What is to live?

By Gabriel Tupinambá

As we take note of the glaring infinity of details and particularities of what there is, we are invited to re-affirm the maxim that to savour existence is to live.

Life, we gather, is the opposite of death. And the more present death is - the more we are haunted by its spectre - the more we learn to appreciate “the little things in life”. Life, then, would be composed of little things.

It is under this maxim that 127 Hours (2010) is inscribed. Crowning the decadent career of the promising director Danny Boyle, who went from Trainspotting (1996) to Slumdog Millionaire (2008) in not much more than a decade, the film also serves the purpose of confirming that those who can only extend their critical discourses to the bemoaning of alienation end up being the ones who reformulate this same alienation and present it as a new-found freedom.

From the myriad of pop culture examples of this same trend of ‘critique of alienation’, think, for instance, of the band Radiohead: whatever little critical capacity was truly at work in the guise of a critique of suburban first-world life in their first albums it nevertheless later came to bloom into a reactionary plea for ecological awareness and “listen to your heart” choruses. The answer to the western man’s anguish would lie somewhere amongst the things in the world, brought about by a new way of looking at them.

So why is it that the “I choose not to choose” in Trainspotting leads to the apology of overcoming our obstacles in 127 Hours? How is it that from the senseless alienation of suburban England we arrived at the new-age eroto-teleology of “This rock was waiting for me, everything in my life led to this moment”?

Let us begin by acknowledging our Virgil.

The question ‘What is it to live?’ has been recently re-taken by our master Badiou in his monumental work Logics of Worlds. It is in his trail that we tread here as we adventure into the desert we are now used to call “peace”. This desert goes by the name of “democratic materialism”, and can be mapped in the following, simple badiouian axiom:

“there are only bodies and languages.” (BADIOU 2008: p.1)

Where ‘bodies’ must be defined as “that which exists in the world” and ‘languages’ as the name of the relations between bodies.

And it is curious that it is also with such an arid landscape as background that the protagonist of 127 Hours stages what is probably one of the the greatest apologies of this axiomatic principle to have ever been made into a film.

The film tells the story of Aron, a mountain climber who gets trapped under a boulder while exploring a Canyon, his weekend sport of choice. Utterly alone and without any food or water supply, with his arm being crushed by an enormous rock, Aron does his best to survive and to remove the huge stone - until the moment he realizes that he is only going to get out of there if he cuts his arm off.

The whole film takes place under the sign of looming death. Aron is alone, starving, thirsty, and in pain. He intercalates his attempts at releasing his arm from the rock with filming himself with a small video-camera, talking about his life and narrating what he is going through. In a way, we as spectators of his little videos are the equivalent to the famous “Wilson”, the volley ball in Cast Away (2000).

There - literally “an arm” away from death - the film finds the perfect reason to invite us without any remorse to wallow in the metamorphosis of needs into desires. At the brink of death, the desire to live is easily reducible to the necessity of surviving.

Aron’s thirst is met with an hallucination about the Gatorade® bottle that he left in his car, miles away from where he currently is trapped. Then, at the moment it becomes almost unbearable, another dream washes over his pain, that of a Coke® add. The ice-cold water drops running on the sides of the glass bottle, the bright colors and some kids jumping into a pool, just like in one of the many adds of soda that come out in the summer. Could anyone say that investing so much in a commodity is a ‘misplacement’ when it is done for the sake of staying alive?

At his most wretched, Aron slides his hand over the smooth stone walls of the cave where he is imprisoned, reaches the furthest he can with his foot to place his body under the warm light of the sun. None of this he does because he needs to survive - here we see his wretchedness lead him to discover a forgotten pleasure in the things he took for granted. And the same is done regarding human contact. The film begins by showing us many different images of crowds - which we will later find out to be images of Aron as well, but he was lost in the midst of all those people - so that, only afterwards, after having survived, does he learn to appreciate being around people, the pleasure of being together.

Let us return for a moment to the axiom we presented above. If “what there is” are ‘bodies and languages’ - elements and relations to and between elements - what regulates such relations? What could serve as a governing principle and thus assign value to certain relations between elements more than to others? If there are only languages and bodies, a law is a language - it cannot be above the tacit agreement of elements and relations - what could have the function of a Law, rather than of a particular law?

Badiou is very clear regarding the limits of the “democratic materialism”:

“democratic materialism does stipulate a global halting point for its multiform tolerance. A language that does not recognize the universal juridical and normative equality of languages does not deserve to benefit from this equality. A language that aims to regulate all other languages and to govern all bodies will be called dictatorial and totalitarian.

What it then requires is not tolerance, but a ‘right of intervention’: legal, international, and, if needs be, military. Bodies will have to pay for their excesses of language.” (BADIOU 2008: p.2-3)

Or, as he puts it elsewhere:

“no principles should be advanced other than that proclaiming there are no principles” (BADIOU 2009: p.18)

The only overarching principle is that there is nothing which could take such a place - not without being the fascist election of a body (a “charismatic dictator”) or a language (a blinding “doctrine”) which would have been raised to a position that doesn’t belong to it. But, as one might notice, the statement itself - “there are only bodies and languages” - is none of the two. The proclamation that “there are no principles” does in effect take the place of a Law - that is, that “there can be no direct relation of submission to the Law” is still a valid Law according to the democratic materialism’s terms.

How then to present this Law without falling into contradiction with what the Law itself states?

Danny Boyle’s film answers this question with an effusive - maniac even - retort: Death!

Indeed, if Life is contained in existence - and existence is defined by our first badiouian axiom - the only name which can safely take the place of a Law without contradicting the axiom, without being neither a displaced body or language, is Death itself. It is against the background of everything ceasing to be that value can then be ascribed to certain configurations of elements and relations - to an individual’s otherwise meaningless personal taste in music, food, clothing brands, choice of lovers etc.

It is against the background of death that we can confuse existence - the things we exist by - with what can give meaning to life - that which we live for. If there are only languages and bodies, then to live is to savour existence. Life could be defined as the combinatory erotics of things. Not only that, but if “what there is” is the horizon of life, then we must agree that we live for things, we live so that things will exist and have value - our individual existence included - since it is only Death which regulates the meaningfulness of a certain configuration of bodies and languages, and it cannot take the place of such an overarching principle if it doesn’t present itself as the symmetrical opposite of Life.

Life would thus not only be the savoring of existence - but, maybe even more, the short-circuit of the most arrogant (“On my individual life hinges the meaning of everything”) and most subservient (“I am submitted to the dumb permutation of bodies and languages”) savoring of things. We begin to grasp why perspicuous theoreticians such as Jean-Claude Milner or Bruno Latour would venture into expressions such as “the politics of things”. In democratic materialism, it is life which helps the propagation of things, by measuring itself against the only thing which escapes the domain of existence, that is, its own annihilation.

Aron’s story works precisely at this intricate oscillation between praising existence’s manifoldness and fearing the dissolution of the body into nothingness. His desire for life is fueled by his desperate attempt to remain within existence: as death bestows every particular thing, and every particular thing’s infinite particularities, with the urgency and taste of life, to live becomes indistinguishable from merely being.

This is all very good. One could argue that we do take for granted all the things that happen around us, and that we do not engage with others with enough care or appreciation as we should. The problem does not lie in passing over such motherly advice, which could be offered as a regulative idea by any parent who didn’t give in to the yuppie principle of feeding off of his child’s perversions. The problem lies in having to stage such a radical proximity to death - equipped with an obscene fascination with realistically presenting how one cuts an arm off using only a toy knife - to bring across such a moronic moral view of the status quo. The only instance which is ideologically recognized and allowed to occupy publicly such a stance of mastery is Death itself - when the same point of the film could have been made by the Teletubbies.

To better approach this question, let us briefly consider the film in terms of entropy:

As our amusing little graph clearly shows, the classic aristotelian model of the three acts of the drama is reduced in this film to a very weird three-stage process, in which the narrative’s structure could be summed up as [- 50m + 50m] - a plunge whose only reason to happen is to be later “overcome”, finally returning us exactly to where we began. But - precisely because nothing changed - now the dirty water tastes like wine. Quite a miracle, indeed.

But what about the arm? Have we not lost an arm in the process? Yes, and this is the crux of the matter. As Zizek says it “a materialist doesn’t deny miracles, he just reminds us that they leave behind disturbing left-overs”.

As the most basic definition of entropy will show, entropy is the measure of the energy that is spent without being available to any useful work. Well, we see Aron doing extreme sports and being a gregarious person before [- 50m], and at the end of the film, after [+50m], we see him again doing some extreme snowboarding and being surrounded by his friends and family. Did the loss of his arm amount to any useful work? Or better - what must the arm be so that losing it can be considered any sort of useful work, so that it adds to the total work of the film?

The answer to that question is given by Aron himself, in his last recording before cutting his arm off. As we quoted above, he tells the camera that he finally “understands” it all: this huge rock had been waiting for him for millions of years, and he made all the choices in his life so that they could lead him to that situation, so that he could make this difficult choice of cutting away a part of his own body, and thus emerging as a new, stronger man.

To make sense of the story Aron is telling himself when trying to account for what he must to in order to survive, it is not hard to see that the crushed arm’s proper name can only be contingency. Let’s not forget that at the very beginning of the film - as a preparation to what would come next - Aron is seen at home, looking for his swiss army knife. He looks for it in the right place, but doesn’t find it just because he didn’t check the back of the shelf. Then, at the crucial moment in which he decides to start cutting his arm off, he realizes that he doesn’t have a proper knife to do it, only a cheap made-in-china one. But how does he answer to this cunning of Reason? He tells us that it was meant to be. (We are left to wonder if, after the whole incident, he ever woke up in anguish from a nightmare in which a swiss chocolate was maliciously running after him)

At the very moment of telling us that it could not have been otherwise he is already cutting away a certain dimension of his accident - the properly accidental dimension - and once all the contingent elements to which he is subjected are turned into elements of his personal story, elements placed in the world so that he could (necessarily) assert himself as a man, all that is left to do is to get rid of that element which insists to attest to the contrary, which resist such an imaginary platitude: his arm.

It is only when considered from this standpoint that we understand what the hell did this man actually “overcome”: he overcame the restless contingency of his life. Nothing changed, yes - but not only that: he overcame the very space of change. From now on, the things he owns, the relationships he enjoys, none of this could have been otherwise. None of this is the product of a fragile and alterable social reality - thousands of years of histories of struggles, a complex social configuration which requires that under-payed, under-fed children in the third-world work to produce all those items...all those materials traveled through thousands of years just so “he could now have them” in the comfort of his home. Everything converged towards him. Aron is not responsible for the meaning of his World, the World has meaning and this “explains” his responsibility. And if Aron were to doubt this again, the absence of an arm is enough of a reminder of his silent pact with the desert.

The matter of fact is that we must interrogate such an arm. If anything, it is the only subject in the film: just as Kafka’s Odradek or Gogol’s Nose, it the very absurdity of this partial object which could embody the little of any actual life that was at stake in the film.

Imagine, if you will, a movie in which Aron was left behind and the arm - the Arm - overcoming all the petty concerns of his previous life as just another human arm, being of no more use than to hold on to different irrelevant and narcissistic objects, realizes that Aron himself is the most stupid of them all, and cuts himself from him. There would be no question there of the use of such an “overcoming”. The reason why, if one manages to shed away the ironic relation to non-sense, such an alternative story truly does hold some sort of heroism is because it points to something else, something other the servitude to death, the absolute master.

The crucial difference is that, for Aron, cutting off his arm is done in the name of Life, while, for the Arm, cutting off Aron would have been done in the name of releasing it from his “grip”, in the name of Freedom (“In the name of my brothers in Arms, I will no longer serve such a petty little human!”) and Justice (“I will stand against the division of labour between head and hand!”).

What this means is that, as we have seen above apropos of democratic materialism, to directly choose Life is to choose Death, for Death is the only possible Other to Life, the other-wordly threat which can directly give Life some value. To “choose Life” ultimately means to choose to exist, and to exist is an activity which does not distinguish between the living and the inert. This is why Nietzsche said that life has no value. One cannot choose to value Life directly: if you call out to it you are always implicitly calling out for that which gives value to it, in the same way that to recognize the price of something is also to recognize the market that assigns it that value.

But if Life is not its own homonym, it nevertheless goes by many names: Freedom, Justice, Struggle, Thought... And in the surreal tale of the Arm’s proletarian revolt, that place which democratic materialism deems impossible to fill - the place of the Ideal which regulates over bodies and languages - would actually have been filled by something other than Death.

Aron’s Arm, that piece of meat marked by contingency, attached now not to a body, but to a rock (it was Freud who back in 1932 referred to the “rock of castration” in regards to the constitutive place of contingency in sexual difference and the formation of the subject) constitutes thus an exception to the democratic materialist axiom. It states: there is not only the 'necessary' (to live) and the 'possible' (to live through the permutative appraisal of existence), there is also the contingent (to live otherwise) and the impossible (to guide life by an Idea).

There is the proposition “it is not the only way, it could be otherwise” and there is the proposition “there is that which could occupy the impossible place”. The world could be otherwise and something other than annihilation could serve as the horizon of a world: by including these two propositions into Badiou’s first axiom we arrive at a new wager, the properly materialist dialectic axiom:

“there are only bodies and languages, except there are truths” (BADIOU 2008: p.4)

A truth is thus not a body nor a language. It is not nurtured by the moronic interplay of existence. Though a truth can exist and appear like a body or a language - or more than them, since it is not only present but eternal - it is conditioned to the faithful inscription of its traces into the world. While the democratic materialist principle holds that one lives by submitting to existence, under the guise of what is called “personal freedom” (the right to submit yourself to existence in whatever way better “expresses” your “free” submission), the materialist dialectic principle holds that one lives by submitting existence not to oneself (as we have just seen, that is the guise under which you submit yourself to existence, after all, we, our bodies and particularities, merely exist as well) but to an Idea.

An individual is not an Idea. A means to express one’s individuality - a person’s “language” - is also not an Idea. Of an Idea we get but the “fitful tracing of a portal”, to quote Stevens, which must then be inscribed into the World. The graceful contingency of an encounter, of a conversation, of a desire to organize, must be forced into the Present. Just like Aron’s Arm - the unsung hero - when the immortal dimension of a truth transfixiates us, it is Aron’s addiction to this abstract Death which we must cut off from us. Love, Politics, Science and Art require us to recognize the truly parasitic nature of our egos. And even though, just like Aron’s Arm, we cannot cut ourselves completely free from it without also losing Life, we can begin by recognizing that it is the ego that parasitizes us, not the other way around.

And to consent to what we have been writing, let us now assert our own fidelity to a truth, by referring directly to the text which has silently been our beacon thus far: ‘What is to Live?’. In it, Badiou gives us a concise definition of a “philosophical directive” on how to roam the desert without confusing its silence with peace:

“It is not a world, as given in the logic of its appearing (the infinite of its objects and relations), which induces the possibility of living—at least not if life is something other than existence. The induction of such a possibility depends on that which acts in the world as the trace of the fulgurating disposition that has befallen that world. That is, the trace of a vanished event. Within worldly appearing, such a trace is always a maximally intense existence. Through the incorporation of the world’s past to the present opened up by the trace, it is possible to learn that prior to what happened and is no longer, the ontological support of this intense existence was an inexistent of the world. The birth of a multiple to the flash of appearing, to which it previously only belonged in an extinguished form, makes a trace in the world and signals towards life.

For those who ask where the true life is, the first philosophical directive is thus the following: ‘Take care of what is born. Interrogate the flashes, probe into their past without glory. You can only put your hope in what inappears.’”

Badiou distinguishes the eternal Present of democratic materialism (the position from which we often tell ourselves, normally listening to Radiohead, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”) from the Present of Eternity as such, the Life which is not subjected to the irrevocable horizon of the body, but to the eternal horizon of the Idea. The first waits for Death, and - as it waits - it is sometimes indistinguishable from this very death. The second - to quote an Immortal - “bears death calmly, and in death, sustains itself (...) it looks the negative in the face and tarries with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being”. Badiou continues:

“Yet it remains important to give a name to this experience [éxperimentation]. It belongs neither to the order of lived experience, nor to that of expression. It is not the finally attained accord between the capacities of a body and the resources of a language. It is the incorporation into the exception of a truth. If we agree to call ‘Idea’ what both manifests itself in the world—what sets forth the being-there of a body—and is an exception to its transcendental logic, we will say, in line with Platonism, that to experience in the present the eternity that authorizes the creation of this present is to experience an Idea. We must therefore accept that for the materialist dialectic, ‘to live’ and ‘to live for an Idea’ are one and the same thing.”

Strategic Addendum:

On Miracles and Misery: reading 127 Hours with The Rite

When we presented our entropy scheme - worried with better understanding what was actually at stake in the otherwise “zero work” structure of the film - we mentioned that the loss of an arm and the terrible threat of death had turned “dirty water into wine”.

This new-found appreciation of existence is presented in 127 Hours as the solution to the loneliness and anguish of a young, handsome, first-world chap who didn’t value the little things in life and was not aware of how important they were to him. But even if Aron’s situation might actually have been truly “radical” (pun intended), his dignity was never at stake. Had he died, at his funeral people would tells us that this was a man who had goals, who loved out-door sports and so on.

On the other hand, this very same mechanism is at play, for example, in the passage from Misery to Poverty, or - as we call it in Brazil - the growth of “the middle-class”. To put it bluntly: against the spectre of Death, a crumb is the bread itself. If one is not faithful to any principle other than “the majestic historical horizon of what doesn’t change” (Brazilians, for instance, are very satisfied with naming this horizon in many different ways), if there is no Idea to guide the organization of the people, or the life of a man, there is nothing to distinguish survival from a life worth living.

One should be quite satisfied with some bread crumbs - and if one is not... there is nothing like a life trapped under the rock of the static management of neo-liberal policies, loomed by the threat of dying of starvation, to learn how to appreciate the subtle flavors of the state’s social crumbles! (See Brecht’s “From Nothing comes Nothing” for a re-staging of 127 Hours which considers this obverse side of the apology to existence.)

It is apropos of Misery that the true dimension of the Miracle of the metamorphosis of the “crumbles into bread” - a miracle granted to us by Death - can be properly understood. What is the function of Misery if not to confirm - at the cost of the expropriation of the life of millions - that at the most bare register, survival coincides with, or even outweighs, life?

Misery as the minimal conformance of bodies and languages - Death as the only overarching principle governing everything from bare to cultural life. How is it then that the combinatory power of elements and relations gives us the feeling of being so spiritual, so full of life, but a brief examination of these configurations - or even an irresponsible pop song, incapable of replacing the anguish it sets off with any worthy celebration of an Idea - open up to such a aimless and pointless wandering around, such a perverse banquet of the lives of those who have nothing, silently offered in sacrifice to the dark horizon of our passions?

There is a scene in The Rite (2011), the latest exorcism movie, which perfectly exemplifies how nihilism can pass for true faith.

The young priest Micheal was in a crisis of faith and went to Rome to learn how to exorcise demons. He is assigned to accompany Father Lucas, an unorthodox exorcist who, later in the film, becomes himself possessed by a demon. Micheal, shaken by his father’s death and the reluctant disposition to accept that what he witnessed was not simply a psychological disturbance, has now to battle against the devil himself.

The possessed Father Lucas then goes on into standard demonic procedure: he crushes the priest’s spirit and reveals terrible details of Micheal’s life, showing how weak he is. But here the amazing twist comes in - a true touch of genius (of the Devil).

After all the bashing, and feeling quite terrible, Micheal leaves the room. Then, as he is hopelessly looking at the distance, his love-interest, a latin-american reporter who was there with him (Hollywood’s new cliché - third-world women who are in contact with some “primitive” sexuality - could also be understood as that of the third-world women who is supposed to know that life is deep down a matter of survival) tells him that he is looking for faith in the wrong place. He shouldn’t be looking for God beyond his (individual) body or his language (of individual expressions). He should learn to believe in himself. And a brief flashback of a memory of his mother, together with the brazilian girl’s hips are enough incentives to re-ignite the flame of his self-worth.

He storms into the room again, and begins “I, who believe...” and now, when demonic Father Lucas pushes him against the wall and says “you don’t believe in anything!”, Michael already has an answer to the Devil: “I believe in you, thus I believe in God”. He has seen the Devil’s doings so he can now believe in God. But as the film goes on to crown this sweet sequitur as a glorious exorcism, the actual events that follow it say something quite different.

As the young priest cries “I’ve seen thus I believe” the Devil actually realizes that his job was done. He lets go of Micheal and allows the priest to finish the exorcism - but not before telling him ... “I will always be with you”.

It is not difficult to recognize under the defeat of the Devil the victory of democratic materialism. Though the Devil pretends to accept the priest’s claim as a demonstration of true faith, he (more than anyone, probably) knows that the Devil is not the opposite of God, just as Death is not the opposite of Life. The priest almost literally admitted that God is only worthy of faith because of the Devil - just like Life, in the democratic materialist regime, only has value because it is defined as the opposite of Death.

And once the Devil's discourse was being spoken by Micheal’s own lips (wasn’t he somehow possessed as well?) the Devil had nothing else to do there. Another soldier ready! What better way to educate satanists then to create a desert and invite us to call it “peace”?

Writing about how the common man thinks in abstractions without ever realizing it, Hegel mentions that to have a person coincide with a predicate - a man who is fully identified by others with his profession or with the crime he committed etc - is one of the most common ways of how abstraction appears in everyday life. Today, in our “post-everything” society, like young priest Micheal, we pride ourselves of having overcome such ideological barriers which separate us from one another. We are free men, ready to respect each other’s differences, ready to admit that there is a multiplicity of bodies, and a multiplicity of languages organizing those bodies. Nevertheless, like young priest Micheal, we should have been more careful before such effusive appraisal of our capacity to savour existence in all its irreconcilable details: no one is taken to be the master, that is true, but that doesn’t make us less of servants - servants who, not even knowing who we serve, fail to escape the grasp of such abstract identifications. And this, Hegel writes, "could drive one to make a pact with the devil.” (Hegel, Who Thinks Abstractly? )