Abstract
Each of the films I have analyzed in this book alludes to a specific institutional religion (Christianity or Islam), but each structurally poses the continued importance of religion as something outside of, and in powerful critique of, these religious dispositifs. Arseniev’s men gesture verbally to a Christian worldview, but theirs is not a mission to convert the indigenous to Russian Orthodoxy; Ed gazes at the crucifix, but only in distraction from the bingo game; and Badii converses with a seminarian but only to insist that the Qu’ran and Hadith present a logic and dogmatism that cannot address (or salve) the wounds of his life. In each case institutional religion is not posed as unreal or false so much as reified; that is, the reality of religion within modern institutions reproduces, mirrors, or quietly justifies the alienating structures and practices of modern society.1 The reality of institutional religion, as quickly referenced and dismissed in these films, conveys the reality and limits of ideology, or in Foucaultian vocabulary, it conveys the reality (and limits) of differential power relations that continually shape (and resist) the technologies of biopower.
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Notes
The obvious dialectic between Badii and Bagheri seems to pose the question of the film as the force of human freedom (natura naturata) in the face of the overwhelming force of either God or capital (natura naturans). See Antonio Negri, The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). I am not suggesting Badii or Bagheri is a Job figure but only pointing to this structural analogy and to the fact that this encounter between freedom and determinism generates both pain and hope.
For a compelling argument linking Irigaray’s double notion of entwining and limit to her critique of Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, and arguing that the lat-ter’s “flesh of the world,” as the element of this entwining, is the very “element” Irigaray explores in Elemental Passions, see Cecilia Sjöholm, “Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray’s Elemental Passions,” Hypatia 15, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 92–112.
Gayatri C. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 127 and 161 respectively. I paraphrased the citation from page 161. The citation from 127 is incomplete; the full sentence reads: “Jacqueline Rose, when she writes about propriation in a couple of sentences in her introduction, is obliged to keep within the Nietzschean historical assumptions about propriation, without the emancipating moment of emergence of woman as ‘catachresis,’ as a metaphor without a literal referent standing in for a concept that is the condition of conceptuality: Nietzsche privileges the metaphor as condition of possibility of ‘truth.’ ”
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© 2011 M. Gail Hamner
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Hamner, M.G. (2011). Concluding Thoughts. In: Imaging Religion in Film. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013248_6
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