Film and Audiovisual Media colloquium – Brian Price (University of Toronto): Contradiction or Difference? Assayas and Political Seriousness

The search for contradiction has long been at the center of political critique, as if exposing a failure in the logic of the enemy will bring an end to antagonism, if also not an end to the enemy. What contradiction thinking supposes, in other words, is that if we can prove to the other, to our enemy, that that they mean the opposite of what they say, they will simply agree, and do so on the basis of having recognized within the themselves an accidental, or at least insufficiently reflective, break with a more authentic, consistent self. This self is only ever conceptual and predicated, in that way, on a sense consistency in values that refuses difference within oneself for the sake of a larger difference between friend and enemy. My contention here is that our preoccupation with contradiction is at the core of the moralization of politics, such that we can only understand the political in light of a friend/enemy dynamic.

Looking at the films of Olivier Assayas—his recent miniseries, Irma Vep (2022), in particular—I will propose an understanding of what it means to be political seriousness and will do so as a corrective to contradiction thinking, which has made it impossible to make significant political change without coercive force; has made it impossible to engage with others who do not obviously and consistently share our values. In order to be politically serious, I will propose, we need to regard difference as essential to unity, which Assayas’s films so consistently demonstrate, and not as what needs to be sorted categorically. It also means that we have to find ways to leave behind the friend/enemy dynamic, which depends on a conception of the self, prior to the formation of—or belonging to—any community, that is itself predicated on a kind of consistency that human experience cannot, in truth, easily bear out.

More information: Miklós Kiss