英文摘要 |
This paper attempts to read the 2011 film Seediq Bale in a number of ways in order to unpack certain aspects of its expressive makeup and show that their significance extends beyond the depicted historical situation. Although director Wei Te-sheng usually responds to the charge of excessive violence in the film by asserting the different life world of the Seediq tribes, the underlying outlook cannot be said to point to any insularity of the indigenous cultural system. In the main killing scene, the film represents ancestral spirits as observing the scene and expressing doubts about the consequences of the act. In their song, we can observe how the gaya of the Seediq is not fixed law but is closer to law with plasticity or lawlike consistency. This ability to deal with catastrophic situations in its own way is rooted in the nature and effectivity of the gaya itself. Colonial power wrecks the life of the Seediq people by molecularizing its causality (breaking up the temporality of the gaya), and the Seediq responds by radicalizing the molecularity of their own system to release its power, treating the formal strata of the system itself as cut off from substance, producing formal values (dignity, freedom) that are “inoperative” and leads straight to catastrophe. This radical molecularity also points to the fact that imperial Japan has betrayed its own tradition of inoperativity. To explain the contemporaneity of the issues raised by the film, we will refer mainly but not exclusively to Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy to discuss the distinction between potentiality and operativity, the imbrication between inoperativity, thought, and formal values, and how the isolation of formal values facilitates the emergence of oikonomia as a means to organize acts when the loss of a mediating system of cultural knowledge signals impending catastrophe. |