Could a pot-bellied, snub-nosed, bald-headed actor with bulging eyes who waddles play Socrates in a movie? That is what Socrates supposedly looked like. What about Hegel? He has been described as an unimposing professor who halted and stuttered during lectures. How might he come off on the big screen? Or Sartre, with his walleye? Could those philosophers be convincingly portrayed on film, or even portray themselves? Could they impart the gist of their thinking?
Astra Taylor, a Canadian documentary filmmaker, brings to a wider public what usually remains in books or in the classroom: philosophizing. For that alone Ms. Taylor deserves at least a bronze medal in the 2009 awards for idealism. In Examined Life she focuses on eight contemporary philosophers, ranging from Kwame Anthony Appiah and Judith Butler to Cornel West and Slavoj Zizek. She drops them into varied urban habitats, where they wander around and philosophize about meaning, ethics, and revolution, sometimes prompted by Taylor.
The film, edited with wit and brio, opens with Cornel West careering about New York City in a car as he raps about truth, music, and the importance of the life of the mind; it then turns to Avital Ronell, a literary critic with a Derridean bent, who marches through Central Park as she holds forth on meaning. It picks up with Peter Singer, who strolls past tony Manhattan stores as he ponders the ethics of consumption. The film continues with the others, each allocated a 10-minute segment. It closes with Judith Butler chatting about disabilities with the disabilities activist Sunaura Taylor, the filmmaker’s sister, who is in a wheelchair, as they negotiate the streets of San Francisco.
The philosophers play themselves brilliantly, although most are far from brilliant. In any event, what can the brightest light accomplish in 10 minutes? “Is philosophy the search for meaning?” asks the filmmaker of Avital Ronell, who, as a postmodernist, reverses roles and asks Taylor what she hopes to accomplish. “How are we implicated on this walk?” Ronell wonders. To Taylor’s questions she offers advanced academic platitudes about the “transcendental signifier,” alterity, and “absolute contingency.” She imparts the news she learned from Derrida that we can never know the “other” except as a “relation without a relation.” Ronell implicates us, but only in arid theorizing.
A few segments do come alive, most notably that of Zizek, whose kinetic energy seems perfectly attuned to the cinema (in fact, Taylor did make a documentary about him, Zizek!, in 2005). Wearing an orange Day-Glo vest, he darts about an urban trash yard. As dump trucks discharge their loads, Zizek pokes about abandoned refrigerators and discarded pornography. “This is where we should start feeling at home.” He ponders ecology, nature, and love and proffers some of his trademark paradoxes. “We need more alienation from our spontaneous nature.” “We need to be more artificial.” Zizek seeks to challenge simple ideas about ecology and nature. He reminds us that oil itself is nature — trillions of organisms that have died — and that catastrophes mark nature. Martha Nussbaum’s reflections on disability and Peter Singer’s on consumerism also sparkle and provoke.
But the film finally seems less philosophic than hagiographic. Taylor loves her subjects, perhaps too much. She doesn’t push or challenge them. Cornel West dominates the documentary; the film opens and closes with him discoursing, and he also has a segment of his own. Taylor obviously cherishes West as the philosopher par excellence, but why? He sounds more like a philosophizing preacher, with Taylor interjecting the “amens,” than a philosopher. The lines tumble from West in cadences. He sprinkles names about like glitter: Vico, John Donne, Walter Benjamin, Goethe, Adorno, Yeats, Montaigne, Chekhov. West is no intellectual wallflower, but is this philosophy or showmanship? At one point West calls himself a jazzman in the life of ideas. He may be right.
Professional philosophers will probably blow a gut over the film, since they may find little philosophy and fewer philosophers. Michael Hardt, Judith Butler, and Avital Ronell teach in literary departments, for instance. Yet Taylor has assembled a personal film, not a philosophy anthology, and is not obliged to respect professional identifications. Others, too, may object, however. You do not have to be a denizen of the American Enterprise Institute to regret the uniform leftism of Taylor’s cast of philosophers. And deathly jargon abounds. Ronell finds “fascistnoid nonprogressive edges if not a core” in the question of philosophical meaning. West flicks off phrases like “structures of domination” and American “imperial power” and emits clauses as if breathing about an “America predicated on the dispossession of the lands of indigenous peoples, the enslavement of African peoples, the subjection of women, and the marginalization of gays and lesbians.” Hardt considers where Lenin may have gone wrong about revolution in America. Zizek himself should be classified a “Left-Fascist,” according to a recent New Republic reviewer. Again, Taylor is hardly required to present a political balance. Her subtitle, “Philosophy Is in the Streets,” summons up 60s radicalism and signals her politics.
To be sure, the subtitle evokes not simply politics but also the intention to bring philosophy from dark lecture halls into the sunlight. Taylor’s subjects walk and philosophize in plein-air. At least from the time of the Peripatetic school, in ancient Greece, walking and philosophy have been linked. But few philosophers actually philosophized as they walked. The Philosopher’s Walk in Heidelberg, for instance, seems named less for philosophers than for students who used it as a romantic refuge. Even the Peripatetic philosophers themselves gathered in a gymnasium.
The leap from classroom to big screen may undermine philosophy, especially if it is cut into snippets. The lifeblood of philosophy depends on reading, discussion, and face-to-face encounters. Even 10 minutes of Socrates playing Socrates in a film would probably prove deflating. Who is that buffoon and what is he prattling about? The transition to cinema might work better if the focus were narrow — one subject or one person. But Examined Life pursues another path and ultimately loses its way.
No matter. Contemporary philosophy needs all the help it can get to reclaim an audience. The film may not lead to more examined lives or even to more philosophy majors. It may be too adoring of its sometimes less-than-scintillating stars and give them too little time; it may be too narrow in its politics. Yet with all those shortcomings, Examined Life expresses an enthusiasm for intellectual exchange that could be contagious. Let us hope.
Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles. A columnist for The Chronicle Review, he is author, most recently, of Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005). Go to http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com for release dates of Examined Life.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 23, Page B16
