File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0206, message 99


Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2002 11:47:19 +1100
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: 44 and 38


Mark/All,

I just saw "The Fast Runner", a movie about the Inuit people many centuries
ago.  It is absolutely unique, nearly three hours long, and in a way
relevant to your last paragraph below.  I searched for a good review, but
comments were limited.  The best description of its effect was
"spellbinding"

It was acted by native people in their native language with (sometimes
unreadable) subtitles in English.

For almost three hours you are in scenes without civilized referents, such
as buildings, roads, trees, books, churches etc.  There are families dressed
in skins.  There are birds, animals in the barren Arctic landscape,
struggling to
exist, killing their relatives, suffering, laughing, weeping.

It is a very physical experience.

regards,
Hugh

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

> > Eric/All
> > Today I read that German animals have been given legal rights.
> > "Paragraph 20a of German basic now says that animals, like humans, have
> > the right to be respected by the state and to have their dignity
> > protected...." (Quote from the Guardian June 22nd.) In 1992 Switzerland
> > amended its constitution  so that animals were recognised as 'beings'
> > rather than things. These political changes represent major social,
> > political and ethical steps forward, perhaps even signs that the Great
> > Apes project may succeed.
>
> in re: step forward
>
> I forget the movie, but there's a film I saw some time back, set in the
> 15th century, that begins with the hanging of a horse which had thrown
> its rider. I'm sure I have some of the details wrong here. Likewise,
> there's the famous photograph from late 19th/early 20th century of the
> elephant hanging. I can't remember the beast's offense. The elephant
> hanging serves as an icon of a bizarre anomaly, a barbarism (not to
> offend King Barbar!), but in fact the practice of "serving justice" on
> animals was a common practice in Europe prior to Enlightenment "reforms."
> Others held in a problematic relation to guilt: children, the insane, and
> the feeble-minded. The issue, here, of course, stems from the
> Enlightenment assumption of what it means to enter into a social
> contract--the ability to sign one's name (even if that is with an X)
> hinges upon one's claim to "reason" and "rational thought."
>
> The challenge of the inhuman, it seems, arises not so much from a sense
> of stepping forward (in the way that the phrase "all men are created
> equal" gains a wider referent in a period of 200 yrs), but from its call
 > to derail this basic Enlightenment assumption of what it means to be in
> society, or as Lyotard has said (and as his wife repeated at his memorial
> service): to breathe together.
>
>




   

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