The Magic Cave of Allegory: Lars von Trier's Melancholia
35.3Abstract (summary)
[...]reviews have characterized the film as such, describing it as "an epic metaphor for the devastating effects of depression," a "profound apocalyptic metaphor for depression," a "metaphor for the onset of severe depression that is about as subde as being hit over the head with a two-by-four," and so on.1 In a press conference at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, von Trier himself primed viewers for such assessments, observing that "to me it's not so much a film about the end of the world; it's a film about a state of mind. Just imagine the worst thing possible." Since her worldview is enduringly negative, Justine finds no peace or consolation in Earth's apparent escape from destruction.
Full Text
Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) opens with a close-up shot of a young woman's pallid face, her long, unkempt blonde hair accentuating a visage utterly absent any affect or movement. As her eyelids slowly open to expose a vacant gaze, dead birds begin to fall against a bleak sky. We are thus initially invited to interpret the film's title as referring to a psychological or emotional state, what contemporary psychology calls "depression" but went by the name "melancholia" from ancient Hippocratic medicine through modern Freudian psychoanalysis. Yet the subsequent images that comprise the film's introductory eight-minute sequence form a quasi tableau vivant that troubles any simple equation of melancholia with a psychological condition. These images record the final moments in the lives of the film's central characters as they prepare for a catastrophic collision with a rogue planet named Melancholia. Resembling Earth in appearance save for its much larger size, Melancholia appears three times in the opening sequence: first as it eclipses the red star Antares, second as it passes perilously close to Earth in what astronomers call a flyby, and third when it returns to impact directly with Earth, a collision in which Melancholia devours its smaller twin.
Given the name of the rogue planet, together with the film's wrenching depiction of the incapacitating effects of psychological depression, viewers would be well warranted to interpret Earth's annihilation as the most hyperbolic of allegories. Indeed, reviews have characterized the film as such, describing it as "an epic metaphor for the devastating effects of depression," a "profound apocalyptic metaphor for depression," a "metaphor for the onset of severe depression that is about as subde as being hit over the head with a two-by-four," and so on.1 In a press conference at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, von Trier himself primed viewers for such assessments, observing that "to me it's not so much a film about the end of the world; it's a film about a state of mind."2 Given the ubiquitous use of the verb "catastrophize" by contemporary psychotherapists to describe a cognitive distortion common to those suffering from anxiety and depression, the popular imagination is already well disposed to pursue this line of interpretation. For cognitive behavioral therapists, to catastrophize is to magnify the perceived negativity of a situation or condition in a manner that is disproportional to reality.3 Von Trier explained that the initial impetus for the film emerged from his own therapeutic situation. "My analyst told me that melancholiacs will usually be more level-headed than ordinary people in a disastrous situation, pardy because they can say: 'What did I tell you?"'4 This notion that paranoid anticipation of the worst ironically makes melancholics more prepared to confront actual disaster is voiced in the film by Claire (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg). Responding to the unaltered emotional state of her sister Justine (played by Kirsten Dunst) in the wake of Earth having survived its first close encounter with Melancholia, Claire asserts, "Oh, you have it easy, don't you? Just imagine the worst thing possible." Since her worldview is enduringly negative, Justine finds no peace or consolation in Earth's apparent escape from destruction.
An allegorical analysis of Melancholia would read the film as a departure from the conventional Hollywood disaster genre insofar as the latter typically stresses the literality of what is represented. This literality is especially crucial to depictions of historical catastrophes. Consider James Cameron's Titanic (1997), in which the sinking of the eponymous ocean liner takes primacy over whatever figurative meanings it may also imply with regard to the fate of starcrossed lovers. As with most disaster films, moreover, in Titanic the scope of the devastation stops short of total destruction. Indeed, a fundamental, repetitive characteristic of the genre is its preoccupation with survival, the continued existence of at least one person beyond the scene of devastation (although multiple people of both genders is preferable, or else the human race could not propagate itself). Writing specifically about science fiction disaster films, Susan Sontag observed in the 1960s that the genre permits one to "participate in the fantasy of living through one's own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself." Disaster films are thus primarily concerned with "accommodating to and negating . .. the perennial human anxiety about death."5 This twofold affirmation and denial of death is central to Rudolph Maté's When Worlds Collide (1951), whose depiction of Earth's destruction by a rogue star named Bellus clearly influenced von Trier's film. True to generic form, a small number of Earth's inhabitants are able to pilot a spacecraft to a planet orbiting around Bellus called Zyra, whose habitability promises the possibility of a future for the human race notwithstanding our planet's total annihilation. Melancholia, on the other hand, leaves us with no survivors, thus depriving the spectator of the routine pleasures afforded by the disaster genre-that is, the sublation of finitude by virtue of which our identification with the survivors permits us to imagine our own vicarious triumph over death.
Although von Trier's film might at first appear to demand an allegorical approach that distinguishes it from its generic antecedents, I want to suggest that reading this cinematic annihilation of the world as something other than what it purports to be-that is, as the absolute effacement of all living beings (human, animal, or plant)-risks the ironic consequence of relocating the film squarely within those generic conventions that resist the possibility of total obliteration without remainder or trace. An interpretation of von Trier's film that registers interplanetary impact solely in terms of psychological depression would therefore measure Melancholia's arrival as a catastrophe that does not finally equate with complete obliteration. It is not the end of the world after all. As cognitive psychology would have us believe, melancholia figures merely as the sign of an exaggerated, distorted perception of the world. Melancholia as psychological distortion is therefore not of this world. Having been "hiding behind the sun," as Claire's son Leo naively explains, Melancholia heralds its devastating force from a location wholly alien and external to "our" world. As a peripheral threat, Melancholia can always "pass us by," as Claire's scientifically minded husband John repeatedly insists.
As tempting as it may be to seek shelter in an allegorical reading of Melancholia, I propose an alternative approach that resists the apparent requirement that the viewer decide between the literal and the allegorical. Indeed, the film frustrates interpretation precisely by destabilizing the distinction between these terms. While allegory is traditionally defined as an extended metaphor, Derek Attridge observes that interpretation presupposes a general allegoricity: "To say what a fictional work is 'about' ... is to proceed allegorically. If a wholly nonallegorical reading of a literary work were possible, it would refrain from any interpretation whatsoever."6 To read anallegorically would thus be not to read at all. The collapse of any allegorical sign onto a determinate meaning betrays what J. Hillis Miller describes as "allegoraphobia," a fear of language that speaks otherwise, which is to say a fear of language itself: literary, cinematic, and so forth.7 When reviewers equate melancholia with psychological depression, they adopt a conventional conception of allegory whereby symbol and meaning are fully aligned: a total eclipse of the sign. An allegorical reading of the film in this sense is attractive precisely because it figures absolute death and destruction as completely other, impossible, and unreal. Its prophylactic function is therefore similar to that of the so-called magic cave that Justine (whom Leo calls "Aunt Steelbreaker") constructs with her nephew Leo prior to Melancholia's impact with Earth. A meager assemblage of eight sticks of wood gathered from a nearby forest, Aunt Steelbreaker's cave is no match for interplanetary collision. Of course, Justine knows that the cave bears no magical properties. Yet her willingness to construct it manifests an unusual display of courage, calm, and above all compassion for her nephew and sister who are utterly terrified of the impending doom. That the content of any allegory is never absolutely certain, moreover, means that Justine's depression could metaphorize the destruction of the world rather than the inverse. As Sigmund Freud observed in "Mourning and Melancholia," these related yet distinct psychological conditions are both characterized by a certain loss and absence of the "world."8 This disappearance of the world may function metaphorically in Freud's account, but Melancholia could be read precisely as inverting this figurative logic; that is, the film obscures Earth's literal destruction behind the allegorical shadow of melancholia/depression. The complete destruction of Earth seems indisputably to be the worse of these two possibilities. On the other hand, its science fiction implausibility forms a protective barrier between us and Justine's melancholia insofar as imagining the extraordinary event of the world's demise is so literally and figuratively out there that it fails to threaten with the same force as the far more ordinary and common condition of depression. After all, many of us have lived through psychological depression, but none of us have witnessed the end of the world.
This assertion seems commonsensical enough. One witnesses the end of the world only on the condition that one does not live to tell about it, only on the condition that one cannot testify to its having happened. Notwithstanding the apparent incontrovertibility of this observation, Jacques Derrida argues that the loss of the other spawns a melancholia that is indistinguishable from the annihilation of the entire world:
For each time singularly, and each time irreplaceably, each time infinitely, death is nothing less than an end of the world. Not only one end among others, the end of someone or of something in the world, the end of a life or of a living being. Death puts an end neither to someone in the world nor to one world among others. Death marks each time, each time in defiance of arithmetic, the absolute end of the one and only world, of that which each opens as a one and only world, the end of the unique world, the end of the totality of what is or can be presented as the origin of the world for any unique living being, be it human or not.
The survivor, then, remains alone. Beyond the world of the other, he is also in some fashion beyond or before the world itself. In the world outside the world and deprived of the world. At the very least, he feels solely responsible, assigned to carry both the other and his world, the other and the world that have disappeared, responsible without world ( weltlos), without the ground of any world, thenceforth, in a world without world, as if without earth beyond the end of the world.9
Derrida thus resists the Freudian paradigm of "successful mourning" through which one fully relinquishes one's attachment to the lost other: "This melancholy must still protest against normal mourning. This melancholy must never resign itself to idealizing introjection. . . . The norm is nothing other than the good conscience of amnesia."10 For Derrida, moreover, melancholic incorporation requires that we bear the other within from the very beginning: "Mourning no longer waits." Mourning thus has neither an identifiable origin nor a definitive conclusion. As if anticipating the reader's resistance, Derrida insists that his account of a mourning without beginning or end is not exaggerated or pathological: "I say without the facility of hyperbole" that we "carry the world of the other . .. after the end of the world."11
How are we to read this denial of hyperbole? Are we to take Derrida at his word? Or is it to be read as an ironic disavowal that affirms what it denies? If there is an answer to such questions, then perhaps it lies in the subde but crucial shift between the following two claims: "Death is ... an end of the world" and "Death marks . . . the absolute end of the one and only world." Shifting to the definite article, coupled with the addition of "absolute," the second assertion qualifies the previous suggestion that the death of the other is merely an end among others. This oscillation between an end and the end, between a relative and an absolute end, attests to the counterintuitive principle of an end of the world that repeats itself over and over again, "in defiance of arithmetic," each time a singular other disappears from our world.
If Derrida's contention is hyperbolic, then it is so in the truest sense of this word: recall that hyperbole stems from the Greek verb ballein, meaning "to throw." Mourning is by definition hyperbolic because it is thrown beyond restricted temporal and spatial boundaries, like a rogue planet that exceeds its orbit. These two forms of hyperbole are not merely analogous to the extent that mourning figures a certain collision of worlds: "There is no longer any world, it's the end of the world, for the other at his death. And so I welcome in me this end of the world, I must carry the other and his world, the world in me."12 Derrida's language necessarily slides between the singular world (of the other) and the world in totality. To grasp this vacillation fully, we must take into account the final line of the poem by Paul Celan that animates Derrida's analysis: 'The world is gone, I must carry you." The Freudian paradigm of successful mourning assures us that the death of the other is not the end of the world. Of course, it is the end of the other's world, but for me it is not an absolute catastrophe, as difficult and as painful as the experience of loss may be. Derrida's reflections on the world's irrecuperable loss resonate with his discussion of Bataille in Writing and Difference: specifically, the distinction that the latter makes between general and restricted economies.13 The world is not a self-enclosed whole that can effectively patch over the cracks and fissures that appear each time a singular being leaks out of existence.14 The world is gone when we lose others because it is not a restricted economy or a closed system that can fully recover from its losses. This principle of irrecoverable loss recalls John Donne's famous declaration that "Any Man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde."lb Whereas Donne believes that death will be undone in an afterlife, Derrida maintains that such reversibility is an illusion that disavows the irredeemable loss of others.
An uncanny parallel thus emerges between von Trier's depiction of depression as interplanetary collision and Derrida's equally hyperbolic equation of melancholia with the end of the world. The term "melancholia" corresponds at once to a celestial body, a psychological condition, and to the general condition of being-in-theworld. Life itself is mourning. Of course, behind Derrida's notion of originary mourning is the shadow of Heidegger, for whom Dasein "is always already dying" in its "being-toward-its-end."16The Heideggerian notion of being-toward-death characterizes our relationship to finitude in terms of an originary "thrownness." Heidegger introduces this term to describe our being delivered over to a world that is not of our choosing. To be thrown into being is to find oneself in a situation that already shapes and determines us. Yet insofar as death always already belongs to being as our "ownmost nonrelational possibility," Dasein is always in the process of being "thrown into this possibility."17 Heidegger's ballistic language thus stresses a hyperbolic logic that projects the self beyond the normal boundaries that separate life and death as well as past, present, and future.
Whereas Heidegger maintains that we are cast ahead toward death, thrust beyond the "now" of any living present, Derrida underscores how we both carry-and are carried by-the mortal others who inhabit our world. Throughout von Trier's film, Claire is often depicted as literally bearing the body of her sister, whose severe depression has reduced her to a catatonic, "worldless" state. In one particularly painful scene, Claire and a house servant struggle to walk Justine's immobile body to a bathtub, only to give up once it becomes apparent that Justine is not even able to lift her foot to climb into the water. Later they coax Justine to a dinner table with the lure of meadoaf, her favorite food, only to witness her break down in tears, crying that the food "tastes like ash." Although some viewers might find the film's tone utterly cynical, such moments portray a sororal intimacy that shares in Derrida's notion of world-bearing, which is not solely focused on our responsibility toward the dead. Insisting that this carrying precedes the physical disappearance of others, he traces this responsibility all the way back to birth, to a mother's visceral bearing of her child: "Between the mother and the child, the one in the other and the one for the other, in this singular couple of solitary beings, in the shared solitude between one and two bodies, the world disappears, it is far away, it remains a quasi-excluded third. For the mother who carries the child, 'Die welt is fort.'" The term "carry" thus "speaks the language of birth" as well as describes the experience of the survivor, the one who bears the other in mourning.18 Among the series of arresting images with which Melancholia begins is that of Claire carrying her young son Leo across the golf course on her estate, returning to seek shelter after having engaged in a panicked yet vain effort to escape the rogue planet's impact. As with the other images that comprise the opening sequence, Claire and Leo are portrayed in extreme slow motion, her desperation and futility aggravated by the visual deceleration. The world is both already gone for mother and child, this "singular couple of solitary beings," and also not yet entirely gone. The world is on the verge of an absolute disappearance after which there will be no world to carry. It might seem that the disappearance of the world either through its actual, physical destruction or as a consequence of the other's death is distinct from maternal bearing. Yet natality and finitude are never far apart to the extent that maternity means giving birth to a mortal being who must continue to be borne by others long after he or she is born.
If the generic formula of the disaster film typically stresses survival as a corrective to destruction, then there is no more culturally cherished image than that of the child to bear this future. Quite deliberately seeking to quash such optimism, von Trier's film insists on the impossibility of life in the wake of Melancholia's impact. Consider the conversation in which Justine informs her sister that "the earth is evil. We don't need to grieve for it. . . . Nobody will miss it." Claire responds, "But where would Leo grow up?" Claire's response betrays a logic of disavowal that is at once poignant and darkly comic. What part about the world coming to an end does she not understand? Claire can accept her own death perhaps, but she cannot contemplate the death of her son, who must survive as the sign and trace of her own immortality. Apparendy surrendering to the possibility of Earth's destruction and therefore of both her and Leo's demise, Claire then suggests that "there may be life somewhere else." Yet she barely finishes her sentence before Justine emphatically asserts, "But there isn't." She goes on to ascribe to herself a clairvoyant ability to "know things... . When I say we're alone, we're alone. Life is only on Earth, and not for long." It does not really matter whether Justine truly "knows things" and is therefore correct that the impact of Melancholia will entail not only the destruction of life on Earth but also the annihilation of all life in the universe. Justine's certainty may turn out to be just as reliable as that of John, whose confidence in science is dealt a devastating blow when he discovers that Melancholia will collide with Earth notwithstanding scientific predictions, a revelation that leads him to commit suicide rather than face the end along with his wife, son, and sister-in-law. What is crucial is that Justine's assertion of absolute destruction and loss is aligned with the film's deliberate positioning of itself as an antidisaster disaster film. On the one hand, the film depicts a destruction of Earth that is quite literally disastrous. Derived from the Latin astrum, the term "disaster" connotes a misfortune that befalls us on account of a malevolent star. On the other hand, the destruction of Earth is not disastrous in accordance with Hollywood convention, which requires that the scene of destruction, no matter how devastating, cannot equate to the absolute termination of all life. What Derrida once said of the possibility of total nuclear war thus also applies to Melancholia: its impact allows us to imagine the "possibility of an irreversible destruction, leaving no traces."19 As Derrida reminds us, moreover, "apocalypse" signifies revelation, an unveiling of truth. This unveiling thus depends upon a dialectical movement that would subíate the scene of destruction, that would resurrect the dead if only vicariously through the figure of the survivor. Remaining precisely to preserve the future against its neutralization, the survivor attests to the conventional, apocalyptic disaster film's decidedly conservative symbolic economy. If Melancholia is apocalyptic, then it begets what Derrida characterizes as an apocalypse without apocalypse, a revelation that unveils no truth.
Although the film depicts the possibility of a total eradication of all traces, the image of Claire desperately trying to bear (up) her child at the end of the world, to protect him from the danger posed by Melancholia's imminent impact, nevertheless attests to the paradoxical condition of the trace, which can be both durable and fragile. As Claire moves across the golf course, she appears almost to sink into the ground, leaving deep footprints in the grass, the earth apparently beginning to yield to Melancholia's force. On her final step her foot is entirely submerged under the earth, as if she is slowly falling into an abyss from which she and Leo will not return. Deeply implanted in the earth, these traces visually imply a capacity to endure that is undermined by the ground's increasing destabilization, rendering these imprints wholly precarious and subject to effacement.
The pathos that this image evokes is nonetheless punctured if we turn our gaze from mother and son to the undulating golf flag, which slowly unfurls to reveal the number 19 at the same moment that Claire's foot penetrates the liquefying ground. Of course, the nineteenth hole literally does not exist in golf. If it did, it could exist only hyperbolically, as it were, permitting the ball to be cast beyond the game's normal temporal and spatial limits. This supplemental hole would allow for a future above and beyond the end of the game, an afterlife for the game that would prevent the ball from descending into the eighteenth black hole, never again to see the light of day. As with the psychological condition known as melancholia, the nineteenth hole is a marker of excess, a surplus that violates the standard rules of the game. In addition to psychology and sports, this transgression of limits corresponds to John's two chief obsessions: stargazing and money. John parades his astronomic wealth not only by throwing Claire an elaborate wedding reception but also by repeatedly bragging quite specifically about the number of holes on his golf course. A cosmic joke in more ways than one, the nineteenth hole mocks both the extravagant wealth that John displays and his confidence in astronomical calculations. The faith in numbers that leads him to accept scientists' miscalculation of Melancholia's trajectory is thus aligned with a farcical underestimation of the number of cups on his putting green. While Derrida maintains that the world is destroyed "in defiance of arithmetic" because the death of each singular being endlessly repeats the end of the world, the destructive force of Melancholia also defies arithmetic on a more basic level by virtue of an unavoidable incalculability, the "margin of error" whose existence John finally acknowledges in the wake of the planet's initial flyby.
Of course, this literal manifestation of a surplus hole plays on the idiomatic practice of referring to the bar where one celebrates with a few (or more) drinks as "the nineteenth hole." If the nineteenth hole is as integral to the game of golf as the previous eighteen holes, then what is von Trier trying to say with this reference? Game over? It's the end of the world, so let's gather at the nineteenth hole and "party like it's 1999" (as Prince's apocalyptic 1982 hit song implores us)? Claire is not exacdy in the mood to celebrate, but once she finally accepts that the end of the world is nigh, she informs her sister that she wants to "do this the right way. ... A glass of wine together, maybe." Justine responds:
You want me to have a glass of wine on your terrace. . . . How 'bout a song? Beethoven's Ninth, something like that? Maybe we can light some candles? You want us to gather on your terrace to sing a song, have a glass of wine, the three of us? ... Do you know what I think of your plan? ... I think it's a piece of shit.
Whether Prince or Beethoven, Justine is not willing to provide a musical score for the apocalypse (ironically, von Trier is clearly happy to oblige, though his choice of soundtrack is Wagner). There will be no "Ode to Joy" for Justine; all men will not "become brothers," or perhaps more appropriately, all women will not become sisters. Against Claire's suggestion that a glass of wine on the terrace would make the end of the world "nice," Justine asks, 'Why don't we meet on the fucking toilet"? Justine's cruelty is certainly objectionable, despite the naïveté of her sister's request for a dignified exit. Yet in the final moments of the film, it is Justine who provides if not a graceful death then one that softens Melancholia's impact by imagining an allegorical cushion in the form of the magic cave. Justine's indifference transforms into compassion once her nephew Leo registers his fear. The three of them construct an alternative world to the one that is about to be destroyed, a world that cannot provide any actual shelter, a world whose walls can be easily shattered but also mediate the characters' relationship to an unimaginable destruction. If Plato imagined his cave as a shelter that deceives its prisoners into mistaking the shadows on the wall for reality, an error that can only be corrected once they are released into the light of day, once they truly enter the world, then perhaps the end of the world-whether we are talking about its literal, physical destruction or the loss of the world on the occasion of the other's death-cannot be approached direcdy; it can only be approached through a certain magical thinking that allows one to believe in the shadows after all.
Irreducible Survival
If Melancholia goes where few (if any) disaster films dare to gothat is, to the absolute end of all life, ostensibly leaving behind no survivors or traces that could subíate this radical finitude-then this depiction of absolute absence nevertheless depends on the possibility of survival that it would negate. Indeed, the film itself survives as a trace given to us as spectators who persist beyond the film's nihilistic conclusion. It might seem unwarranted to collapse the film's internal narrative world with the external world of its artifactual existence. Yet the film stresses not only the threat to life that interplanetary collision poses but also the possible destruction of all aesthetic creations, including its own digital traces. The opening sequence alludes to a number of famous artistic works, including John Everett Millais's painting Ophelia (1852), which is the inspiration behind the image of Justine floating on a pond in her wedding dress. In addition, a shot of the topiaries on the front lawn of Claire andjohn's opulent estate recalls the resort featured in Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Following this allusion to Resnais, the film depicts Pieter Bruegel's painting The Hunters in the Snow (1565), fully reproduced and aligned with the cinematic frame. This painting reappears later in the film, along with Ophelia and another painting by Bruegel, The Land of Cockaigne (1567), as well as Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath (ca. 1610). Abandoning her wedding guests and barricading herself in the library of her sister's house, Justine impulsively substitutes art books displaying these images in place of those featuring the abstract geometric art of the twentieth-century painter Kazimir Malevich. Absorbing these famous artistic creations into its visual landscape, Melancholia not only acknowledges a shared interest in their dark, melancholic aesthetics but also hints at their collective vulnerability to erasure, as if the film mourns not only the loss of life but also the end of all aesthetic productions that the world's destruction must necessarily engender. This destruction is dramatized in the opening sequence when The Hunters in the Snow begins to burn at its edges and becomes perforated with holes. Insofar as the painting's borders fully coincide with the cinematic frame, the film appears to succumb to the same radical annihilation.
As indicated by its tagline-"A beautiful movie about the end of world"-Melancholia is preoccupied not only with the annihilation of aesthetics but also with the aesthetics of annihilation.20 Despite, or perhaps because of, this coalescence of beauty and destruction, von Trier worriedly confessed in an interview with Nils Thorsen that the final result might be overly polished and too beautiful. Thorsen asked, "Doesn't it help to destroy the whole world?" To this von Trier replied, "I hope so. The approaching planet does provide some fundamental suspense, at least And Thomas Vinterberg [his friend and fellow Danish director] said something very sensible when he had seen it . . . which was: how do you make a film after this?"21 Implying that the film does not merely represent the end of the world, but rather performatively enacts it, von Trier enfolds the film's ostensibly extradiegetic trace into the scene of destruction that it depicts. The film depicts an end of the world, the end of one cinematic world among others, but this end slides between a relative and an absolute end, as if the end of this singular world amounts to nothing less than the absolute destruction of the one and only world. Due to its mechanical reproducibility, however, this performative annihilation bears a capacity to repeat itself before innumerable spectators at all corners of the globe whose total destruction it nevertheless portrays. Each time unique, each spectator "witnesses" the end of the world according to a conservative mode that shores these planetary fragments against their ruin.
Melancholia's obliteration of all life on Earth thus exists only as a fantasy or fiction in the same manner that Derrida characterizes the threat of total nuclear destruction. As Peggy Kamuf puts it,
the end of all life ... is precisely what we cannot think except in a mode and as a vestige of survival beyond the annihilation that will therefore not have been total. Instead, the movement of a dialectic recuperates the loss of everything as not-quite everything; there remains a remainder for the speculative imagination, which can project the end of everything only by surviving to mourn it.22
As with any fantasy of total nuclear war, we can only imagine our planet's absolute destruction "in a mode and as a vestige of survival." Notwithstanding film's quasi-magical power to psychically suture us into its imaginative world, thus temporarily collapsing the distinction between imagining and witnessing, believing and knowing, this "witnessing" amounts to a speculative projection that dialectically reverses the irreversible destruction that the film depicts. Although it belongs to the archive of human artifacts whose devastation it portrays, the film Melancholia cannot avoid presenting itself as a symbolic cushion that softens or deadens the destructive impact of its literal, planetary namesake. Melancholia therefore cannot neutralize the movement of survival in a manner that would fully depart from the conventional disaster film. As Derrida observes, archivation and monumentalization ensure that "the burden of every death can be assumed symbolically by a culture and a social memory." Only the absolute destruction of all life and all symbolic capacity would generate the "absolute referent," which equates to "the absolute effacement of any possible trace; it is thus the only ineffaceable trace,... the trace of what is entirely other."23 The "absolute referent"-that is, a referent wholly independent of language and representation-would require the total destruction of all life and all symbolic possibility. In this sense, the demand for the absolute or "pure" referent is ultimately nihilistic to the extent that any unmediated (nonrepresentational and nonsymbolic) access to the world would necessitate the utter absence of all living witnesses and all artifactual representations of life.
Death is thus another name for this absolute referent: the entirely other that cannot be known or avowed by any living witness. As much as Melancholia may insist on the eradication of all traces of life, it can do so only through a mode of irreducible survival. Survival is irreducible precisely because the "imagination of disaster," to borrow Sontag's phrase, can never transgress the threshold that separates life from death.24 Although Melancholia departs from conventional cinematic fantasy by leaving us bereft of any living protagonists with whom to identify, we nevertheless survive on the condition that we are denied access to the experience of total annihilation without remainder. Survival is irreducible, in other words, because it cannot open onto any apocalypse; it cannot unveil any knowledge or truth beyond the border that separates life from death. As Derrida argues, death names "the most improper possibility and the most ex-propriating, the most inauthenticating one."25 Whereas Heidegger distinguishes between inauthentic and authentic being-toward-death, the latter naming an attitude that affirms Dasein's "ownmost nonrelational possibility," the death that belongs to each one of us and that therefore ought not to be disowned and projected onto others, Derrida underscores that death cannot finally be owned.26 This conceptual turn away from Heideggerian authenticity sheds light on some remarks that Derrida made in an interview published in Le Monde less than two months before his death in October 2004. Knowing that he was suffering from a terminal illness, he confessed that he had
never learned-to-live. In fact not at all! Learning to live should mean learning to die, learning to take into account, so as to accept, absolute mortality. ... I remain uneducable when it comes to any kind of wisdom about knowing-how-to-die, or, if you prefer, knowing-how-to-live. I still have not learned or picked up anything on this subject. The time of the reprieve is rapidly running out.27
This acknowledgment of having failed to learn to live or die might seem to conflict with his affirmation of survival as nonsupplementary: "It is not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary: life is living on. Life is survival."28 As with his concept of the trace and originary mourning, survival is a structural condition of being. Given that he characterizes all living beings as "survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve," we might expect him to adopt a Socratic acceptance of mortality in the face of his terminal diagnosis.29 In this sense, affirming life as originary survival would be akin to learning to die or accepting death. While Derrida claims to "believe in this truth [acceptance of death]," he reveals that he is nevertheless unable to accede to it.30 He thus implies that this failure to "own" his death, to say "yes" to its inevitability, bespeaks a singular or unique failure on his part, or at least a failure that is not shared with everyone, as if there may be other mortal beings capable of achieving a passing grade on this subject for which he remains hopelessly unteachable. Yet he also implies that the question of educability extends beyond the singular self: "Can one learn, through discipline or apprenticeship, through experience or experimentation, to accept or, better, to affirm life?"31 The pronominal shift from "I" to "one" ("I remain uneducable . . . "Can one learn . . . ?") implies that Derrida is skeptical that both living and dying constitute subjects on which any of us can be successfully educated. Indeed, despite their apparendy confessional tone, Derrida's remarks remain irreducible to the biographical. The "I" who claims to remain uneducable on the subject of knowing-how-to-die or knowing-how-to-live is ironically trying to teach us something about the unteachability of these subjects. The lesson to be learned is that there is no lesson to be learned; we cannot be taught how to live and die, at least not according to an instructional model for which one can submit to examination and therefore be said to have passed or failed. A measurably "successful" affirmation of death makes about as much sense as successful mourning, which similarly relies on a logic of calculation by virtue of which melancholia is said to resolve once one measures one's loss as less than total. It is not the end of the world (one has not lost everything), and thus it is the end of melancholia. One could truly "get over" death only by denying it, that is, only by submitting it to the same amnesia that Derrida associates with the Freudian paradigm of successful mourning. This amnesia is precisely what the conventional disaster film induces by soliciting our identification with its surviving characters. If the disaster film comforts us by literally projecting mortality elsewhere, then the Derridean notion of survival thinks death within life according to a mode that resists their sublation and thereby destabilizes the opposition between affirming and negating finitude.
That Derrida's uneducability extends far beyond a merely anomalous, personal failing becomes clearer if we ask ourselves how seriously we could take him if he were to answer in the affirmative, if he were to assert without equivocation 'Yes, I have indeed learned to die." How could we not smile at the audacity of such a claim? Who among us could righdy ascribe to themselves such an unmitigated capacity for affirming finitude? Is not the full and final acceptance of finitude indistinguishable from its full and final disavowal? Although Lee Edelman does not say so direcdy, he implies in a reading of Derrida's final interview that such an affirmation is possible, that one can in fact learn to avow finitude. According to Edelman, Derrida ultimately "chooses" life over death and thereby betrays a "conservative rhetoric of futurism over real openness to an event."32 At first glance, Derrida's comments seem to support such an interpretation. After all, he insists that he
would not want to encourage an interpretation that situates surviving on the side of death and the past rather than life and the future. No, deconstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of life. Everything I say... about survival as a complication of the opposition life/death proceeds in me from an unconditional affirmation of life. This surviving is life beyond life, life more than life, and my discourse is not a discourse of death, but, on the contrary, the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and thus surviving to death.33
Edelman opposes this "instinct for self-preservation" to "real openness to the unknown of the 'à-venir.'"34 Such "real openness" rhetorically implicates the Derridean à venir in an apparendy false openness. Indeed, "real openness" suggests something like an absolute or unconditional affirmation of the future as "radically unknown" that runs counter to the formulation of life as survival, which negates the future by seeking to know it in advance. For Edelman, saying "yes" to survival, and therefore to the future, amounts to "anticipating a future whose very anticipation effectively prevents it."35 Affirmation of life as anticipation of a future to come thus implies an "economy of reserve ... by means of which the future promises 'the good."'36
Edelman's critique of Derrida is part of a larger interrogation of "reproductive futurism," which circles around the figure of the child as the promise and guarantee of "social and cultural survival."37 For Edelman, those who come to occupy the position of the queer threaten this ideology of survival through their ostensibly antisocial nonreproductivity. Although Derrida never suggests that queers are a threat to the future, Edelman nevertheless implicates him in reproductive futurism on the basis that any thought of the future presupposes the ideological fantasy of the child as the guarantor of this future. Responding to Derrida's characterization of the yes as the "condition of all promises or of all hope, of all awaiting, of all performativity, of all opening to the future, whatever it may be," Edelman reduces such hope to a utopie messianism.38 As he writes in No Future, "we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child."39 Rather than advance an alternative conception of the future that would not rely on the child as its dominant figure, Edelman maintains that all thought of the future is inescapably bound to the child and its various allegorical guises: the archive, the specter, the yes, the promise, and so on. Even when they do not explicidy invoke the child, all of these concepts belie the openness to which they purport to subscribe by retaining a messianic investment in the future.
Edelman bases his critique of Derrida on a reading of "Archive Fever," in which Derrida observes that the archival gesture not only points to the past but also "turns incontestably toward the future to come. It orders to promise, but it orders repetition, and first of all self-repetition, self-confirmation in a yes, yes."40 Edelman hears in this double yes a conservative gesture that "obliges the future to conform to the past. . . . The archive, after all, like the specter .. . evinces that reserve whose survival produces the future as its own."41 Although Derrida alludes very briefly to the notion of the double yes in "Archive Fever," he discusses it extensively in a number of other texts, including "Two Words for Joyce," "Ulysses Gramophone," and "A Number of Yes."42 Far from constraining the future to conform to our hopes, the yes constitutes a performative promise or pledge that exposes itself to the structure of iterability. The yes is the condition of possibility for a future that can be either better or worse. No yes is immune to becoming no. Its iterability is what "threatens it as well."43 The yes thus wagers on a future that it can never guarantee. To promise this yes to a future beyond its enunciation is therefore not to secure this future in advance. Channeling Doris Day, Edelman sings que sera, sera to Derrida's ostensibly false openness to the future. Yet a purely nonanticipatory, unconditional relation to the future amounts to an impossible nonrelation. The future may not be ours to see, but we cannot not project ourselves into it, no matter how wrong our prognoses often turn out to be. Our relation to the future cannot but be anticipatory. Distinct from Edelman's notion of futurism, moreover, the Derridean à venir does not hold out the promise of a future present that is infinitely deferred. In a brief allusion to the musical Annie, Edelman mockingly rebukes the optimistic refrain of "tomorrow, tomorrow . . . you're always a day away." Yet the future is also always both more and less than a day away. The interval separating the present from the future is at once infinitely large and infinitely small. That the à venir does not wait, that it signifies urgency and imminence as much as deferral, means that it cannot be equated with the infinitely delayed future that Edelman identifies as the sine qua non of reproductive futurism.
Whereas Edelman reduces the yes, yes to a mechanical repetition that "promises the good," Derrida insists that the
"second" yes must come as an absolute renewal, once again absolutely inaugural and "free," failing which it would only be a natural, psychological, or logical consequence. It must act as ifrht first had been forgotten, past enough to require a new initial yes. This forgetting is not psychological or accidental, it is structural, the very condition of fidelity.44
Although Derrida distinguishes between first and second yeses, his scare quotes indicate the inadequacy that attends any effort to calculate their ordinal enumeration. If the second yes turns out to be the second first yes, then these yeses no longer conform to any orderly inventory. In addition, we gravely miscalculate if we presume a capacity to tally up the number of yeses in order to arrive at the finite number of two: "A yes cannot be counted. Promise, mission, emission, it always sends itself off in number."45 Indeed, the two yeses are themselves doubled-and therefore total at least four-insofar as they slide between prescriptive affirmation (one "ought to" or "should" say yes) and what Derrida variably characterizes as a "^Masrtranscendental," "silent performative," or "archioriginary yes." I might say "yes" to alterity out of a sense of ethical duty or fidelity, but this "second" yes is preceded by a silent yes that is the condition of possibility for any affirmative or negative utterance. Even if I say "no" to the other-in case the other threatens to harm me, for example-I must still have first "said" yes:
As a r/M«.vkranscendental and silent performative, it is removed from any science of utterance, just as it is from any speech act theory. It is not, strictly speaking, an act; it is not assignable to any subject or to any object. If it opens the eventness of every event, it is not itself an event. It is never present as such. What translates this nonpresence into a present yes in the act of an utterance or in any act at the same time dissimulates the archioriginary yes by revealing it.46
Whereas Edelman misreads the yes as a transcendental condition of possibility-an affirmation that stabilizes itself across innumerable repetitions-Derrida underscores the quasi-transcendental character of the yes, its status as both the condition of possibility and impossibility of a pure, unequivocal affirmation of alterity, life, and the future.47 "Prior" to any affirmation or negation, whether spoken or written, the silent, unpresentable yes always already "says" yes to alterity. This "first" yes thus names an originary exposure to what Derrida elsewhere names the arrivant, which signifies whoever or whatever arrives (ce qui arrive), whether we judge this alterity to be welcome or monstrous, good or bad.48
To claim that "deconstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of life," is thus not to choose life, as if Derrida is simply reiterating an old platitude, either in its biblical form or in its 1980s' incarnation on T-shirts worn by the British pop duo Wham! Far from making "the choice of life over death," Derrida crucially employs a vocabulary of preference.49 Survival names "the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and thus surviving to death." And who does not prefer living to death? Anyone who is still alive has already affirmed life, has already "said" yes. This yes is both archi-originary (a consent or acquiescence to the life into which we are thrown in the Heideggerian sense) and one that we reaffirm as long as we take measures to ensure our survival. We might indeed find ourselves in situations where we imagine death to be preferable to life, and we might even choose to hasten the advent of our death on the basis of this perception. Yet insofar as we are all "survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve," we can say "no" to life only on the condition of having first said "yes." As Derrida suggests in H C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . , one cannot ultimately make a choice between life and death; any "choice" for death remains a choice for life. Derrida recounts an ongoing, interminable "dispute" between himself and his friend Hélène Cixous, in which he sides with death and she sides with life, in which he finds himself reminding her that "we die in the end, too quickly," while she cannot bring herself to believe what she nevertheless knows all too well, "as if [si] she said, 'We're not going to die'; 'Yes we are [mais si],' I would answer. She knows I tell the truth, I know she tells the truth."50 Indeed, we can say "no" to life (or "yes" to death) only on the side for which there is no opposite, no beyond that we might access, the side of no side that we cannot not side with, the side of being-for-death that does not side against but instead runs alongside life. We thus do not choose to be on the side of life so much as we find ourselves inhabiting its space of infinite irreversibility.51
Edelman's preoccupation with the innocent child as the emblem of futurity thus seems to be haunted by a correlative figure: the incorrigible child who cannot be taught how to live or die and therefore fails to advance or mature. As Derrida observes, "apprendre à vivre" means both to mature and to educate. "Je vais t'apprendre à vivre" means "'I am going to teach you how to live'" or "'I'm going to teach you a lesson.'"52 The claim that all thought of the future, that all affirmative declarations, promises, and hope, amount to reproductive futurism ironically proselytizes a certain nonbelief in the future by reprimanding those errant children who, like litde Hank in The Man Who Knew Too Much, need to be taught to let go of the future, to let the future be what it will be. Consigning all thinkers of the future to the "futurch," Edelman fashions himself as the lone aposde of the New Anti-Futurch whose creed insists on an impossible nonrelation to the future that is literally utopie: a nonplace that no one can occupy, not even its fiercest leader.53
Although the conventional disaster film is predicated on a disavowal of finitude, Melancholia does not simply negate the negation; it does not simply say "no" to the future. It does not call upon its central characters to convert their reflexive human tendency to deny death into an equally stable and unequivocal affirmation, an acceptance of mortality to which we as spectators would likewise be urged to assent. Justine may summon us to accept radical finitude by asserting that "life is only on Earth," a conclusion that the film underscores when the screen fades to black in the wake of Melancholia's impact. Yet this black hole into which we as spectators descend cannot open onto the referent of absolute destruction.
Consider the film's final line of dialogue, "close your eyes," an imperative that Justine issues to Leo but also directs the spectator to deny by proxy the imminent threat of total destruction. Although she displays utter serenity and composure in the face of Melancholia's approach, Justine physically turns her back to its final arrival. And while she ostensibly builds the magic cave to comfort her nephew, perhaps she too requires a symbolic bulwark against destruction. Whereas Leo dutifully obeys his aunt's command and Justine sits with her back to the looming rogue planet, only Claire turns her face toward the source of their impending demise. Death finds Claire watching, "trying to see beyond seeing," peering over a horizon that cannot ultimately be crossed.54 Claire, however, does not maintain a steady, unflinching gaze toward Melancholia; instead, she repeatedly shifts between regarding the planet, Justine, and Leo before finally covering her ears and staring direcdy toward the earth, a split second before Earth and all of its living inhabitants are consumed by a cataclysmic explosion. Each character thus embodies a different mode of comportment toward the absolute end. One can close one's eyes, turn one's back, or gaze direcdy at this end, yet none of these modes are presented to us as necessarily more authentic, dignified, or graceful than the others.
Melancholia may not teach us how to live or die authentically, but it cannot really be faulted for failing to achieve the impossible. Edelman is surely correct that our culture is deeply invested in a reproductive futurism that relies on the idealized figure of the child. Concluding with the construction of the magic cave, Melancholia seems poised to reproduce this ideology by giving Leo the task of voicing his fear when confronted with imminent death. What could be more predictably poignant than measuring the force of absolute destruction against the face of an innocent child? Yet the film does not fully reproduce this cultural fantasy insofar as Leo does not survive to engender a future. We are all that remains, we as spectators, "survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve." The world is gone, yet as long we survive, which is to say as long we say "yes" to life, we must carry this world into a future that survives the total destruction to which we can never bear witness.
Footnote
Notes
1 James Kendrick, "Review of Melancholia," Qnetwork, www.qnetwork. com/index.php?page=review&id=2681; Allison Vitkauskas, "An Apocalyptic Portrait," Cornell Daily Sun, November 18, 2001, http://cornellsun.com/Ps =%22an+apocalyptic+portrait%22; and Richard LeBeau, "Hauntingly Accurate Portrayals of Severe Mental Illness at a Theater Near You," Psychology in Action, December 12, 2011, www.psychologyinaction.org/2011/12/12/ hauntingly-accurate-portrayals-of-severe-mental-illness-at-a-theater-near-you/.
2 Vitkauskas, "An Apocalyptic Portrait."
3' David Burns, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (New York: Avon Books, 1999).
4' Nils Thorsen, "Interview: Longing for the End of All," Melancholia: Lars von Trier, www.melancholiathemovie.com/#_interview.
5- Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of Disaster," Commentary, October 1965,44, 48.
6' Derek Attridge, /. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 36.
7 J. Hillis Miller, "The Two Allegories," in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, edited by Morton Bloomfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 356.
8- Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1975), 245.
9- Jacques Derrida, "Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue-Between Two Infinities, the Poem," translated by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski, in Sovereignties in Question: the Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 140.
10. "*Ibid., 160.
11. "* Ibid., 140.
12. Ibid., 160.
13 Jacques Derrida, "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve," in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 251-77. According to Bataille, Hegelian dialectics constitutes a "restricted economy" that aims to subíate and thereby recover (from) all of its losses, including death. A "general economy," on the other hand, attests to a surplus that can never be fully exhausted or contained by the Hegelian synthesis. See Georges Bataille, La part maudite (Paris: Les Editions de minuit, 1967).
14'1 borrow this phrase from J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. In the final scene of the novel, the narrator describes the room where David's dog is euthanized as "a hole where one leaks out of existence." SeeJ. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999), 219.
15 John Donne, "Seventeenth Meditation," in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, edited by Anthony Raspa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 87.
16- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 253.
17- Ibid., 240, 251.
18- Ibid., 159.
19 Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)," translated by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 26.
20, "Directors Statement," Melancholia: Lars von Trier, www.melancholiathemovie.eom/#_directorsstatement.
21, Thorsen, "Interview: Longing for the End of All."
22* Peggy Kamuf, "Competent Fictions: On Belief in the Humanities" (working paper, 2010), 9.
23 Derrida, "No Apocalypse," 28.
24- Sontag, "The Imagination of Disaster."
25 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 77.
"* Ibid., 240.
27 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, translated by PascalAnne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Melville House, 2011), 25.
28- Ibid., 26.
29 Ibid., 24. For a comparison of Derrida's interview with Plato's Phaedo, see Judith Butler, "On Never Having Learned How to Live," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (2005): 27-34.
30* Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 24.
31 * Ibid.
32Lee Edelman, "Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That's Out of Joint," Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2011): 162.
33- Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 51.
Edelman, "Against Survival," 157.
35. Ibid., 154.
36. Ibid., 163.
37 Ibid., 148.
38, Ibid., 161.
39, Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) ,11.
'"*Jacques Derrida, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression," translated by Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 51.
41 * Edelman, "Against Survival," 160.
42- See Jacques Derrida, "Two Words for Joyce," translated by Geoffrey Bennington, in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays From the French, edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer, 145-58 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Jacques Derrida, "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes injoyce," translated by Tina Kendall and Shari Benstock, in JamesJoyce: The Augmented Ninth, edited by Bernard Benstock, 27-75 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988) ; and Jacques Derrida, "A Number of Yes," translated by Brian Holmes, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 2, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 231-40 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
43- Derrida, "A Number of Yes," 240.
44- Derrida, "A Number of Yes," 240.
«Ibid.
«* Ibid., 239.
47 For more on the difference between transcendental and quasi-transcendental conditions, see Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2000), 40-41, 89-92.
48 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 33-34.
49, Edelman, "Against Survival," 162.
50 Jacques Derrida, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . , translated, with additional notes, by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, NY: Stanford University Press, 2006), 2,158.
51 * It might be argued that those who are unable to consent to their survival cannot exhibit a preference (or not) for living: for example, a comatose individual whose continued survival depends on the actions of others, who may or may not represent the wishes of the patient. Yet even if, prior to one's incapacitation, one expresses a wish not to persist in a vegetative state, this desire nevertheless springs from the irreversible side of life.
52- Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 23.
53, Lee Edelman, "Antagonism, Negativity, and the Subject of Queer Theory," PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 821.
54 Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 200.
AuthorAffiliation
Christopher Peterson is senior lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality (Fordham University Press, 2013).
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