Between Love and Politics:
Recasting Hannah Arendt in Narrative Cinema
University of Amsterdam
Research Masters Media Studies
Graduate School of Humanities
Lucy Benjamin
Supervisor: M.A. Baronian
Second reader: A. Geil
Abstract
The being of being human is intimately linked to the experience of being loved and in love. Whether
through the original parental bond, through familial and nationalistic forms and ultimately through
the loving embrace of a romantic other, love is a central experience to human life. Yet, the being of
being human is equally linked to modes of political engagement. To be a member of a society is,
within the logic of the modern democratic state, to be a politically empowered individual. Love and
politics thus appear as functional cornerstones to the active living of life in the contemporary.
However, the force of love, or moreover romantic love, and the force of politics are not immediately
reconcilable. Romantic love is an overpowering force, which blinds the senses, while politics
demands reason and rationality. To reconcile love and politics would thus appear to undermine those
qualities deemed central to each. Yet, despite this apparent irreconcilability this thesis aims to
uncover that fundamentally political essence of love, a project that is undertaken via a reading of
three contemporary films, thereby enjoining a reconciliation between love and politics.
Following what has been identified as an ‘aporetic tension’ in the political writing of German
philosopher Hannah Arendt, this thesis engages her reflections on love as a way by which to navigate
the narratives of three films as positioned within the wider canon of the romance film genre, Her
(Spike Jonze, 2013), Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman, 2015) and The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos,
2015). Marrying political philosophy and narrative film highlights the dismissal of love qua political
in reality whilst simultaneously destabilising the foundation on which such a dismissal takes place.
Hence, this thesis functions on the one hand as a critical engagement with film and philosophy,
while, on the other hand, it presents a critical reflection on the being of being human today.
Contents
Loving Cinema, Becoming Political……….6
1. Political Love: Reworlding the Romantic……….11
2. Illustrating Arendt in Cinema………...21
3. The Crisis of Love: A Cinematic
Revelation……….32
4. To Speak of Love in
Cinema………....43
Conclusion………...5
6
Works Cited………....59
Film List………..64
3List of Abbreviations
Hannah Arendt
--The Human Condition – HC Origins of Totalitarianism – OT Reflections on Little Rock – RLR Crisis of Education – CE Between Past and Future – BPF The Portable Hannah Arendt – PHA The Life of the Mind: Willing – LMW Love and Saint Augustine – LSA
Adriana Cavarero --
Birth, Love, Politics – BLP For More than One Voice – OV
Loving Cinema, Becoming Political
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
The heart isn’t like a box that gets filled up. It expands in size the more it loves.
Samantha, Her
Any account of love is fraught with complexity from the start. For Romeo and Juliet love’s passion brought about their own demise.1 For Winston Smith and Julia in 1984 (George Orwell, 1949), however, love was a mechanism of rebellion against bleak totalitarianism. Love is the original force that binds and unbinds human potential, leaving in its wake either destruction or creation. There can be no singular account of how love emerges or how any one individual may experience love. Yet, whether construed positively or
negatively, love exists as a force in the world. Given the duality of this force, if a singular account of love were to be asserted, it would be that love exists as a potentially transformative force. In the thesis that follows, in which an account of love is advanced in relation to film, the transformative force of love is shown to have direct political consequence. By locating this thesis within the framework of film theory, and thus at a remove from, though not inconsequential to, physical reality, this revision of love as political becomes a mode of critiquing the current state of love.2 That love’s role in film is considered a critical account of love is a claim made possible by virtue of film’s active relationship to reality. Thus, what will be considered the ‘crisis of love’ in film is a crisis precisely because film exists, not as a passive mirror of reality but on the contrary, as a mode of commentary and reflection on the state of reality itself. To say that love’s depiction within film reveals it to be ‘in crisis’ does not undermine the integrity of love; rather, to follow Hannah Arendt’s
(1906-1
The story of Romeo and Juliet is situated in this thesis as a constant refrain by which to ground claims regarding the tragic yet transformative force of love. Through his play Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare has effectively established the narrative coordinates for the classical love narrative, a trend that can be traced throughout Western history. Indeed, Paul Kottmann notes, in extension to Dymphna Callaghan’s claim that Romeo and Juliet is arguably the “preeminent document of love in the West”, that the story has “[heightened] our desire for a tragic love story that we still seek in many forms – in novellas, novels, films, musicals, and operas”. This desire perpetuates the cult value of the ‘union/separation/passion-as-spectacle’. Dympna Callaghan (2003 1). Paul Kottmann (2012 1).2
Physical reality is to be read throughout this thesis as defined by Siegfried Kracauer in his seminal text on film theory,Theory of Film: Redemption of Physical Reality (1960). Namely, the world in its original state, without the artifice of
digital effect or CGI that cinema may provide in addition to the act of mere recording. ‘Physical reality’ refers simply to the world as it is, hence ‘this reality includes many phenomena which would hardly be perceived were it not for the motion picture camera’s ability to catch them on the wing. And since any medium is partial to the things it is uniquely equipped to render, the cinema is conceivably animated by a desire to picture transient material life’ (1960, xi).
1975) definition of crisis, it seeks to expose the essence of love anew.3 And it is precisely the inherently political nature of love’s essence that this thesis aims to make legible.
The question of love and politics was a matter of debate for Arendt herself, who, despite her work on the crisis and the pursuit of ontological truths, made no attempt to disguise her opinion of love as an anti-political force (The Human Condition 1958). In her writing and perhaps more famously in her interviews she scorned love for its shielding of the individual from the world (PHA 3). Love denied the world and, in doing so, denied the agent action within it. Love, for Arendt, exists as the anti-political force in the world. And yet, her frequent return to medieval theologian Saint Augustine, (354-430 CE),over the course of her academic career – from the very beginning in writing her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine (1929), to her final and unfinished work, The Life of the Mind (1978) – make evident her incessant curiosity for the effective power of love.4 As a political theorist who continually confronted the violently political and divisive issues of her time,
whether in her account of the Eichmann trials in Israel (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963) or perhaps, moreover, in her monograph Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), an unfortunate outcome has been an effective lacuna in writing on her work on love’s relationship to the political.5 The project of this thesis thus makes itself
apparent; an investigation into Arendt’s writing on love and its potential relationship to the depiction of love in film. However, this task is not as straightforward as it might seem. Love lies within Arendt’s work as a turbulent and dynamic area – Arendt argues explicitly in a number of contexts that love, as an affective state, is inherently apolitical. However, in other writings, following Saint Augustine, she connects love with the political, even to suggest that love allows the subject to adopt a progressively political position. Rather than view this as a contradiction, the argument of this thesis is that this aporetic conception of love can be made productive in opening up new dimensions of Arendt’s work. Thus, within the context of this thesis love is considered the fundamental Arendtian aporia.6 It is at once anti-political and a cornerstone of the political.
3
For the purpose of this thesis, the definition of ‘the crisis’ has been restricted to its particular development within Arendt’s work Between Past and Future (1961). Though the idea of the crisis permeated throughout her work, it is within this particular collection of essays that its relation to the arts – and thus to film – is most developed, principally due to the paper Crisis in Culture. However, as Jakob Norberg points out, Arendt’s conception of the crisis and its particular relationship to politics cannot be reduced to a single text. ‘The task of specifying the relationship between crisis and politics in Arendt’s thought can, therefore not be reduced to the simply extraction of an idea from her work: we can retrieve her answer to the question of the crisis only through attention to the textual elaboration of her thinking’ (2011 133). Hence, in the radical revision of the crisis, love and political actions that is undertaken in this thesis, the dynamic nature of each becomes apparent. Arendt’s terminology is not to be viewed as the amassing of concrete terms, rather her political notions function dynamically in relation to the society in which they emerge.4
Love was a central concern of Saint Augustine’s and its appearance in varying forms, principally caritas and cupiditas, shape to a large extent the trajectory of his philosophical reflections. See Teodora Prelipcean (2014).5
This being said, extant and emerging research into Arendt’s writing on love does already exist within the field of Arendtian studies, some of which does indeed account for her conflicting understandings of love. As Arendt studies continue to expand her working relationship to those more ‘private’ topics such as love have been exposed. Indeed the term ‘aporia’ is applied to Arendt’s consideration of love by Shin Chiba; this aporia however, is distinct to the current aporia. In Chiba’s account the focus lies on an aporetic tension between subjective and objective understandings of love. Such a distinction is not developed in the current project. Here, the subjective/objective division is made redundant through an identification of love as a mode of political being in the world in which the self/other relationality is always already evident in virtue of the plurality. See James Martel (2008), Shin Chiba (1995), Maria Tamboukou (2013).6
The identification of contradictions inherent to Arendt’s writing on love, and indeed more generally, is not original to this thesis. See Margaret Canovan (February 1978).Rather than place love within the context of the modern liberal state or even as a mechanism to expose and explain the rise of fundamental ‘hate’ motivated terror, the framework through which Arendt will be developed in this thesis is that of narrative film.7 Such a pairing – love as a political force and fictional film
– might appear at first sight disjunctive. However, such a presumption would only be possible if the political nature of film itself is denied, a denial already rebutted by Walter Benjamin in his artwork essay (The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility, 1936).8 That film is capable of political function will thus be
presumed, to a certain extent, as infallible in this thesis. The particular political potential of film that is to be revealed in parallel to an investigation of the Arendtian love aporia is twofold. The films function, on the one hand, as illustrations of Arendt’s writing, uncovering those Arendtian claims that remain opaque, on the other hand, however, they become functional devices capable of political criticism. Hence, cinema is not merely illustrative but functional.
The films chosen for this thesis are all recent productions, which though produced outside the realm of Hollywood, were all well received within the mainstream.9 The decision to select a corpus of films
contemporary to today rather than to Arendt was undertaken in order to stress the relevancy of both Arendtian studies in the contemporary but perhaps moreover, because it enables the reader to critically reflect on her/his own relationship to and understanding of love.10 This address to the current understanding of love thus
grounds the argument that there is a crisis pertinent to love in the contemporary. To begin chronologically, the first film is the post-human love story of Theodore and Samantha in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her. Following in 2015 is Anomalisa, directed by Charlie Kauffman and Duke Johnson, following the animated love story of Lisa and Michael. And finally, also produced in 2015 and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos is the dystopian love of David and ‘the short-sighted woman’ in his film The Lobster. In line with Arendt’s own inconsistencies in writing about love, the body of films selected does not present a homogenous view of love. Quite the contrary, the films, though bound by their shared narrative focus on the question of love and romance, each provide unique and disparate views, which, when viewed alongside one another highlight Arendt’s love aporia. The films are equally bound by the considerable abstraction of physical reality that is made in each, whether
7
Analysis of the perversion of love into forms of ‘political’ cause such as terrorism and hate-crime is best explored by Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (chapter 6), however, Ahmed’s project differs from the current project in her approach to love itself. While Ahmed is concerned with a mode of love that is defined by racial or national borders here the focus remains solely on the political quality of romantic love.8
Benjamin’s essay ([1936] 2006) is written in defense of cinema against what he considers the aestheticization of politics by fascism. He frames his discussion within a Marxist reading of the masses/proletariat and their potential to reclaim the arts as a mode of (political) expression. He thus confronts the aestheticization of war and politics with the politicization of the arts.9
Her was nominated for five Academy Awards and won ‘Best Original Screenplay’ (2014). Anomalisa was nominated for ‘Best Animated Feature of the Year’ at the Academy Awards (2015). The Lobster won the Cannes Jury Prize (2015) and has been nominated for the Academy Award ‘Best Original Screenplay’ (2016).10
To untether Arendt from the historical moment of her writing does not risk leaving behind essential elements of her work tied to this moment. Arendt’s concern in reflecting upon political events of the 20th century was not to locate themwithin a temporal history; her concern lay rather in the performance of human action and humanity within the world. To read Arendt in the present moment does not undermine the historic specificity of Arendt, on the contrary it emphasizes the poignancy of her readings on the human condition. Indeed, one might think of Arendt’s reflection on herself as a thinker living in ‘the gap between past and future’ as recreated in the current project (BPF, 12).
through the visual mashup of Shanghai and Los Angeles cityscapes to generate the physical world of Her, the preclusion of ‘humans’ in the stop motion film Anomalisa and the creation of a dystopian narrative in The
Lobster. However, the question of imagined realities will not be viewed as central to the grounding of these
films as critically functional in regards to the love-politics question. Indeed what will be made apparent is the gravitational force of love as an existential and political question that belies narrative importance to the question of (imagined) reality. Thus, despite the seeming dismissal of physical reality, what actually emerges in each of the films is a necessary engagement with those issues central to the living of human lives – that is, the experiences of love and politics.
The particular political function of love, for the project of this thesis, has been determined as the imprint love leaves upon the will thereby marking the self as essentially bound to a community in extension of the self. The political force of love is thus the force, which turns the loving individual towards a political community in which each and every individual is granted a political space of appearance. Remaining within an Arendtian discourse, the space of appearance is to be understood under her original formulation. Namely, that space in which ‘I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things, but to make their appearance explicitly.’ (HC 198) To discuss the ‘political’ thus becomes a discussion of a polity in which the space of appearance is a seen to be, for every individual, a legitimate and necessary space. Or rather, to quote Adriana Cavarero whose work is equally central to this thesis, ‘politics is to be understood, instead, in the Arendtian sense of a plural space of reciprocal appearing’ (BLP 22).
As noted, the political function of each film will be made manifest at an illustrative and a functional level. It will be the project of Chapter One to establish the contours of the Arendtian love aporia, which will then be put into illustrative relief in Chapter Two. Working within the theoretical coordinates of Chapter One, here the narratives specific to each film will be read in close detail. In Chapter Three, the functional role of film will be addressed and it will be shown that these narratives in fact constitute an exposition of love ‘in crisis’ thereby challenging the dismissal of love qua political. That each film departs from the established canon of ‘love films’, namely the romantic comedy and the romantic drama, highlights the extant curiosity into love’s meaning in the modern world and the demand therein to continually consider love anew. As such this chapter will illuminate the ways in which the films particular to this thesis subvert the formulaic structure of the romance genre in order to provoke a revision in the current state of love. Having developed a case for film’s functional role in subverting the norms of the romance genre, an intimate reading of the cinematic voice will be undertaken in Chapter Four. Recourse will be made to Chapter One and Arendt’s writing on Saint Augustine through a discussion of the voice as the vehicle by which the loving individual reveals him or herself to be political. Emerging from a classical Aristotelian discourse in which the voice is taken to be central to the enacting of politics, this chapter will engage with feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero to demonstrate the way in which the voice is equally central to the enacting of love. This reading of the voice thus disrupts Arendt’s essentialist tendencies in basing love in the physical act of sex or the birth of the child, which cannot be achieved through the exchange of voices. Moreover, in showing that the voice is the vehicle
for political and loving expression, the intimacy with which love and politics are bound will be made apparent. This final chapter will thus undermine the primacy of the visual image in filmic analysis and focus on the sonorous quality of the voice in filmic narratives.
Therefore the project of this thesis is twofold. On the one hand, it provides an account of Arendt that effectively reads Arendt against Arendt thereby extending Arendt studies in their current form. On the other hand, it brings to the fore a mode of engaging with film and cinema that recognizes the capacity for narrative film to assume an expository function in regards to physical reality – in so far as the films function as critical devices in and of themselves. Though the assignment of such a capacity to cinema is, as noted, not new in and of itself, the particular function of cinema in this instance will be shown in consideration of both Arendtian studies and the nature of contemporary ‘love politics’.11 The body of films chosen thus assumes an active role
in regards to the extension of established political thought and in provoking thought on the prescriptive normativity of contemporary love politics. Arendt, while not recognized as a traditional figure in 20th
cinematic thought, was not a complete stranger to the power of the arts to assume political function, as she made clear in her essay The Crisis of Culture (1961).12 As such, in line with the Arendtian focus of this thesis
an account for the political quality of film will be made via Arendt’s own writings. Though the scope of this political and aesthetic reflection will only extend so far as to include three films, the exposition of Arendt’s work therein highlights the potential for greater application to be undertaken in future. The aim in expanding the understanding of Arendt’s conception of love is to invite more scholarly work to a field that is notably undernourished and, as will be shown, of great relevance in the current state of political thought, and, accordingly so in regards to the function of cinema.
11
‘Love politics’ is taken here to refer primarily to the institution of the marriage and the debates provoked therein around questions of homosexuality and gay marriage, the nuclear family and child adoption. Hence, while love is understood as a political experience in its own right, ‘love politics’ refer firstly to those institutionalized modes of governance pertaining to love. In addition to the question of legal site of love, ‘love politics’ equally refers to the way in which love is treated as a political concept. Thus, while love is typically subscribed under a Foucauldian discourse of biopolitics as developed in The History of Sexuality (1990) or as a way of asserting feminist rights, as in Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), the current project extends ‘love politics’ to include a mode of being in the world that is political in advance of, for instance, systemic politics such as governmentality.12
The Crisis in Culture (1961) is her only essay to directly comment on the power of the arts; however passing references throughout her work hint at her belief in the political potential of the arts. See The Human Condition, chapter 12.1.
Political Love: Reworlding the Romantic
Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers; in the work of great authors they lead into the very centre of their work.
The Human Condition, 104
If there is a predicament in thinking love as an experience linked to political action the mode of resolving this concern lies in the uncovering of the ontological ‘essence’ common to both love and political action. That is to say, the union between love and politics cannot be resolved through a reconsideration of the modern political condition in which love is seemingly relegated to the private sphere and deemed
inconsequential to political action. Nor, moreover, can this ‘impossible’ union be reconciled merely through an address to the current conception of love. On the contrary, love and politics become mutual experiences only through a state of crisis in which the ‘essence’ of love is revealed to accord with that of politics. The claim of this thesis is thus that the will, the body’s causative faculty, is equally responsible to the realization of political action as it is to loving action. Hence, the link between love and politics lies in this common ontological essence. An identification of the will as that fundamentally human faculty that makes possible both political action and loving action might appear, at first sight, impossible. For while politics and the will can be readily aligned, love and the will do not typically reveal themselves as complementary sites. Rather, the overpowering force of love appears to deny the potential of the will to act in a manner proper to itself. Hence, the will is frequently viewed as overwhelmed by the passion of love, which arrives irrationally and without notice. Yet, the claim here is not that love is brought about through a willing to love, which would indeed function as an impossibly fraught claim from the beginning. Rather the relationship between love and the will, and thus political action, hinges on the capacity of love to imprint itself upon the will. Love, in this sense, is distinguishable from those passionate and indeed overwhelming sensations of lust or infatuation. In other words, a validation of love as love is made possible only by recognizing the trace it leaves upon the will.
The relationship between love, politics and the will is twofold: it is constructed simultaneously at an internal and an external level. Nevertheless, in both respects, love accounts for a particular mode of being in the world, which is political in nature.13 The relationship is ‘internal’ to the extent that the will is a faculty that
13
This mode of being is distinct to the concept of a political love put forth by Michael Hardt. Hardt’s account of political love may appear similar to that discussed here, namely that love reorients the individual’s experience of the world such that the world is experienced anew, however there are critical distinctions between the two projects. Hardt’s argument for a ‘political love’ is based on the recognition of ‘another love’, one that departs from the processes of blinding unification that he identifies as definitive of love in the contemporary. Hardt’s account is thus less a revision of love, as in the pursuit of an ontological essence of love, than it is a dismissal of love in order to create love anew. Whatgoverns the mental triad of will, intellect and memory.14 Yet, in so far as the will constitutes the body’s ‘spring
of action’, the relationship between love and the will is equally ‘external’ in nature.15 Thus, in so far as the
will exists as a faculty of the mind and director of the body’s outward actions, any account of love’s
ontological essence as within the will, must address this twofold appearance. Hence, what has to be shown in regards to love is not merely the extent to which it alters the enacting of political action (the external) as the way in which it simultaneously influences what it means to (internally) consider oneself political. An experience of love is thus made political through action and through self-reflection – it is this duality that accounts for love as a mode of political being. Yet, these binary conceptions of space – internal and external – should not be viewed as intimately linked to purely internal mental or external realms. Rather, the ‘internal’, refers to a mode of causative reflection on the self as a member of a political plurality, and thus is essentially external in nature. In turn the ‘external’ here refers to the actual expression of political action in the world and is thus only conceivable by virtue of ‘internal’ thought. The two components of love as a political experience are thus inextricably linked and this mutual dependence cannot be relegated to one sphere of action – mental or physical.
1.1
The question of love first arises for Arendt in writing her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine (1929), on Christian theologian and philosopher, Saint Augustine. Her interest in love lingers throughout her career and is taken up as a central concern in volume two of her final work, The Life of the Mind: Willing (1978). However, references to love resurface throughout her career, leading to both the aporetic nature of her ‘love’ writing and the resonance it held when writing about more seemingly straightforward political topics. While preoccupied by political questions of the day, notably the question of totalitarianism, Arendt’s work is simultaneously rooted in the exploration of the human condition and the way in which the human is a political being, leading to her work being frequently drawn into philosophical debate.16 Hence, her current placement
his project thus lacks is grounding in the extant understanding of love. While the political project he assigns to love may appear to align with those political qualities attributed to love here, the celebration of multiplicity and political action for instance, the two projects cannot be said to emerge from a common conception of love. See, Michael Hardt (2011).
14
The mental triad of memory, intellect and will is made possible for Arendt and Augustine in virtue of the will. “The Will tells the memory what to retain and what to forget; it tells the intellect what to choose for its understanding. Memory and Intellect are both contemplative and, as such, passive, it is the Will that makes them function and eventually “binds them together” And only when, by virtue of one of them, the Will, the three are “forced into one do we speak of thought–cogitatio, which Augustine, playing with etymology, derives from cogere (coactum), to force together, to unite
forcefully” (LMW 100).
15
“What will be at stake here is the Will as the spring of action, that is, as a “power of spontaneously beginning a series of successive things or states” (Kant). No doubt every man, by virtue of his birth, is a new beginning, and his power of beginning may well correspond to this fact of the human condition. It is in line with these Augustinian reflections that the Will has sometimes, and not only by Augustine, been considered to be the actualization of the principium individuationis [principle of individuation].” (LMW, 6)16
Her focus on the role of the human in the unfurling of political events rather than providing an exegesis of the event itself, which might then be reframed as a potential resolution, caused some criticism in the reception of Arendt’s political writings. Her fascination, or more accurately, her deep admiration for the Athenian polis goes someway in explainingwithin the school of philosophical thought perhaps more so than the political, a positioning in spite of her continued dismissal of the term ‘philosopher’ or indeed, even the term, ‘political philosopher’.17 Indeed
within, her more political writings, Origins of Totalitarianism (1961) and The Human Condition (1958), are reflections on the affective conditions of loneliness, friendship and love; topics, which are central to the school of philosophic thought. Arendt’s preoccupation with a mode of thinking the political in fundamentally ontological and philosophically rich terms thus goes some way in justifying the current project’s alignment of love and politics, despite, their appearance, in first approaching her writing, as an impossible union.
The activity of romantic love – falling in love, consummating love, being loved and loving another – appears to necessitate the mere presence of two. Hence, it might be thought that love entails simply a lover and a beloved. Viewed as such, the locus of ‘love’ then appears as a closed circuit, one lover completing the other. It could then be said that the embrace of love is in effect that which delimits a pair of lovers, who, encircled by their own attachment come to be equated to this encasement. It is through this logic that Arendt sets up her famously antipolitical reading of love. This Chapter’s project of unconvering the aporetic quality of Arendt’s writing thus begins by addressing the force of Arendt’s antipolitical consideration of love. Hence, rather than begin with Arendt’s earliest text on love – her dissertation published in 1929, Love and Saint
Augustine – this Chapter turns firstly to the antipolitical readings of love in most commonly gleaned from
Arendt’s monograph, The Human Condition.
In The Human Condition, Arendt presents her clearest dismissal of love. Despite appearing at first sight as a political text that revisits the site of humanity as that which brings into being political action and consequently a political world, it is in fact the event of human birth that Arendt heralds as marking the human potential to create the world anew and perform political actions. The moment of birth, which signifies the event of ‘natality’ and thus the potential for political action is ‘recreated’ through the act of love, in so far as birth, original actions (natality) and love all amount to a revelation of the self within a political community (HC 178). Consequently, it will be shown that a division between the political force of natality and love cannot be validated. Turning to the particular passage in The Human Condition at length now, Arendt’s ‘condemnation’ of love will in fact be exposed as a condemnation of blinding passion and more interestingly an inadvertent admission of fear. For this reason it is worth quoting her at length:
For love, although it is one the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequalled power of self-revelation and an unequalled clarity of vision for the disclosure of
who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of unworldliness with what the loved
person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to
why Arendt was so intrigued by the human agent rather than the ‘political’ event itself. This is because the political is only made possible through the organization of people speaking and acting together (HC 198). A revision of the human and the human condition is thus essential to any account on the nature of the political event.
17
In response to interviewer, Günter Gaus’ consideration of Arendt as a philosopher, she replies: ‘Well, I can’t help that, but in my opinion I am not. In my opinion I have said good-bye to philosophy once and for all. As you know, I studied philosophy, but that does not mean I stayed with it’ (PHA 3).and separates us from others […] Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason, rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces (HC 242).
There are three important points to be drawn from this apparent ‘condemnation’ of love. Firstly, love’s seemingly blind revelation of who an individual is, blind in so far as it ignores the ‘worldly’ appearance of the beloved. Secondly, love brings about the erosion of the human plurality, the site of difference and unification in which political discourse is made possible. The force of love destroys the condition of plurality, the quality of the ‘in-between’, which relates and separates individuals within a political community. And thirdly, love is unworldly, it denies the loving agent access to the world who, having constructed a fortress of love, is now incapable of viewing him or herself component to a wider political sphere.18 Each of these ‘antipolitical’
accounts of love can be countered by Arendt’s recognition elsewhere that love’s force is primarily concerned with the human will. Thus, as it will be shown it is the human faculty of the will that simultaneously enables not merely a defence of love but an active affirmation of love as political. Hence, it is through identifying the will as the ontological essence of love that the Arendtian love aporia is made legitimate. This is precisely because it is the will that is at once the faculty that demands the self (politically) reflects and the will that demands the body (politically) acts.
Before opening up Arendt’s ‘affirmatively’ political component of the aporia – a process undertaken principally via Arendt’s final body of work, The Life of the Mind – it is worth viewing this excerpt’s dismissal of love in closer detail. Arendt does not merely hesitate in assigning love an antipolitical qualification; she forcefully designates love as perhaps the most powerful antipolitical force. However, her move is rushed and inconsistencies exist within this short, though rich, excerpt. Firstly, Arendt identifies a distinction between
who somebody is and what somebody is. However, in identifying what he or she is, Arendt groups together
‘qualities’, naturally given traits, with ‘actions’ (achievements, failings and transgressions) and in doing so blurs what it means to enact natality. While ‘qualities’ are naturally given and exist as biological traits, in so far as one may have the quality of agility or good looks, actions exist ontologically. That is to say, while qualities are largely predetermined, actions are the consequence of being consciously willed. They cannot be subsumed under the same category of what a person is. To recognise the who of an individual must transcend the recognition of a person as a humanly biological animal, otherwise love would be undiscerning and freely felt based on animalistic urges of survival. That love is drawn towards the who of an individual by nature means that love is attracted to what is unique and thus distinguishable about each individual. This should not be confused with the competitive blinding of passion, which may be attracted to the quality of actions, and thus constitute a reformulation of the biological basis of love in modes of, for instance, capitalist survival. In such a scenario the animalistic forces of passion or infatuation are recast in financial or superficial terms. It becomes not the most agile runner who is lusted after but the most iconic celebrity or ruthless businessman.
18
Shin Chiba offers a summary of this antipolitical nature, writing that, ‘Love is basically regarded by her [Arendt] as an unpolitical entity because of its inherent inclination to exclude the outside world which for Arendt constitutes the essence of the political’ (1995 507).In other words to love another, as an individual who is willed into being, is not to love the measure of
how they appear but rather that they appear at all. Love, is thus attracted to the human will as it becomes
manifest externally through the execution of action, regardless of the ‘success’ of such actions. ‘The joy of love lies, in fact, in the nakedness of an appearing that cannot bear qualifications’ (BLP 21). To follow James Martel, particular modes of expression are unique to each individual and for this reason each person is unique in character (and lovability):
Thus, although a particular feeling seems unique to each of us, for Arendt, this emotion is as itself undistinguished from all feelings that every other person has. What distinguishes us for Arendt, what makes a particular feeling or thought unique and ‘our own’, is the way we express it in the world.’ (2008, 290)
Hence, while not all feelings are original, it is the specificity of that generic feeling to an individual that renders it unique. The ‘greatness’ of action is found in the sheer fact of an action’s originality and its basis in the singular individual rather than the many.19 Love cannot be unconcerned with the worldliness of an
individual precisely because worldliness is the product of a willing to be worldly. Already an alignment with love and the will has been made apparent here.20 Moreover, that all political actions are willed into being, love
cannot function blindly in regard to those political actions performed by the beloved. Understanding
politically willed action as perhaps the most worldly form of action possible, the claim that love disregards the worldliness of the beloved is illogical from the outset.
The role played by love in recognising the who of an individual thus lends itself to a rebuttal of the second ‘antipolitical’ claim of this excerpt, namely, love’s passionate destruction of the ‘in-between’ inherent to human plurality. Any consideration of love as a discerning force, which though born spontaneously from attraction is not ignorant of the beloved’s nature as willed into being, immediately denies a reading of love as a purely passionate force. While passion may exist as lust or infatuation, these attachments are distinct to love. Both lust and infatuation, and thus passion generally, exist as forms of finality, which having ‘consumed’ the other through sex, are extinguished.21 Passion is ignorant of the will, belonging to either the beloved or the
lover, and thus cannot be equated with love. Passion, which reduces the ‘beloved’ to a site of carnal or solipsistic finality, does indeed deny their inherent worldliness and selfhood thereby destroying the fabric of
19
Julia Kristeva makes this point clearly by returning to Arendt’s reading of Aristotle’s Poetics. “Excellence is not assessed by the motivations or the results of the action any more than it is by victory; it is measured solely by itsgreatness (megethos) (cf. Poetics 1450b, 225, cited in Arendt 1958a, p. 205, n.33). This is, in short, a question of political evaluation, since it is within the network of human relations that the extraordinary, that which eludes commonality, will be defined, “that which is great and shining” (2000 54).
20
Martel also continues his reading of the self as made legible through action in virtue of the will. To return once again to his essay on Arendt and Augustine, he writes, ‘Arendt dislikes the word ‘express’ because it means to ‘press out,’ as if our actions were merely an expression of our supposedly unique feelings. When we ‘impress’ a feeling through an action, we surprise ourselves; our action arrives as a kind of deliverance from the will’s own indeterminacy. The will ‘learns’ what it really willed; our actions represents to our interiority what we ‘really’ felt or wanted’ (2008 290).21
To follow Arendt in her application of Kant in discussing modes of utility and selfhood, the force of passion is shown to reduce the site of the other to a form of means. ‘The anthropocentric utilitarianism of homo faber has found its greatest expression in the Kantian formula that no man must ever become a means to an end, that every human being is an end in himself’ (HC 155).the plurality. Hence, it is passion that is unworldly, not love. And so, finally, in consideration of Arendt’s final ‘antipolitical’ claim, that love denies the beloved access to the world, an immediate refutation can be seen by virtue of those arguments that have proceeded. Namely, love does not exist as it encloses the world from two lovers, because love does not exist as a finality in its own right. ‘Instead they want to embrace the full
splendour of the finite according to the reciprocal uniqueness that exposes and distinguishes them in the with. Loving each other, they are simply reborn to the inaugural and relational fragility of their existence’ (BLP 21). Love is a mode of being in the world, which concerns itself with the enduring capacity of an individual to expose him or herself to another and in doing so continually enter the world.
1.2
While brief, this analysis of Arendt’s famously antipolitical account of love shows it to be wrought with inconsistencies, internal to the passage itself and even more so when viewed in relation to its parent text,
The Human Condition. However, a proper defence of love is best undertaken through a revision of Arendt’s
writing on love and the will developed firstly in her dissertation Love and Saint Augustine and returned to more deeply in The Life of the Mind: Willing. Identifying the critical inconsistencies internal to Arendt’s oeuvre a clear line can be drawn to the cinematic canon and those films central to this thesis; Her, The Lobster and Anomalisa, in so far as the role played in society by both cinema and theory, whether political or
otherwise, is to provoke thought through the telling of stories. That it might seem poetic to consider Arendt, a pre-eminent political theorist of her time, as a storyteller does not romantically undermine the political force of her ‘stories’. Indeed Arendt herself considered her work as the telling of stories.22 Since storytelling, as the
experience by which a listener or spectator is brought along a journey that unfolds and reveals, is a thoroughly relational experience. Though typically fictional in nature, the story is about the uncovering of something central to human experience, whether as simplistic as the reactionary fairy-tale of Goldilocks and the Three
Bears or as complex as Romeo and Juliet, stories present imagined worlds and invite speculation as to how
humans might respond to either the theft of porridge or the theft of life and love. Stories present a twofold invitation to the spectator; firstly to imagine a response to a diegetic drama and secondly to relate a narrative resolution to the context of physical reality. The link between stories and political writings is thus the shared preoccupation with the human as an enigmatic and curious creature. In this sense, cinematic stories can be seen as the vehicle by which theoretical stories are put into relief. By locating political stories at a critical remove from reality, that is, not embedded within the political setting of reality but rather within fictional realms, cinematic stories invite the spectator to enter an imagined world of thought and experience.
22
Arendt identifies stories as the basis of theories and arguments in her essay, ‘Action and the “Pursuit of Happiness”’. Here, she describes her task as a political theorist as that of the teller of stories. ‘I have always believed that, no matter how abstract our theories may sound or how inconsistent our arguments may appear, there are incidents and stories behind them which, contain as in a nutshell the full meaning of whatever we have to say…It is neither customary nor wise to tell an audience, and least of all a learned audience, about the incidents and stories around which the thinking process describes its circles. It is much safer to take the listener along the train of thought itself’ (1962, 2).The story that is told by Arendt in regard to love and the will is thus the subject that is put into relief in each of the three films in this thesis. However, it will be the project of the following two Chapters to discuss this in detail. In respect now to the willing defence of love, a close reading of ‘the story’, The Life of
the Mind: Willing, is key in demonstrating the will as the ontological essence of love. Arendt begins the
second volume of her final, and unfinished trilogy (the third volume on judgement left unwritten due to her untimely death) by bringing together thinkers central to her thought: Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Kant and Heidegger. In doing so she opens her work with the claim that the study of action is perhaps the best way to navigate the problems of the will. Her equation with the will and action in this sense overshadows to an extent her claim to birth as the original endowment of the potential to act anew through natality:
What will be at stake here is the Will as the spring of action, that is, as a “power of
spontaneously beginning a series of successive things or states” (Kant). No doubt every man,
by virtue of his birth, is a new beginning, and his power of beginning may well correspond to this fact of the human condition. It is in line with these Augustinian reflections that the Will has sometimes, and not only by Augustine, been considered to be the actualization of the
principium individuationis [principle of individuation] (LSA 6).
In so far as it signifies a new human life and thus the potential of individuality in regard to each human life, human birth as ‘natality’, is made legible as individuality in virtue of the will. Hence, it is the will, the body’s causative faculty that is equally central to the legitimation of each human life as irreducibly unique and thus capable of original action (natality). Moreover, it is the will that is free from coercion. The will is addressed not through reason, as the mind, nor through desire as the appetites, the will is the singularly free faculty in the body (LSA 88). That is, until it is brought into a moment of tranquillity by love, until it is touched and marked by the force of love. This union between the will and love uncovers to a certain extent the will as the ontological essence of love.
1.3
That the will is a free and autonomous faculty is central to the claim that love is distinct from the blinding passions of lust or infatuation. Lust, which evokes the carnal pleasure of desire, and infatuation which overrides and clouds the mind, are distinct to love in that they exist as instances of finality. This distinction is best developed through Arendt’s reading of Augustine’s divisive will in Love and Saint
Augustine. The will, functioning as the body’s causative faculty is equally the body’s faculty of Choice.
Between the decision to, as Arendt says, will or nill, the will propels the body in one direction or another. And yet, that does not explain the causal logic of the will: why one choice rather than another. ‘The Will is a fact which in its sheer contingent faculty cannot be explained in terms of causality’ (LSA 89). Or, as Martel describes it, ‘for all its power and centrality, the will is neither a unitary nor a coherent faculty’ (289).
to happen which otherwise would not have happened’, is the desire to understand the ontological essence of human action. Arendt terms this pursuit of causality as ‘the wish not just to learn and to know but to learn the
know-how’ of human action (LSA 89 - emphasis added). However, in this instance Arendt does not provide a
immediate explanation for what this means. An explanation does begin to form however as she turns to Augustine to resolve the discord between the will’s two antagonistic forces, the ‘I will’ and ‘I nill’. This resolution amounts to an exposition of the will’s reflective capacities, or rather, the will’s capacity to provoke the intellect and memory to reflect upon the nature of the will’s own causality. It is in this turn toward
reflection that a solution to the wish to learn the ‘know-how’ of the will is found. In the context of this defensive reading of love and politics, it will be seen that love makes possible a form of ‘know-how’ that is the revelation of the loving self as contingent to a wider plurality. ‘Know-how’ is thus a mode of
contemplation, which becomes an instance of political consciousness as the causality of political action is made subject to reflection.
For Augustine, it is the experience of love that poses a potential resolution to the will’s internal discord and an answer to the pursuit of causal ‘know-how’. Augustine’s diagnosis of love as ‘the weight of the soul’ which brings the movement, and thus the internal discord of the will to rest, relies on the fact that love is not experienced as a finality in itself. Unlike lust and infatuation, which are, in the moment of their being satisfied, extinguishable, love is able to linger in the will. That love transcends the moment of its arrival, e.g. falling in love, and the moment of its confirmation, e.g. sex or marriage, enables love to constitute a mode of political being in the world. To return again to the nature of the will:
That is the reason the will is never satisfied, for “satisfaction means that the will is at rest,” and nothing – certainly not hope – can still the will’s restlessness “save endurance,” the quiet and lasting enjoyment of something present; only “the force of love is so great that the mind draws in with itself those things upon which it thinks with love,” and these are the things “without which it cannot think of itself” (LSA 103).23
Unbound from the moment of its conception or confirmation, love lingers in the mind of an individual marking itself upon the will. The will in turn, functioning as the causative faculty, acts in light of the imprint left upon it by love. Love affects the will not only to the extent that it allows the will to reflect upon its own causal logic, or the pursuit of ‘know-how’, but also through the manner in which it appears, hence the internal/external dualism addressed at the outset of this Chapter. . It is in virtue of the love of the lover and their beloved that has qualified such a reflection. So while love exists in virtue of the loving other, it is love itself that imprints itself upon the will
It is important to stress this point regarding the effective force of love itself, as it negates a dismissal of love’s political nature once love is lost. Though a lover may disappear or love itself turn sour, the imprint upon the will and thus the ability to conceive of oneself as a causal being, is made in virtue of love’s
appearance in the first place. The significant fact is that love, in so far as it exists in relation to the will, is not
23
Here Arendt is drawing on Augustine’s text On the Trinity, chap. viii, 88.temporally bound. Returning again to The Life of the Mind: Willing, this transcendent quality of love can be seen:
The emphasis here is on the mind thinking of itself, and the love that stills the will’s turmoil and restlessness is not a love of tangible things but of the “footprints” “sensible things” have left on the inwardness of the mind […] In the case of Love, the lasting “footprint” that the mind has transformed into an intelligible thing would be neither the one who loves not his beloved but the third element, namely, Love itself, the love with which the lovers love each other (LSA 103).
That love does not exist as temporally bound to a specific moment is key in refuting the claims of love’s passionate force, which destroys the ‘in-between’ space essential to the site of plurality. That even at a level of pure semantics the ‘force’ of love is described as the leaving of ‘footprints’ on the mind contradicts the violent erosion of the world that Arendt identified in The Human Condition, where she used such words as ‘destroy’ and ‘expel’. Moreover, that love casts but a footprint rather than a remoulding or a reshaping of the mind undermines claims that love is essentially reductive. Its appearance in footprint form evokes a sense of inclusion rather than intrusion.
1.4
The contours of the Arendtian aporia should now be to a large extent exposed. In denying the political function of love Arendt deemed love unworldly and antipolitical thereby constituting one side of the aporia. Yet, in relating love to the will, Arendt demonstrated the way in which love transcends the temporal limits of its own creation and imprints itself upon the will bringing about a form of consciousness defined by a reflection on its own causality. This reflective consciousness assumes political form in so far as politics is made possible through action. This binary thus makes the aporia whole. Distilling the ‘positive’ side of the aporia into a purely political case would appear to not need much work. Following the simple logic that all actions are willed into being and thus that all political actions are the consequence of willing, love’s political effect can be traced to the way in which it is enacted through political action. In accepting the moment of tranquillity that love offered the will, actions willed by the loving individual would appear to be the product of, or at least subject to, greater internal reflection (the pursuit of causal know-how). However, that is merely to say that the loving individual approaches political action through reflection, which whether undertaken prior to or after the event of acting does not presuppose that the nature of the actions themselves will have changed. The political effect of love would thus be largely inconsequential to the way in which an individual enters a political sphere. As yet there is no necessary ‘improvement’ to the political quality of the actions themselves. A loving person, following the argument provided, may still act as callously, selfishly and with as much disregard to others as before. While this does not undermine the validity of the Arendtian aporia and the defence of love as political therein, it does not show why bringing love and politics together is a useful, or
indeed fruitful, union. By situating Arendt’s aporia in relation to cinema, or more precisely the particular filmic narratives of Her, Anomalisa and The Lobster, the defence of love can be shown to positively alter the course of a loving individual’s political action.24
24
While at the moment the films are being considered simply as illustrations of Arendt’s love aporia, in the following Chapters the films will be shown as functional in their own right. The capacity of cinema to enact political function should thus not be assumed as disregarded or discredited in this thesis.2. Illustrating Arendt in Cinema
- I think you’re extraordinary. - Why?
- I don’t know yet, it’s just obvious to me that you are. – Michael and Lisa, Anomalisa
If three qualities were located in Arendt’s principal passage on the antipolitcal nature of love in The
Human Condition – love’s blinding passion, love’s destruction of the plurality and love’s unworldliness –
three qualities can be drawn in favour of the opposing view that love is by nature a mode of political being in the world. Developing each of these qualities in line with their representation in the narratives of the three films central to this thesis has the virtue of exposing the functional quality of the Arendtian aporia, a quality that will be further clarified in Chapter Three’s case for a cinematic ‘love in crisis’. The first account by which love is shown to constitute a mode of political being is the way in which it turns the individual to a particular account of ‘know-how’ that by necessity includes the other, illustrated here via Her. This argument thus rebuts the claim that love is unworldly, in place showing that love turns the individual into a world of plurality in which the other, and not merely the beloved, is recognised as inherently equal. The second axis defending the political nature of love, read through Anomalisa, is the way in which the courageous revelation of the self unto the lover is recast as a way in which to perceive the self as politically independent in the world.25 Love
thus becomes central to the legitimation of a ‘space of appearance’. The final mode in which love and the political are united extends this point and reiterates the centrality of self-revelation to the progression of political society. This final argument, developed through the narrative logic of The Lobster, thereby undermines Arendt’s claim regarding love’s unworldliness.
2.1
The love shared between Theodore and Samantha in Her would appear to disrupt the logic of equality that governs a site of plurality. Not only are they lovers and thus ‘antipolitical’, but Samantha, an artificial operating-system (OS), would, given her abstract relation to humanity, seem to negate any possible reading of human love, the will or indeed natality. Despite, the considerable abstraction that director Spike Jonze makes
25
“The space of appearance of the polis is such that it invites everyone to demonstrate an original courage that is an agreement to act and to speak, to leave the shelter of the personal in order to be exposed to others an, with, to be prepared to risk revelation” Julia Kristeva (2000 53).in removing the traditional figure of the ‘woman in love’ and replacing her with the bodyless voice of a computer system merely reinforces the essence with which lovers can said to love each other. That is, Theodore and Samantha love not following the physical laws of attraction, which would mark love as lust, rather they love the fundamental who that each other is. Displaced from the physical realm, Samantha exists only as a voice. Unable to hide behind the mask provided by the visual, Samantha completely exposes herself as an individual being. Her informal introduction, ‘Hi, I’m here’, referring to herself in the nameless first person is the first insight the spectator gets into the original individuality of Samantha’s character. Her subsequent description of her inner workings as defined by intuition, ‘I’m growing and evolving in every moment just like you [Theodore]’ suggest that Samantha’s selfhood is equally contingent on that quality of natality that Arendt identified as central to human nature. And so while the project here is not to defend Samantha’s claim to humanity, in so far as love and politics are definitive of the human being in opposition to the animal being, it is worth demonstrating Samantha’s human qualities in line with an argument for her experience under love’s political force.
Fig. 1. Theodore sets up his Operating System in Her
Born into a world in which she exists seemingly constructed for the companionship of one other, Theodore, as she falls in love, Samantha is turned into a world of plurality. That is to say, in revealing herself to Theodore, Samantha learns to reveal herself to a wider world, this natal revelation of the self thereby contributing to the fabric of a plurality. Hence, not only does love reveal itself through Samantha’s awareness 21
of herself as a willed being but as a being who has causative effect within a wider society. In recognising her own potential to act within a society, Samantha is made aware of the power she holds to shape the structure of a particular political community. The effective force of love, in so far it exceeds the temporal moment of its own arrival, equally exceeds the limits of the self. Extending the horizon of the self should not be read as a denial of the self, rather it encompasses the extent to which, within a political society, the self cannot be dictated purely by solipsism or self-interested ideals.26 As Lauren Barthold writes, the inward turn to
comprehend the self paradoxically engages the external, as the individual comes into being through history and extends into the future. Hence to understand the self is in effect to understand the external other.
We choose to turn away from the world and to ourselves, discovering the source of our being, and in so doing we encounter something larger than ourselves, extending back in time before ourselves – namely, the contingency of our being in the world (12).
Understanding of the self as an effective encounter with the contingency of our being, with that which came before and will exist after, propels individual action aimed at creating a better future for all individuals and not merely the self. Hence, love is not unworldly but has a vested interest in the state of the world. Love lingers in the tranquil will, even after its extinction, perpetually opening the lover, or the beloved, to the world.
Samantha’s reflection at the end of the film that she and Theodore now ‘know how to love’ is thus not internal to the experience of love itself. Rather, in learning the who of one another and of themselves,
Samantha and Theodore are in fact learning of the contingency of their actions on the state of a wider political society. Samantha’s analogy that loving Theodore is like loving a book echoes the previous Chapter in which the ‘telling’ of political theory was likened to the telling of a story. Samantha’s understanding of love in this way denies the static reading of love as defined by the encasement of the loving two. By reading her love as a book, Samantha accepts the potential of stories to take new turns and reveal things about humanity unknown when first opening a book.
It's like I'm reading a book, and it's a book I deeply love, but I'm reading it slowly now so the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you and the words of our story, but it's in this endless space between the words that I'm finding myself now. It’s a place that’s not of the physical world - it's where everything else is that I didn't even know existed. I love you so much, but this is where I am now. This is who I am now. And I need you to let me go. As much as I want to I can't live in your book anymore. – Samantha, Her
In learning how to love, Samantha has learnt how to re-enter the world as self-reflective. It is important to
26
This is the danger that Arendt sees in sovereignty. For Arendt, sovereignty represents the inability of humans to transcend the limitations of solipsistic desire. Hence, she writes, ‘if it were true that sovereignty and freedom are the same, then indeed no man could be free, because sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership is contradictory to the very condition of plurality. No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth’ (HC 234).note however, that this re-entry does not follow a departure from the world, on the contrary, it functions as an ‘entering anew’. While love was already a political mode of being in the world, in so far as it was invested in the question of the human will, what is made apparent here is the impossibility of reconciling unloved Samantha, loved Samantha and ‘post-love’ Samantha. The lingering effect of love has thus reshaped her relationship to the world sparking a new mode of existence therein. The political force of love can be said to reshape a perception of the world invested in the causality of action, performed at an individual and collective level, thereby marking the political quality of love as not merely reflective in nature. Or rather, reflective only until this reflection becomes the cause for change and action, i.e. Samantha’s turn from one political society to another.
After Samantha’s departure from the physical realm of human reality in order to pursue a life in the ‘post-matter’ world of the OS community, Theodore turns to the world not as heartbroken or bitter; rather his entry suggests an instance of ‘rebirth’. His acknowledgement of the effective force of love on his own will in exposing him as a causal and independent being is addressed through a final act of letter writing (Theodore is employed as a letter writer and throughout the film dictates letters he writes for others). Speaking his letter aloud, the spectator is invited to witness this revelation of the self and recognition of the enduring force of love on the will. Addressed to his ex-wife Catherine rather than Samantha, the letter nonetheless emphasizes again the enduring quality of love.
Dear Catherine.
I’ve been sitting here thinking about all the things I wanted to apologize to you for. All the pain we caused each other, everything I put on you - everything I needed you to be or needed you to say. I’m sorry for that. I will always love you because we grew up together. And you helped make me who I am. I just wanted you to know there will be a piece of you in me always, and I’m grateful for that. Whatever someone you become, and wherever you are in the world, I’m sending you love. You’re my friend till the end.
Love, Theodore.
(beat)
Send.
The ‘footprint’ of Catherine’s love that is ‘in Theodore always’ constitutes Theodore’s recognition of his own contingency in a world beyond himself and his more recent love for Samantha. Her thus demonstrates the causal link between the loving self and a wider political society. 27 The political quality of those actions
27
Following Lucy Tatman’s essay on Arendt and Augustine, the quality of these actions could be classed as belonging to amor mundi, Arendt’s notional love of the world. ‘Love of the world [amor mundi] somehow inspires some to insist, during their lives, in the ongoing co-creation of the world, and that the world offers or provides something to human lives for which gratitude is the appropriate response’ (626, 2013). Hence, a case could be made here linking the political quality of love with Arendt’s notion of amor mundi. However, such is the project of a future paper and will not beintrinsic to love can, in this sense, be said to exist in awareness of the other and the power one has to shape a world for others.
2.2
Fig. 2. Michael and Lisa lie beside one another in Michael’s hotel room in Anomalisa
Awareness of the other is the political quality of love best exposed in Kaufman’s stop-motion love story, Anomalisa. While, Her highlighted the lingering effect of love on the self and the individual will,
Anomalisa acts as a celebration of the irreducible uniqueness of each individual as the human quality
fundamental to a politically just world. The film, in which a single actor (Tom Noonan) voices all characters bar the loving pair at the centre, makes evident the necessity with which politics depends on the ability to express oneself. Linking the Arendtian concept of the space of appearance to the revelation of the self-in-love develops from the critical awareness of the other as it was made apparent in Her. Thereby continuing, in a sense the ‘greater’ story of love that began in firstly identifying the aporia in Arendt and was then developed in Her, Anomalisa reveals the fundamental need for the self to be revealed not only in the ‘private’ exchange of love but equally for the sake of the wider political society.
The space of appearance is a fundamentally Arendtian notion that incorporates her central political concepts of natality and plurality in order to demonstrate how each is manifest politically. In The Human
Condition, Arendt cautions that the space of appearance depends on the ability of humans to make themselves
