Page 46 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

36 Alexander Garcfa Düttmann

Viscontis films give expression in "flesh and blood"? From the perspective
of intellectual history one can discern in the proposition an allusion to
the political debate over possibilism, in which, for instance, Rosa Luxem-
burg took part with her article on the alternative between possibilism and
opportunism. Luxemburg quotes in this article a definition according to
which possibilism is a politics that strives for "that which is possible in the
given circumstances." She then develops the thought of a praxis that is
not opportunistic: it neither renounces the analysis and consideration of
the "given circumstances" nor lets itself be ruled by the axiom that "one
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meets with the most success on the path of concession." Without refer-
ring to the debate, deconstruction takes up this thought anew. It con-
ceives it as the tension between the possible and the impossible, between
the impossible that remains dependent on the possible and the possible
that remains dependent on the impossible, for example in the form of
right and justice. (I say "deconstruction"—Jacques Derrida thought its in-
sight in "flesh and blood.") From the perspective of textual history one can
recognize in the proposition concerning the roadblock of the possible the
impact of an anarchic impulse. It is the same impulse that leads Adorno
in the mid-1960s to insist during his lectures on the theory of history and
freedom that at every moment the possibility of change is present and must
not be deferred into an uncertain future—as though precisely the possible
as the conditional had brought about the omission of the realization diag-
nosed at the beginning of Negative Dialectics. The possible is, so to speak,
in itself conservative. It prolongs the real and, as a consequence, renders
impossible the change that it at the same time announces or on which it
opens up a view. Would one be able to speak of change at all in a world
in which everything were real? Adorno, one might conclude, denounces
the transcendental illusion of possibility. The possible is not impossible
enough. Or else it is all too impossible, remaining abstract and bordering
on delusion. Not impossible enough and then again all too impossible, the
possible becomes entangled in the conflict in which it loses out every time
to the real. At the end of Viscontis Le notti bianche, the young woman Na-
talia catches sight in the snow of the hieratic figure of the feverishly awaited
stranger and leaves in the lurch the kind, but dull, office worker. Thereby
the concreteness of the possible that perpetuates reality is smothered by the
abstractness of the possible that appears to the viewer a delusional fantasy.
As a result, it is irrelevant whether or not the stranger, in fact, returns.
Nearly all the flashbacks depicting Natalias encounters with the stranger