Browsing by Author "Erik Bordeleau"

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Surviving to Oneself after Tiananmen: Wang Xiaoshuai’s Frozen (1996)
(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Erik Bordeleau
In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Agamben develops a subtle analysis of the irreducible ambiguity inherent to the verb “to survive.” “From the beginning,” writes Agamben, “the verb also has a reflexive form when referred to human beings, which designates the striking idea of survival with respect to oneself and one’s own life. In this form, the one who survives and the person to whom something survives thus coincide” (132). Strangely enough, it is exactly what is at stake in the performance around which Wang Xiaoshuai’s movie Frozen (1996) revolves. Qi Lei puts into work his own suicide, letting everybody believe that he is actually dead; everybody but the curator of the exhibit, who will take care of the artist’s secret “survival,” and Qi Lei’s sister, who, as a doctor, signs a false death certificate. Therefore, technically, the movie displays an artist who has survived performatively to himself. How to interpret the remnants of this performance? What has happened, what has “passed,” what has been lost in this passage between life and death? What does this movie tell us about life-that-continues after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and China’s entrance into the global economy? Showing the precarious condition of a small Beijing performance art community, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Frozen offers a convincing and well-informed allegory of the aftermaths of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, as well as an interesting glance at what has become one of the most dynamic sectors of Chinese underground culture of the end of the 20th century and beyond.
What Remains of Tiananmen?
(英語學系, 2011-03-??) Erik Bordeleau
Conjugation, Emily Tang’s first feature film, describes the difficult love of a young unmarried couple, seeking to build a home away from the turmoil of the times after the Tiananmen events. Telling the story of their precarious active life, the sorrow about giving up their ideals, and the memories of fallen friends and comrades, Conjugation marks a temps mort, a time no verb can be conjugated with. In this article, I would like to think Emily Tang’s attempt at expressing the post-Tiananmen malaise in relation to the more general background of neoliberal globalization. More precisely, I would like to show how the existential itinerary depicted in Conjugation can be read as a powerful allegory about how neoliberalism operates as a reduction of the political to a postpolitical, economic management issue. Following on the work of Giorgio Agamben, this reduction will be thought of as an extraction of bare life that can be understood as the production of a form of survival. In the last instance, I wish to show how Emily Tang’s film constitutes a paradigmatic cinematic itinerary illustrating the complex passage from qualified form-of-life to a form of survival or bare life, a passage whose relevance far exceeds the Chinese context and can directly contribute to a better understanding of the formatting of subjectivities corollary to the ongoing global oikonomic mobilization.