. By showing its distrust of both

Idea and the re-presentation, of the seduction of presenting beauty or prior experience as immediate and

19/38

20/38

immanent, (Plato distrusted it, and Kant thought immediacy necessary to aesthetic judgment) the film raises a

question on the value of both intuition first experience to knowledge.

Is knowledge through intuition, if that was what guided Leth through von Trier’s rules, true

knowledge? Is it to be trusted or distrusted? And is intuition about continuity or discontinuity? Are immediacy

and originary feeling necessities for aesthetic judgment or obstacles? Is the Idea / Concept in its unity, a

necessary precondition and limit for aesthetic experience? Is any apriori necessary for a judgment of beauty or

taste, to provide the structure of aesthetic experience? Must the structure of aesthetic experience proceed by way

of categories or judgments? Is judgment a necessary structure for aesthetic experience? Or are distrust of beauty,

immediate feeling and the need for truth the necessary conditions for art?

In his first Critique, The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant has pointed to ‘categories’ being the ‘a-priori’

conditions for making judgments. Kant has referred to space and time as these a priori conditions for making

judgments, objective, universally valid moral judgments. However, in his Third Critique which deals with The

Aesthetic of Judgment, Kant points out that no a-priori conditions are required for making judgements based on

pleasure, the judgment that something is beautiful, i.e., a judgment of taste’56

. This of course he says with

particular reference to the ‘sublime’ that is in fact possible with the failure of the reason and the sensible, the

imagination. Reason cannot find an a priori concept or idea to give the explanation for experience, thus landing

us in horror or awe. Kant of course, says, this is a temporary failure. That contrarily, it is also the prevalence of

reason over sensibility – our ability to think of that which is great beyond all comparison – a supersensible

ability ‘a faculty of the mind that surpasses every standard of sense…that eventually takes over towards a more

adequate representation of our ideas. Both the elements of reason and sensibility are contradictorily part of the

sublime experience57

. In this dramatizing of Kant’s aesthetic theory and the problematic of aesthetic feeling,

what comes across is the Kantian belief that without ‘immediacy’ and demand for universal communicability,

the element we are dealing with is not art. Virtually, in the Kantian order of things there is one regime of

aesthetic judgement and feeling/experience for beauty and the sublime. Anything that is not made transitive

immediately and is not universal cannot be an aesthetic feeling or art. Outside of this regime there is no art or

aesthetics. By this logic, Kant stands apart from both Platonic and Anti-Representation regime.

Is ‘immediacy’ a necessary structure of judgement, particularly aesthetic judgement? Or is it an

‘occluding’ structure58 as Bachelard would have us believe? Bachelard’s distrust of ‘first experience’ makes

‘immediacy’ a contested terrain. Bachelard’s response to Bergson’s idea of ‘intuition’ in his Dialectic of

Duration seems to indicate towards the latter – that it is not true knowledge. For Bergson who distinguishes

between science’s ‘instant’ and imagination’s ‘intuition’, the latter is a ‘singular’ experience and not universal

as it is for Kant - in other words, ‘private’. Intuition constitutes for Bergson the true principle of philosophy and

judgement.

While Bergson tried to disentangle philosophy from science, Bachelard was convinced about

philosophy being rooted in scientific enquiry. Bergson proposes ‘intuition’ as the necessary element of

‘imagination’ by which science’s exclusive reliance on intellect may be interrogated; he considers all negations

as, in fact, affirmations, and therefore, negation and the idea of ‘nothing’ being pseudo-problems as they cannot

be imagined. Bachelard presents a discontinuity to these ideas. He insists upon fighting ‘easy intuitions’ as they

‘hinder the freedom of the spirit’. His response to Bergson’s idea of ‘intuition’ in his Dialectic of Duration

seems to indicate that it is not true knowledge. ‘First knowledge’ and ‘first intuitions’ are generally wrong and

‘first experience’ must be subjected to rigorous examination. It is unreliable and is the first of the obstacles to

objective knowledge.59

For Bachelard, therefore, immediacy would be an occluding structure to be distrusted as

true knowledge. It helps us pose a question to Leth’s intuitive move towards retaining a hold on the Concept of

prior experience – was it ‘easy’ intuition? Perhaps that is what finds resonance in his last statement in the film

that it was all “a cheap trick of art”.

These ideas Bachelard had already explored systematically in a rigorous discussion on the

“epistemological obstacle”60

. He proposes prior and primary experience as an epistemological obstacle to

scientific experience. Here he draws attention to various kinds of valorisations attempted by the articulation of

pre-scientific thought masquerading as scientific. He delineates through an analysis of the psychological

underpinnings of 18th

century scientific literature how pre-scientific thought valorised itself to become an

obstacle to new and scientific experience, and how its evidence lies in none of these thoughts graduating to the

epistemological level and rigour of ‘science’. He exposes the commonsense beliefs and convenient analogies on

which pre-scientific thinking that never could rise to the status of knowledge that could be called ‘science’.

While Bergson believed intellect to be incapable of capturing time and space in their real continuity, as

it can grasp only the realm of inert matter, ‘immobility’ as he calls it, and thus incapable of comprehending life,

Bachelard proposes a philosophy of ‘repose’ that aims to give ‘rhythm’ to imagination rather than continuity.

Bergson believes intuition to be capable of grasping real time. Bachelard believes that it is impossible to know

21/38

22/38

DAS: OBSTRUCTION: LIMIT & FALSE MOVEMENTS OF CINEMA

time without judging it61

. He believes Bergsonian approach to be an obstruction to judging, choosing and acting

according to a plan. The alternation of the dialectic of two activities – the intellectual and the imaginative –

should form the rhythm of our own life. Imagination must purify itself from the constraints of intellect in order

to freely express itself, and vice versa, freeing themselves from the obstacles they pose to each other. Thus we

see Bachelard presenting a non-Euclidean scientific approach to objective knowledge, which is the overcoming

of the immediate, intuitive and naïve approach of Euclidean geometry. He rescues both reason and imagination

while retaining his scientific critique of first and prior experience and intuitive knowledge.

At this point in our drama, Bachelard’s suspicion of that which has immediate transitiveness is no

longer just a critique of Bergson’s idea of perception and time, but also of the Kantian terms of aesthetic

judgment. We also find Platonic elements of the ‘detour’ applied by Bachelard to first experience, intuition and

imagination that challenges ‘immediacy’ and ‘originary’ structure of experience which Kant emphasized as

mandatory for aesthetic judgment. This polarisation is also to be witnessed in Five Obstructions. Von Trier

takes on the risky avant garde ‘detour’ of both chaos and banalization of The Perfect Human to dialectically test

the truth and resilience of the immediately transitive beauty of this form. Leth acquires more and more patience

with the receding matter that is presented to him in the shaky contexts he is pushed into for the punishing

performance of mimesis. In the act of calculated re-presentation that he is forced into he does not let matter

crumble away into ambiguity as Bachelard would expect, for new experience to enter62

. He fills up the

‘emptiness’, the ‘loss of presentation’, ‘unpresentability’ of matter which we identified earlier as the crisis of

aesthetic experience with necessary falseness, be it of Context or Concept, to reinvent the truth of the perfect

human.

Making True: One of the false movements in Five Obstructions is that of ‘making true’. Though Hegel did not

assume to any a priori in his phenomenological explanation of experience of self/being, or in his work

‘Aesthetics’, a deep questioning of the necessity of the Idea/Concept as apriori to structure of aesthetic

experience plays out in the film.

We see the point of a clash between continuity and discontinuity forces within the aesthetic domain,

where on the one hand we have von Trier presenting an episteme of ‘unpresentability’ that disrupts the smooth

movement of/into the Aesthetic Regime, and on the other hand, there is Leth who is forced into totalizing

aesthetic discourse on the relationship between representation, thought and experience by imposing the norm of

Hegelian Concept/Idea on his own experiments. The tension is between two regimes of aesthetics, the one rule-

bound and of constraints, and the other, of boundlessness, limitless representations. Yet it is the limit of this

boundlessness that we now address.

The limits of thought in film are maintained as the sovereignty of Thought in the movement of the Idea.

Badiou says, “To speak of a film is to speak of the possibilities of thought, not its resources”. The Platonic ideal

is here presented by the filmmakers in Hegelian dialectics and Concept. Though Hegel is kept invisible

throughout, his spectre looms. Dialectics and Concept rise as norm to the surface of the film, assuming a

totalising unity and continuity of experience, co-opting attempted ruptures, preventing ‘falsification’ of the

initial hypothesis of the Perfect Human, the Platonic Ideal. In Hegel’s own words, this would be termed as the

idealization of the ‘Concept’ and presentation of the Idea as Concept63

. This is what in the Kantian system

would be disqualified as aesthetic judgment.

As in the history of the aesthetic regimes, we see how the concepts of ‘unpresentability’ and

‘unrepresentability’ are not allowed to be retained as ‘working concepts’ within the normative structure of

boundlessness marking the Aesthetic Regime that Leth is compelled to embrace in his rule-following.

Leth, without overtly laying claim to any norm (and we ask here, if such a state of ‘beyond the norm’

as the Aesthetic Regime claims for itself is not a false one, and if it is at all possible), seeks the success of the

normative structure of the ‘aesthetic regime’, allowing it to wipe out ‘obstructions’ to the Idea of the perfect

human in the form of a ‘continuous’ display of the relationship between representation and experience, that is

integral to it.

We understand from Dhareshwar that it is ‘normativity’ that postulates an essential link between action

and its description64

, the ‘norm’ being used as a ‘truth’ to explain human/aesthetic experience, ‘norm’ being the

‘occluding’ structure here, and further on, norm being also the ‘frame’ for describing the explanation of events

and forms within a domain, in this case that of art.

In this context, two things ‘made true’ by Leth are – a) there are no rules and there is no limit to

representation; b) the bad infinity of art as the end of art, the cheap trick of art.

The assertion of ‘un-representability’ claims that some things can only be represented in a certain type

of form, by a type of language appropriate to their exceptionality. Just as Ranciere thinks this is vacuous65

and in

23/38

24/38

the anti-representation regime there is no longer, as a rule, a language or a form which is ‘appropriate’ to a

subject, whatever it might be, Leth is compelled to establish on the same lines that there can be no end to

representation because of thought’s ability for ‘infinitization’! He is forced to show through a ‘structure of

belief’ that the impossibility of thought presented by the impossible rules of von Trier to stumble him into either

or both un-representability and bad art, is overtaken by the privileging of ‘infinitization’ and ‘apparent

normlessness’ of absolute representation of the Aesthetic Regime being privileged where Thought and rules

cannot possibly be obstruction to re-presentation - there are no limits to re-presentation.

The task of ‘making true’ which is the task of the stereotype, becomes most apparent in the work of

Leth where, in explaining the ‘structure of experience’ of anti-representation art, the idea of ‘boundlessness’, a

dependence on the ‘instability’ is used to exact, what I call, a seeming ‘normlessness’ of the representation.

However, what we are able to show is the fallacy of such a claim of normlessness by showing the

‘dialectic’ norm at work in Leth’s experiments as well as other possible regulating norms. While there are no

doubt ‘norms’ operating in the Representative Regime, too, as regulatory of experience, we know them to be

those of ‘constraint’ principles – of what is to be spoken, shown, and seen and who is eligible in this and in what

preparedness. What is the regulating ‘norm’ in Leth’s experiments as he is forced to break away from the

Representative Regime of constraints and ‘unpresentability’?

Leth is normatively forced to land us in the Romantic Aesthetic of infinite representation, taking us to

the brink of Hegelian ‘end of art’ with his last statement on ‘the cheap trick of art’ which enables such

repetition, such forgeries of the original work of Thought. We are forced to confront in cinema the trap of

‘stereotype’ to which Dhareshwar has drawn attention.

While one interpretation is that Hegel has attributed the ‘end of art’ to the role of technology and is

more a criticism of the art of his time as having nothing new to convey as compared to the perfect

synchronisation of Greek art, another view, particularly held by Ranciere and others, is that the end of art is born

out of the dissolution of the determinate relationship between form and content that marks the Romantic

movement in art, idea and material presentation.66

“….The polemical function of Hegelian art is clear, it aims to reject the notion that another art might be born out of

the dissolution of the determinate relationship between idea and material presentation. For Hegel such dissolution

can only mark the end of art, a state beyond art…”67

In the film it is the hyperbolic version of Hegelian dialectics that Leth uses to turn von Trier’s tests of

de-familiarising incomprehensible experience and ‘impossibility of representation’ into an infinitization of the

Concept. In this, Leth can be seen as ‘saving the dialectic norm’ and the norm of the Concept, by taking us to a

state of ‘beyond art’ where he attempts to transform the bad infinity of art, that is reduced to reproducing solely

its signature, into “a fidelity to an original debt.”

Falseness of Cinema as Poetics of Cinema: Have we arrived here at the ‘end of art’ with Leth revealing to us

the cheap trick of art, or have we arrived at the ontology of cinema medium itself? Was von Trier’s shuffling of

rules intended to take us away from the truth of art to the ‘powers of the false’?

In spite of the fear of falsification and the contentious efforts to fortify experience what emerges as

poetics of cinema is falseness of cinema. We thus arrive at a point where impurity and falseness of the cinematic

medium, its ability for unreliability, themselves make aesthetic experience possible. Falseness, becomes the new

poetics of cinema.

Von trier’s reckless march towards the powers of the false are towards a new status of narration marked

by chaos68

and deception rather than a case of ‘each has its own truth’. This falseness is also quite different

from error or doubt, because in this system it is difficult to judge the truth. Falsifying narration frees itself from

the system of judgment. There is no value-judgment here, because this new regime is fully capable of offering us

‘second-hand’ masterpieces as indeed Leth proves in the application of the Concept.

The idea of falseness has been elaborated by Deleuze in his essay, The Powers of the False69. Drawing

upon Nietzsche and Leibniz he states that since antiquity time has always put the notion of truth into crisis

(pp130)... in the form of ‘contingent futures’....and the wonderful notion of ‘incompossibility’70. It is Nietzsche,

he reminds, who under the name of the ‘will to power’, substitutes the power of the false for the form of the

true, and resolves the crisis of truth, wanting to settle it once and for all, but, unlike Leibniz, in favour of the

false and its artistic, creative power...

Truth is replaced by incompossibility, the co-existence of not-necessarily true pasts. With contingency

and incompossibility, narration ceases to be truthful and becomes fundamentally falsifying. It becomes difficult

to conceive of a direct relation between truth and time or distinguish between the eternal and the imitation of the

25/38

26/38

DAS: OBSTRUCTION: LIMIT & FALSE MOVEMENTS OF CINEMA

eternal. This Deleuze calls the ‘crystalline regime’, marked by “the indiscernibility of the real and the

imaginary”.

The truthful man dies, every model of truth collapses, in favour of the new narration71

. Thus the perfect

human that is Claus Nissen in The Perfect Human is overtaken by forgers from any time and place that von

Trier places before Leth.

All this could be summed up by saying that the forger becomes the character of the cinema72

. The

forger could previously exist in a determinate form, liar or traitor, but he now assumes an unlimited figure

which permeates the whole film.

What does this power of the false effect? What it effects is the shattering of the Kantian system of

judgment and the Platonic system of Truth, not to mention the Aristotelian system of logic and necessary truth

according to which every proposition about the future must be either true or false.73

We break from the world of

necessities towards a world of chance where contingency can be the only apriori, the only necessity for aesthetic

experience.

Where lies aesthetic pleasure in this breakdown of truth and contrary reliability and continuity of

falseness? Chaos and deception become the necessary structure of aesthetic pleasure as the art of forgery is

unconcealed. Deleuze reminds us that the protagonist in The Man Who Lies, which is one of Robbet-Grillet’s

finest films, is not a localized liar, but an unlocalizable and chronic forger in paradoxical spaces. So also, in my

view, is the protagonist of David Mamet’s House of Games where games within games are structured with

deception and displeasure as the necessary structure of aesthetic pleasure.

What Leth succeeds in reproducing with great beauty every time is the Concept/Idea of the Perfect

Human as the perfect forger here, demonstrating skilfully the indiscernibility between the real and the

imaginary. Leth knows he is in the act of mimesis, in multiplicity, in forgery and deception.

Everywhere it is the metamorphoses of the false, says Deleuze, which replace the form of the

true...Even ‘the truthful man ends up realizing that he has never stopped lying’, as Nietzsche said. The forger

will thus be inseparable from a chain of forgers into whom he metamorphoses. There is no unique forger, and, if

the forger reveals something, it is the existence behind him of another forger, if only the state, as in the financial

operations in Stavisky or in Le grand escroc. The truthful man will form part of the chain, at one end like the

artist, at the other end, the nth power of the false. And the only content of narration will be the presentation of

these forgers, their sliding from one to the other, their metamorphoses into each other. No wonder, Leth and von

Trier emerge as master forgers in this presentation of falseness.

But how did art land us in this falseness? And is truth lost to us completely or is it an undesirable in

art? In what relation does art stand to truth? We turn here to Nietzsche in Heidegger’s “The Will to Power”. The

question about the essence of knowledge, as the question about what is true and truth, is a question about beings

- what they themselves are as such. According to Nietzsche, “Man is the one who honors, and consequently

also the one who denies, truth....” In a note from the year 1884, when the formation of the thought of will to

power consciously begins, Nietzsche remarks “that honouring truth is already the consequence of an illusion”.

(WM, 602) Thus truth becomes something unreal, a de-realization, a hindrance to and even a destruction of life.

Truth is then not a condition of life, not a value, but an unvalued. Truth in the sense of a thing’s being

recognized as true”, is transformed into a holding-for or holding-to-be-true74.

If accordingly, the will to truth belongs to life, then truth, since its essence is illusion, cannot be the

highest value. There must be a value, a condition of perspectival life-enhancement, that is of greater value than

truth. Indeed, Nietzsche does say, “that art is worth more than truth.” (WM 853, IV; from 1887-88)

Art alone guarantees and secures life perspectivally in its vitality, that is, in the possibilities of its

enhancement, against the power of truth. Hence Nietzsche’s statement: “We have art in order not to perish from

the truth” (WM, 822, 1888). Art is a higher “value”, that is a more primordial perspectival condition of “life”,

than truth. Here, art is conceived metaphysically as a condition of beings, not merely aesthetically as pleasure,

not merely biologically and anthropologically as an expression of life and of humanity, and not merely

politically as proof of a position of power. If one may say so, here art itself is apriori.

How did art transform from being integrated metaphysically to Being to being isolated from it? If art

and being were metaphysically connected, how did the severing come about that it can only be reached today

either through a detour or through a rigour of deception, of a ‘holding-to-be-true’?

Heidegger points out that Nietzsche saw the reason in the Greek sense of “image” which is a “coming

to the fore” or “phantasia”, understood as “coming to presence”. With the transformations of the Greek concept

of being in the course of the history of metaphysics, the Western concept of the image changes accordingly. The

27/38

being that in the time of Heraclitus was seen in the Platonic way as phein, physis, “in being” and the “rise of

presencing”; and the Idea was most in “being of beings”; and therefore the image, in the designated sense of

phantasia, was seen as a view to this, and therefore, true (Truth is imaging, when thought in the Greek way). To

be in being means the self-showing that arises and presences: presencing an outward appearance (eidos)

constituting the countenance (Idea) that a “matter” has...But precisely this is what shows itself, the sight and the

image that proffer themselves.

Heidegger himself, in his “Origin of the Work of Art” discusses the significance of this presencing as

‘unconcealment’. Heidegger asks, “Whence does the artwork originate? Where does it spring from? And what

springs from the work of art itself?”75

For Heidegger these questions about the origin (der Ursprung) relate the

matter of art to truth as aletheia or unconcealment. For the Being of beings, the coming to presence of things, is

the original self-showing by which entities emerge from hiddenness; by the constancy of their relation to

concealment beings show that they have an origin. But beings that are works of art manifest their origin in a

special way. Heidegger therefore calls art the becoming of truth, the setting to work of the truth of beings...

When Heidegger examines and describes Van Gogh’s painting of some (peasant) shoes, he believes that this

work reveals things in their Being. More, it reveals the world of the peasant who walks in those shoes while

working the earth76.

However, what is still happening in Western history, post the Heraclitan time is this -“What is and

what occurs consist in the strange fact that at the beginning of the consummation of modernity truth is defined

as “illusion”77, and not, as was earlier seen by the Greeks, in being. This metamorphoses the truth-relation

between art and Truth.

While in the Greek system it was believed that ‘method’ was required to guide us from ‘error’ that was

opposed to truth, in modern Western history, the approach to method changes. “Finally what leads us to truth is

not ‘method’ but ‘constraint’ and ‘chance’: no method can determine in advance what compels us to think, it is

rather the fortuitousness of the encounter that guarantees the necessity of what it forces us to think”78. Drawing

us undoubtedly close to Heidegger’s profound statement that the problem of thought remains that we are not yet

thinking.

Indeed, the castigating nature of rule-following in Five Obstructions does achieve a revelation of the

true nature of cinema which is false. What Leth achieved in The Perfect Human was the unconcealment or

presencing of perfection of the wounded being within the constraints of appropriateness. What von Trier does is

land us in the poetics of falseness, seeking to prove the perfect human as a mere “holding to be true”,

contingent upon chance, which Leth demonstrates to be falsely true in a series that can go on as an endless list

of forgers. But in so doing, in creating the chaos and falseness with deliberate intent, both filmmakers, Lars von

Trier and Jorgan Leth, reveal to us the true ontology of our beings and that of art.

End Game: So, finally this game of obstructions is made to come out with all its hide and seeks, the visible

rules and intentions as well as the ulterior ones, in the last film on obstruction. Here, where Leth reads out a

script written by von Trier but masquerading as his and addressed as “Dear silly Lars…”, the film is laid open

at the seams – where Leth’s valiant struggle against obstruction, to the point of victory, is actually made out to

be a product of an abject human being, fooling the world with a cheap trick called art with films that are

hideaways, and von Trier’s annihilating efforts to expose Leth behind his ‘provocative, perverse, perfection, and

depression’, become ‘a loving chastisement’ of the same. A chastisement turned against not Leth alone but

himself as well, an assault against himself, ultimately proving Leth to be both human and the ‘perfect’ human

‘fallen’ aesthetically. Disarmingly, “how does the perfect human fall” is in fact the last frame of the film

showing Leth practicing the ‘fall’ done so naturally by Claus Nissen in The Perfect Human, while von Trier

reveals himself as having fallen ‘flat on his face’. The assault, the loving chastisement, of course, is not just of

one or both the filmmakers but, as we have said, of the medium as well, of the very nature of its art whose

technology demands artifice, cheating, hiding, lying, controlling.

We are reminded again of Hegel and the end and use of art. If his disapproval of the use of art forms

for non-art reasons, based as it is on the rationality of ‘optimality’79, is to be taken seriously, then the use of art-

form as pedagogy and therapy that we see in this film lands both von Trier and Leth in trouble. Or does it? Is

rule-following about instrumentality80

or intuition? Coming back to Paisley Livingstone whom we started with,

in so far as our experiences of art have various instrumental values, Hegel’s worry about the rationality of

choosing artistic means to non-artistic ends remains relevant81.

The ‘instrumental’ use of cinema in Five Obstructions is intended not only as a means of creating

knowledge but also to device so that it works ‘against itself’ and exposes the falseness and impurities of

filmmaking art, challenges the ‘authenticity’ of the filmmaker and the spectator, and at the same time, perhaps,

attempts to clothe the painful rigour of art and creation, in part Aristotelian manner, as intended more for

28/38

29/38

DAS: OBSTRUCTION: LIMIT & FALSE MOVEMENTS OF CINEMA

healing than the purpose of truth, and dominantly, to deceive us into a true consciousness of the powers of the

false and their other side of the coin that is aletheia, presencing as truth and unconcealment.

Having witnessed in Five Obstructions the battle between ‘limit’ and ‘limitlessness’, both von Trier

and Leth struggling with all versions of the ‘limit’ of art and use of art being applied to cinema, with the last

episode on obstruction in the film we arrive at a Platonic moment, indeed, of the revelation of the ‘trickstery’ of

art and the (critical) ‘self-delusion’ of the artist!

Notes

1. See, Livingstone, Paisley. Theses on Cinema and Philosophy. 2006

2. Elster, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment and Constraints. 2000. in

Livingstone, above stated.

3. See, Badiou, Alain. 2005

4. See, Dhareshwar, Vivek’ paper for the Conference on “The Human Sciences and the Asian Experiences”,

February 18-20, 2000.

5. Refer Balagangadhara, S.N. ‘On Experience Occluding Structures’. 2007. Unpublished.

6. See, Bachelard, Gaston. Transl. Mary Mcallester Jones. Clinamen Press 2002. Published in French by

Librairie Philosophique J. VRIN as La Formation de I 'Esprit ScientiJique

7. See, Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image. 2007.

8. Ranciere, pp 112. above stated.

9. See, Badiou, Alain. 2005.

10. Plato, The Republic. Transl. Jowett, B. Representation should take into account the desirable character for

statesmanship, hierarchy of character, the cosmic arrangement of the world-order. Also refer Badiou.

Above stated. Platonic criticism of mimesis is not aimed merely at art’s imitation of things, but its

aspiration to imitate the effect/s of truth.

11. Refer The Republic; Also refer Badiou, Art and Philosophy, Handbook of Inaesthetics. Above stated.

12. The idea of a ‘frame’ for experience is taken from Balagangadhara’s paper On Experience Occluding

Structures. 2007. Unpublished.

13. For Plato poetry is non-truth, resembles sophistry; far removed from the truth. (Plato gives the analogy of

the magnetic rings in Ion). Therefore, what will be its use vis-a-vis truth? Plato describes both Painter and

Poet as (a) pursuing inferior degree of truth in their creations; (b) having concern with inferior part of the

soul; (c) poet is a manufacturer of images far removed from the truth – (Ion) . In The Republic on pp 420 he

points out that Art generates pleasure and pain but it should be subject to the pedagogic surveillance of

truth. Platonic suspicion was that pleasure and pain might become the rulers of the state if poet and muse,

epic or lyric were allowed to move the soul beyond restraint. So Pleasure was distinct from the Good;

Truth, Beauty and Justice in their harmony symbolized the Good, and not pain and pleasure which needed

to be contained. Poetry was to be tested by these ideals. Guardians as performers, if at all they became so,

were to impersonate only appropriate types of character - men who are brave, religious, self-controlled,

generous, no meanness or dishonesty. Secondly, Guardians should not become practiced performers of a

particular character.

14. See, Ranciere, Jacques. above stated.

15. Refer Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Kant details the Genius as an internalisation of bodies of rules and forms from

genius works from the past that work unconsciously and intuitively in him to produce the art of Genius... In

Schelling and Hegel, art is presented as the unity of a conscious process and an unconscious process.

16. Gesture has been analysed as the basic structural unit of cinema by both Ranciere and Giorgio Agamben.

17. See, Badiou, Alain. above stated.

18. See Ranciere, Jacques. above stated. Pp 114 and 115.

19. Ranciere, Jacques. Above stated. Ranciere gives the example of Cornielle’s staging of Oedipe where he

tries to adjust the relationship between mimesis, poesis and aesthesis by taking two negative steps and one

positive step. He tries to change the excess of knowledge...and the excess of pathos that thwarts the free

operation of the spectator’s affects. (pp115)

20. Ranciere. Above stated.

21. See Kant, Immanuel. 2000.

22. Lyotard. Jean-Francois. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. p115. In Holderlin’s words, “At the extreme

limit of distress, there is in fact nothing left but the conditions of time and space”. Lyotard points here to a

crisis of the arts that resembles the ‘crisis of the sciences’ since the end of 19 century, the sciences of space

and time (arithmetic and geometry). The problems out of which emerged non-Euclidean geometry,

axiomatic forms of arithmetic and non-Newtonian physics are also those which gave rise to the theories of

communication and information.

30/38

31/38

23. Lyotard. Above stated. This Lyotard takes from Edmund Burke’s notion of Sublime – “when nothing more

happens”.

24. See, Bachelard, Gaston. 2000. pp 44

25. In Christina Chimisso’s Introduction to Dialectic of Duration. Above stated.

26. See, Bachelard, Gaston. 2000.

27. Bergson believes that action is guided by memory and past experience of the being - that intellect, intuition,

torpor are poised to give ontological stability to the being.

28. Lyotard, drawing largely upon Kant, has a ‘metaphysical’ view that explains matter as exterior to being,

that bears on being, of which being has to make sense, or fails to make sense when it produces itself before

it in with-limit and without-limit forms, (in The Inhuman he talks of the possibility of the loss of forms –

another limit). Bachelard, on the other hand, has a psychological perspective, wherein he views things

through an ‘interiority’ approach of the unconscious. Bachelard’s argument also takes the form of a

scientisation of psychological ‘proof’ through the use of scientific discourse and concepts. Lyotard on the

other hand can be seen to be disengaging himself from the coils of psychology, always withdrawing from

its label.

29. Bachelard, Gaston. Relaxation and Nothingness. In Dialectic of Duration. Stated above. There is also the

example of inverse curiosity that is marked by the need to destroy such as exhibited in death instinct,

necrophilia, which are the negating aspects of mental life. pp 39.

30. The idea of stoff appears in Kantian aesthetics as something different from matter. On the one hand, stoff

appears in the Power of the Critique of Judgment as the material furnished by the soul (geist) to furnish the

faculties of knowledge, while in his other works, stoff is the rich material of Genius abstracted from the

rules and methods of various schools of art, and therefore, on the one hand, constituting Idea, and at another

level, it is presented as the ‘object’s’ determining cognition.

31. Balagangadhara, S.N. On Experience Occluding Structures, Unpublished. 2007. This protective belt

immunized the programme against falsification; it encouraged the formulation of ad hoc hypotheses as

immunizing strategy. Balagangadhara describes fear of falsification as the appeal to ‘experience’ in order

not to accept accounts which appear contra-experiential; the cognitive attitude being to ‘save the

experience’… All structured experience derive their structure from the structure of cognitive schemes, be

they theories, accounts, implicit beliefs, or whatever else.

32. Balagangadhara points to Dennett’s work, “Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI”, published in

Christopher Hooway, ed., Minds, Machines and Evolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Pp.129-151.

33. Refer Balagangadhara. Above stated.

34. Daniel C. Dennett. Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI

35. In this essay, Balagangadhara sees ignorance as ‘active’, as being able to cause or effect certain things.

Such an interpretation is not available within the traditions of Western philosophy as they are in the Indian

traditions.

36. Dhareshwar gives Foucault’s example of Sex� Truth�Discourse.

37. Dhareshwar, Vivek. Adhyasa and the “I”: On Some Aspects of Stereotypes. Unpublished. pp 8. This is a

very intuitive and informal characterization of stereotypes as adhyasa, of what some at least of the Indian

traditions think of as reflections on anubhava or adhyatmic thinking….

38. The term ‘norm’ is used differently in different places by Michel Foucault in History of Sexuality,

sometimes to refer to a codification, sometimes to normalization. We may understand it here as a category

used to determine our experience so as to make it true. For this making true, the norm needs to deploy

certain discourses and discursivities. For instance, the norm of sex as the (false) truth of our beings was

made so through disciplinary discourse and scientific discursivity to generate a set of power-relations. This

is essentially the act of meconnaisance. According to Foucault, meconnaisance is based on a wrong

determination of the relationship between the object of knowledge and its capacity to reveal the truth.

39. Hegel, G.W.F. Concept of the Beautiful As Such. Aesthetics. pp106-109.

40. Hegel, G.W.F. Concept of the Beautiful As Such. Above stated.

41. Badiou. Above stated.

42. Badiou. Above stated.

43. According to Badiou, the Platonic aim is not to produce impurities but to wallow in the purity of the

concept, i.e., to philosophize – to ‘register’ truths and not to produce them. It is in this closeness/proximity

to concept that art exhausts its effect and (prose or poem) is sutured to philosophy.

44. Badiou. Above stated. ‘...The image is ‘not what is visible’.

45. Kenny Anthony. The Wittgenstein Reader. Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing. 2006. pp 101. In

‘Following a Rule’ Wittgenstein says, Rule following can also happen without understanding, without

grasping the principle, just by the formula occurring to the person… And if understanding is different from

formula, and understanding the principle is different from the formula occurring to one, why is the process

32/38

33/38

DAS: OBSTRUCTION: LIMIT & FALSE MOVEMENTS OF CINEMA

of understanding hidden, when one says “Now I understand’ because I understood? “And if it is hidden”,

Wittgenstein asks, “how do I know what I have to look for?”

46. Kenny Anthony. The Wittgenstein Reader. Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing. 2006. pp 102. Here,

Wittgenstein delinks understanding from a ‘mental process’ which he says is the confusing element in

understanding understanding and rule following. Instead of thinking of the mental process we need to

think of the ‘particular circumstances’ under which we say, “Now I know how to go on”….

47. Kenny Anthony. The Wittgenstein Reader. Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing. 2006. pp 102-104.

48. Kenny Anthony. The Wittgenstein Reader. Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing. 2006. pp 103 –106.

Regarding language games - How do I manage to use a word correctly – i.e., significantly; do I keep on

consulting a grammar? No. The fact that I mean something – the thing I mean, prevents me from talking

nonsense.’ – ‘I mean something by the words’ here means: I know I can apply them.

49. Kenny Anthony. The Wittgenstein Reader. Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing. 2006. Pp 112-114. Thus

the question again, How am I able to obey a rule? Have I reasons? And then I shall act…” If this is not a

question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do...If I have

exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say:

‘This is simply what I do’…Whence comes the idea that the beginning of a series is a visible section of rails

invisibly laid to infinity? Well, we might imagine rails instead of a rule. And infinitely long rails

corresponding to the unlimited application of a rule.

50. Kenny Anthony. The Wittgenstein Reader. Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing. 2006. pp 118. It is only

by examples that you can show somebody the ‘right continuation’. “That is I teach him to continue a series

(basic series), without using any expression of the ‘law of the series’…he must go on like this without

reason...not because he cannot grasp the reason, but because in this system - there is no reason. (‘The chain

of reasons comes to an end’) And the like this (in go on like this) is signified by a number, a value. For at

this level the expression of the rule is explained by the value, not the value by the rule. …Rule is what is

explained, not what does the explaining. “He grasps the rule intuitively.’ But why the rule, why not how he

is to continue? And to guess the meaning of a rule, to grasp it intuitively, could surely mean nothing but: to

guess its application. …We might in that case also imagine that, instead of ‘guessing the application of the

rule’, he invents it...He has already mastered a technique.

51. Lyotard. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Lyotard points to the transcendental nature of aesthetic

pleasure and the idea of limit/limitlessness as ‘finality without end’ : The Critique draws the transcendental

trait of aesthetic pleasure through the metaphysical motif, that is, its immediate demand to be universally

communicable... ‘The soul is the power “to get an expression for what is indefinable in the mental state (das

Unnenbare in dem Gemutstande) accompanying a particular representation (bei einer gewissen Vorstellung)

and to make it universally communicable (allgemein mitteilbar)” (180, t.m.; 172).

52. The finality of the object or art work enables us to say that ‘the sculpture is made of stone’, or that ‘the

painting is in colour…’

53. Lyotard. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Above stated. pp 66-69

54. Lyotard, The Inhuman. pp 114. Thus Lyotard fleshes out an opposition between two forms of reception: on

one side the poetic form which he imputes to the Greeks, and on the other – techno-scientific reception

which occurs under the general regime of reason, and whose explicit birth he sees in Leibniz’s thought.

Thus all that governs computer science and communication, and even the infinitesimal are attributed here…

55. Refer Kenny Anthony. The Wittgenstein Reader. Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing: 2006. pp 104-105.

56. Kant. The Aesthetic of Judgment. In The Critique of the Power of Judgment. “In judgments about natural

beauty I need not have beforehand a concept of what sort of thing the object is to be, i.e., I need not know

its material purposiveness (the purpose). But its mere form pleases by itself in the act of judging it, without

any knowledge of the purpose.”(154) By contrast, judgments concerning the beauty of artificial objects are

not aesthetic reflexive judgments.

57. Smith, Daniel W. Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality. In Deleuze: A Critical

Reader. Ed. Patton, Paul. Blackwell Publishers: 1996. This view, of the overcoming of the sublime through

reason/supersensible, has not found acceptability in either Heidegger or Edmund Burke. Lyotard sometimes

speaks of the ‘imagination or sensibility’ in the same sentence (e.g., pp. 80, 81, Lessons on the Analytic of

the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), but without ever

taking the further step towards extracting the limit-element of sensibility. In this essay Smith mentions that

Deleuze and Lyotard are located at different points in Kantian aesthetics, though there might be

convergences in their respective theories of art: Deleuze’s theory is derived from Kantian theory of

sensibility (intensity), whereas Lyotard’s is derived from the faculty of the imagination (the sublime). “The

difference would seem to bear on the nature of Ideas appealed to each instance: transcendence in the case of

imagination, immanent in the case of sensibility.”…

58. Refer Vivek Dhareshwar and Balangangadhara.

59. Bachelard. Introduction. The Dialectic of Duration. Above stated.

34/38

60. Bachelard, Gaston. The Formation of the Scientific Mind . Clinamen Press 2002. Published in French by

Librairie Philosophique J. VRIN as La Formation de I 'Esprit Scientifique © J. VRIN 1 938. 6, Place de la

Sorbonne F - 65005 Paris.

61. Bachelard. Relaxation and Nothingness. In The Dialectic of Duration. pp 53. Bachelard gives a detailed

account of duration with all its intervals of laziness, fatigue, hesitation, and leisure – the centres of

causalities as Bachelard he calls them; memory; temporality. Intuition, he says, presents an obstacle to their

understanding.

62. Bachelard. Relaxation and Nothingness. In The Dialectic of Duration. In the chapter on Relaxation and

Nothingness, Bachelard says, “Matter crumbles away as you act precisely on it and so ends up giving only

ambiguous answers to your enquiries. Its precise existence becomes as singular as your own individual

existence. The coincidences of subject and object will be atomized. They will not have duration. You will

no longer find subtle, precise matter always there at the disposal of experiment. You have to wait for it to

produce its events. You are now in pure expectation and nothingness is no longer a disappointed

expectation, absence is no longer a displacement.” Thereby, he lays down the most sharply distinct of all

dialectics – all or nothing.

63. Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics.

64. Dhareshwar, Vivek. Adhyasa and the “I”: On Some Aspects of Stereotypes. Unpublished. pp 10.

65. Ranciere. Above stated. pp 137

66. Ranciere : Are some Things Unrepresentable. The Future of the Image. (pp 136)

67. Ranciere : Are some Things Unrepresentable. The Future of the Image.

68. Interestingly, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his famous work, The Cinema of Poetry, has already provided a

theorization of chaos as the true structure of cinema experience, to be located in the mise-en-scene as

opposed to in language and dialogue. This theorization was a departure from the linguistic theories that

sought to provide the dominant explanations for cinema experience in the 1970s. But that is another paper.

69. Deleuze, Gilles. The Powers of the False. Cinema – 2, The Time-Image. Pp 130-131. Transl. Hugh

Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 1989, The Athlone Press.

70. Deleuze, Gilles. The Powers of the False. Above stated. We have to wait for Leibniz to get the most

ingenious, but also the strangest, and most convoluted, solution to this paradox...what happens in one world

may not happen in a different world, and these two worlds are possible, but are not ‘compossible’ with each

other.) He is thus obliged to forge the wonderful notion of incompossibility (very different from

contradiction) in order to resolve the paradox while saving truth: according to him, it is not the impossible,

but only the incompossible that proceeds from the possible; and the past may be true without being

necessarily true… But the crisis of truth enjoys a pause rather than a solution. For nothing prevents us from

affirming that incompossibilities, that incompossible worlds belong to the same universe...

71. Deleuze. Above stated.

72. Deleuze “…not the criminal, the cowboy, the psycho-social man, the historical hero, the holder of power,

etc., as in the action-image, but the forger pure and simple, to the detriment of all action…He is

simultaneously the man of pure descriptions and the maker of the crystal-image, the indiscernibility of the

real and the imaginary: he passes into the crystal, and makes the direct time-image visible; he provokes

undecidable alternatives and inexplicable differences between the true and the false, and thereby imposes a

power of the false as adequate to time, in contrast to any form of the true which would control time”.

73. Aristotelian logic is best exemplified in the analogy of the ‘sea battle’ discussed in chapter 9 of his work On

Interpretation. A contradiction is a pair of propositions one of which asserts what the other denies. In every

such contradiction, one member must be true and the other false. This is called the “law of the excluded

middle”. Aristotle puts across these two propositions: 1. There will be a sea-battle tomorrow; 2. There will

not be a sea-battle tomorrow. According to the Law of the Excluded Middle, exactly one of these must be

true and the other false. He further elaborates that the truth of one is dependent upon its past truth, thereby

making it ‘necessary’ truth.

74. In Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics, Heidegger’s Vol III (pp 24-25). Nietzsche

describes ‘holding to be true’ as error, untruth and illusion as it fixates Being and does not precisely

correspond to the nature of Becoming as chaos.

75. Heidegger, Martin. The Origin of the Work of Art. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The

Task of Thinking (1964). Harper San Fransisco, 1993 (139-212p).

76. Heidegger, Martin. The Origin of the Work of Art. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The

Task of Thinking (1964). Harper San Fransisco, 1993 (139-212p). Heidegger argues that such revelation

belongs to every work of art: the work erects a world which in turn opens a space for man and things ; but

this distinctiveness openness rests on something more stable and enduring than any world, i.e., the all

sheltering earth.

77. In Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics, Heidegger’s Vol. III (pp 31)

35/38

36/38

DAS: OBSTRUCTION: LIMIT & FALSE MOVEMENTS OF CINEMA

78. Smith, W. Daniel. Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality. Deleuze: A Critical

Reader. Ed. Paul Patton. Blackwell Publishers Ltd: 1996.

79. Livingstone, Paisley. Theses on Cinema and Philosophy. Pp 17. Hegel’s assumption about optimality may

be restated as the thesis that it is only rational to value a work of art as a means to some end if we have

good reason to believe that it is the most efficient means to that end. Yet we must be careful here. If we in

fact believe a more efficient means to our goal is available, would it not indeed be irrational to pass it by?

G.W.F. Hegel (in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol 2., trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pp

995), warns that it is a mistake to value an art form in terms of its ability to serve external ends, such as

“instruction, moral improvement, or political agitation”, as these ends are “are pursued and achieved still

more effectively by other means”. Hegel evokes the “free heights where poetry lives for its own sake

alone”…

80. Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol 2., trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pp

995. Hegel warns that it is a mistake to value an art form in terms of its ability to serve external ends, such

as “instruction, moral improvement, or political agitation”, as these ends are “are pursued and achieved still

more effectively by other means”. Hegel evokes the “free heights where poetry lives for its own sake

alone”…

81. Livingstone, Paisley. Theses on Cinema and Philosophy. Can his (Hegel’s) drastic conclusion in this regard

be forestalled? Is it always suboptimal to try to use an art form to advance knowledge?

References

Bachelard, Gaston. Dialectic of Duration. Transl. Mary McAllester Jones. Clinamen Press 2000

Badiou, Alain. Art and Philosophy. Handbook of Inaesthetics . Transl. Toscano, Alberto. Stanford University

Press. 2005.

Badiou, Alain. The False Movements of Cinema. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Transl. Alberto Toscano. Stanford

University Press. 2005

Balagangadhara. S.N. “Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI”, in Christopher Hooway, ed., Minds,

Machines and Evolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Pp.129-151.

Balagangadhara. S.N. On Experience Occluding Structures, Unpublished. 2007.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Powers of the False. Cinema – 2, The Time-Image. Pp 130-131. Transl. Hugh Tomlinson

and Robert Galeta. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 1989, The Athlone Press.

Dhareshwar, Vivek. Adhyasa and the “I”: On Some Aspects of Stereotypes. Unpublished. pp 10.

Dhareshwar, Vivek. The idea of a study of ‘obstructions’ to objects of enquiry that possibly explain ‘our’

‘experience’ is taken from Vivek Dhareshwar’s paper, “Anubhava and Anubhaava: Towards a Theory

of Experience?” Paper for the Conference on “The Human Sciences and the Asian Experiences”,

February 18-20, 2000.

Elster, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment and Constraints. Cambridge University

Press, 2000.

Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol 2., trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pp 995.

Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, transl. James S. Churchill, Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1962.

Heidegger, Martin. The Origin of the Work of Art. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of

Thinking (1964). Harper San Fransisco, 1993 . pp. 139-212.

Kenny Anthony. The Wittgenstein Reader. Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing: 2006. pp 104-105.

Livingstone, Paisley. Theses on Cinema and Philosophy. Thinking through Cinema: Film As Philosophy. pp 17.

Ed. Smith, Murray and Thomas E. Wartenberg. Blackwell Publishing: 2006

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Transl Bennington, Geoffrey and Rachel Bowlby.

Polity Press: 1991.

Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics, Heidegger’s Vol III (pp 24-25)

Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image. Transl. Elliot, Gregory. Verso: 2007.

Smith, W. Daniel. Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality. Deleuze: A Critical

Reader. Ed. Paul Patton. Blackwell Publishers Ltd: 1996.

37/38