Movement

In a Chinese restaurant, London, on the last night of our conference, I told someone sitting beside me about movement -- something I was thinking of before polemics came along. Perhaps it's more apt to say instead, how they are always arriving together.

Agamben reminds me of that gathering, once again:

Do we have to keep using the concept of movement? If it signals a threshold of politicisation of the unpolitical, can there be a movement that is different from civil war? Or in what direction can we rethink the concept of movement and its relation to biopolitics? Here I won't give you any answers, it is a long term research project, but I have some indications: [...]

Movement is the indefiniteness and imperfection of every politics. It always leaves a residue. In this perspective the motto I cited as a rule for myself might be reformulated ontologically as this: the movement is that which if it is, is as if it wasn't, it lacks itself (manca a se stesso), and if it isn't, is as if it was, it exceeds itself. It is the threshold of indeterminacy between an excess and a deficiency which marks the limit of every politics in its constitutive imperfection.

TOW

For Sam:

In the hall, stillness and attention. I am both listening and reading, hearing and seeing for the frist time the text I have pledged to render into English. Between ears and eyes, but also on the tongue and to the touch, the enveloping sensation of the untranslatable. A sensation, yes, and not just a matter for reflection, not just a teasing of thought into the space between idioms -- hers and his and mine. That will come too, later, but first a sensation, tingling, stinging, better yet: burning (Kamuf "Afterburn: An Afterword to "The Flying Manuscript" 47).

Cha Cha, Say You?

At the bar of forever young cheerleaders-in-toilets and cursed reindeers, my favourite couple (who saved me from the urban sprawl to Salton Sea) asked me about the Chinese habit of repeting names when I told them to watch the film Yi Yi.

"So would you please not call me Col Col if I promise not to call you Shao Shao?"

"Worst case scenario, Ling Ling, if we get really annoying."

Meanwhile, Grateful Dead plays in the background.
---
Later, we met their friends, most of whom are in Creative Writing and Literature academia. Amongst them, I learnt that Shauna will be going to Geneva for a new Editor job in WHO - one of those rare hires of a Comparative Literature Phd candidate whose interest in human rights will take her deep to the policy-making sides. Telling me this as we were shivering and smoking outside the bar, it was perfect that one of her main tasks would be on tabaccon banning. To take the cake, her friend then told us of the "World Peace Drink" served at Geneva, perfect blue with a white chocolate dove. I think of my Paleonymy of the Human vis-a-vis Kant and Hegel, and wonder whether I'll revive my fantasies of taking my questions outside the University.

Perpetuated were tales of the city as the "unwriterly-NYC" freelance experiences, and sliced in with the history of the vibrator and one's excited idea to start up a film/cuisine venue. I told them slices of our Raffles statue(s) and our little reminiscences of Fat Frog Cafe and S-11s.

No chaw kwey teows here and late night teh-bings. However as Nicole insists on breaking up the conversations to drive me back, offering me sweaters and all that fuzzy kindness, I'm good with bloody marys for supper. On the news now, a frosty the snow man blow-up doll was being attacked as we hit a new low of 34F. Luckily for me, I am having a hot chocolate with my funky new heater Woozy-Chan at my feet. Plus a new purple military jacket and some vintage sweaters, the latest Richard Powers novel, The Echo-Maker after, I may have to eat more oats this Xmas but I sure hear the jingles.

Wouldn't you??

Polemics

Really, I wrongly misplaced a Werner Hezog for Fearless at Video Hut tonight. And I'm so glad I did.

Watching DVD's uncut version instead of the theatrical release has its benefits: think I was spared of Jay Chow's unsavory rappings of a theme song and several delected scenes crucial to the development of Huo Yuan Jia (Jet Li)'s character. Minding that I have a very uncompromising childhood raised on Sun Yet-Sun fetishes and wu shu ethics, from constantly reading Jin Yong novels in an English girls' school, it's no surprise that I have to wax lyrical about this long indulgence of mine. Hey, Fearless in Los Angeles is almost a B-grade movie title in itself.

And I little care that I have missed a Herzog for a Jet Li, that I am going to risk what appears as my dreamt of research topic on a badly translated film title. Fearless is about Huo Yuan Jia, who is far from merely fearless. Perhaps not unlike the Western code of honour, Huo's life is humility, misjudgment and ultimately, character, duty, ethics: 義. As Li's martial arts swan song, the movie works, ultimately. As Huo says before collapsing in the ring, it is to know that when one fights, it's never just a two-by-two; there is always a (n +1). Wu Shu must teach how to concede.

My favourite phrase lately, 'that's so mob' is a frivolous composition of Hong Kong Triads, martial arts novels albeit sneaking in some Godfather here and there. For lack of a more sophisticated translation, I have found my earlier immersion in The Condor Heroes, the Book of the Sword, etc, etc, in thinkers who are friends and whose friendship has taught the best of philosophy, ethically.

Hence polemos, the outright antagonism that can be classified as war must have all the asymmetrical bearings of stasis, internal, civil war. Age old, the relation counts on being able to count one's friends from one's enemies. Neutrality is a strange phenomenon; hence International Relations would always be my bed-time fodder. If I cannot help always recount growing up with such stories, it's not to assert any "masculinity" whatever that means, or to justify "why" I buy into this wholeheartedly. Less reasons, more 義 ．

The two fundamental principles of Empedocles -- philia and neikos -- are, both in name and function, the same as our two primal instincts, eros and destructiveness, he first of which endeavours to combine what exists into ever greateer entities, while the second endeavours to dissolve these combinations and to destroy the structures to which they have given rise... And no one can forsee in what guise the nucleus of truth contained in the theory of Empedocles will present itself to latter understanding (Freud, qtd in Derrida, Politics of Friendship 112).

On a Blurb

When I added on my graduate student profile a phantom-like, perhaps somewhat non-existing interest in Taiwanese literature and film, absence is not always wished for.

Maybe because of how sometime ago, I had been inducted to this place by someone whom spoke little Chinese but to whom I spoke a lot to. Maybe because of that particular director of that city at which that brief correspondence was last abandoned.

Tonight I watched Yi Yi, by director Edward Yang. The name had sounded really familiar and because of a certain ill-formed knack, I rented the video before a wonderful dinner with Sam, whom I miss already, and his friend Dan.

Beginning with a wedding, clapped in with a baby shower and ending with a funeral, Yang, like Hou Hsiao-Hsien and of course, Tsai Ming-Liang, is remarkable in suspending 3-hour registers. Centered around a Taipei middle-class family and its occassional forays into next-door neighbours and a Japanese businessman, 'Yi Yi' is all about our curiosity of what lies behind us, over and above what happens alongside and around. The family's youngest member, Yang Yang, moves the narration, admist subjections and bullys in school -- a whisp of Trauffaut there -- with his photographs of the back of people's heads. His reluctance to speak to his grandmother lying in coma translates into the question of what we can say to a loved one when all that can be said are already known.

The grandmother's coma foregrounds the compulsion to repeat. The father's withdrawal from his computer-software business, the mother's breakdown after realising that she merely needs 3-minutes to sum up her day to her mother, the daughter's overly-optimistic views of her neighbour's love life, the latter's drive for attention, and the good-for-nothing brother-in-law's constant reliance on horoscopes, fortune-telling, and small-time cheatings. Much of these repetitions work side by side, with the father's reunion with his first lover paralled by the daughter's failed attempt to garner the equivalent for herself. Towards the end, the mother returns from her Buddhist retreat and realises that there, her role became that of her own mother in coma, where people speak to her of the same things, day after day. Her husband, after having his closure with his first lover, realises that he will cease to wonder what might have happened with his first love if not for the fact that he can always go on asking, "what if..."

At the grandfather's funeral, eight-year old Yang Yang reads to the open casket his reasons for not willing to speak, earlier. "Grandmother, I'm sorry. It wasn't that I didn't want to talk to you. I don't know what else to say to you that you already not know. Just like when I ask them now where you've gone, they tell me that it's to a place that I will know when I grow up. Since it is true that I do not know so many things now, I want to grow up and tell these things to people. This is what I want to do when I grow up. It'll be so much fun. Perhaps, one day I'll then find out where you've gone, for real. Grandmother, I miss you, especially when I look at my little cousin who still does not have a name [because his father is still looking for the most auspicious one], I know what you meant when you always used to say that you felt old. I really want to tell him that I feel old too."

---
I walked out of the cinema that day and told Matt, that Yang Yang must have wanted to grow up to be a film-maker. Yes, I think that was what I said. So, there, it was true, I have watched Yi Yi before. I just remembered more of what I had said about it.

Please watch this film , again or not.

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Tony Raynes, in his commentary of new Taiwanese cinema in general and Yi Yi in particular, says that like all "new" anything, they all break up. "There is no "new" Taiwanese films to speak of, today." I would like to know how Yang Yang will feel about that.

It's Real This Time

So, I was getting ludicrous stares from Lindsay and Sam whenever I broke into cheers, that we were finally done with the semester. Indeed, two weeks earlier when I was saying that, we were far from being done. A senseless 502 exam and three papers later, now I can holler and no one can upset my delusions. It's over.

The three papers this term were challenging in different ways though by the end of which I was really scared for really not caring as much about them as I'd have liked to. Throw in my usual continental fetish and some ra-ra Medieval crying methods, I think there remains much to be explored regarding the institutional-disciplinary negotations. I am still clueless about the boundaries of the comparativism that I've slotted myself in, though some of these papers have given me a glimpse. One rule remains the non-rule: if I know what I do not like, I'll proceed from there.

Hence it is bit surreal, to say the least, in surviving the first term at USC. I do not know what I'd have done without the lovely ten days when Mayee came to visit. She witnessed first hand Los Feliz, my late sleeping hours, 2-buck chucks, the beauty that is Trader Joe's, the lovely cell-mates of support, Lindsay, Sam, Seth and Colin, USC during Fall, and most of all, the love-hate relationship one must have with Los Angeles. We did what we had set out to do during her visit: conversations, silly photographs with our faces in masques posing with cheese chips, France, laughs and future plans of books, books, and more books. (Ok, and clothes too).

She is now over at Michigan, Ann Arbour and I'll spend the next week vegging out, reading novels at last, devouring DVDs, and of course, sleeping. Most of my cell-mate support group will be back in their respective homes for Christmas, and I've got a swoon-worthy set of PJs from Lindsay to keep me warm. Very soon, Meiyen will be visiting me from Japan and before we know it, it will be the Spring term of 2007.

Everything is real this time.

Nian Nian and Mummy

Kudos to Mayee :)