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Special issues:

Literature and Linguistics (Vol. 1 No. 2); Literature and Violence (Vol. 3 Nos. 1-2)

Women, Consumption and Popular Culture (Vol. 4 No. 1); Life, Community, and Ethics (Vol. 4. No. 2)

The Making of Barbarians in Western Literature (Vol. 5 No. 1); Chaos and Fear in Contemporary British Literature (Vol. 5 No. 2)

Taiwan Cinema before Taiwan New Wave Cinema (Vol. 6 No. 1); Catastrophe and Cultural Imaginaries (Vol. 6 No. 2)

Affective Perspectives from East Asia (Vol. 9 No. 2); Longing and Belonging (Vol. 10 No. 2, produced in collaboration with the European Network for Comparative Literary Studies)

Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 1776 to the Present (Vol. 11 No. 2). 

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to read the 2011 film Seediq Bale in a number of ways in order to unpack certain aspects of its expressive makeup and show that their significance extends beyond the depicted historical situation. Although director Wei Te-sheng usually responds to the charge of excessive violence in the film by asserting the different life world of the Seediq tribes, the underlying outlook cannot be said to point to any insularity of the indigenous cultural system. In the main killing scene, the film represents ancestral spirits as observing the scene and expressing doubts about the consequences of the act. In their song, we can observe how the gaya of the Seediq is not fixed law but is closer to law with plasticity or lawlike consistency. This ability to deal with catastrophic situations in its own way is rooted in the nature and effectivity of the gaya itself. Colonial power wrecks the life of the Seediq people by molecularizing its causality (breaking up the temporality of the gaya), and the Seediq responds by radicalizing the molecularity of their own system to release its power, treating the formal strata of the system itself as cut off from substance, producing formal values (dignity, freedom) that are “inoperative” and leads straight to catastrophe. This radical molecularity also points to the fact that imperial Japan has betrayed its own tradition of inoperativity. To explain the contemporaneity of the issues raised by the film, we will refer mainly but not exclusively to Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy to discuss the distinction between potentiality and operativity, the imbrication between inoperativity, thought, and formal values, and how the isolation of formal values facilitates the emergence of oikonomia as a means to organize acts when the loss of a mediating system of cultural knowledge signals impending catastrophe. 

KEYWORDS: gaya, headhunting, Agamben, Deleuze, Guattari, Ghanavyūha sūtra 

摘 要

本文希望從幾個角度檢討電影《賽德克.巴萊》觸及的 文化與哲學議題。雖然導演認為片中的反抗暴力不應由自以 為文明的外部觀點來責難,但是影片的底層並不支持原住民 文化是絕對封閉的實體。由公學校場景透過祖靈歌聲所呈現 的猶疑立場,我們可以觀察賽德克族律如何以自己的方式, 接受災難情境的挑戰,省思族律本身的活性與可攜性。本文 認為這樣的省思來自族律本身的性質與形態。殖民活動以分 子化(切斷族律因果)的方式破壞賽德克人的生活,賽德克 人則援引族律本身的運作形態,通過更徹底的分子化來保衛 形式化的文化價值(尊嚴、自由等)。這些價值不能求勝而 「無用」,卻直指殖民者也背叛了自己的「無用」傳統。為 了說明影片所描述的歷史也不是封閉的觀察或「觀賞」對 象,本文將引用阿岡本哲學來連結當代文化的議題,特別是 能與用的區分、無用與思維以及形式價值的關係,以及形式 如何透過密嚴性來解決災難情境中必然出現的,有限與無限 失去知識中介的問題。

關鍵詞:族律、獵首、阿岡本、德勒茲、葛達里、密嚴經