David Deamer - Polysemous futurity in the cinematics of Cloud Atlas and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a presentation from David Deamer Abstract: Luisa Rey is reading the letters of a dead man: ‘I’m trying to understand’, she says, why ‘we keep making the same mistakes over and over’. Somewhat abashed, Adam Ewing recites a question from memory, ‘how do we know what we can change, and what things must remain sacred and inviolable?’ Sonmi-451 is in magnetic shackles facing the Archivist. Fabricants, she responds accusingly, ‘have just one possible future’. Zachry listens in dread to the Abbess; possessed, she warns him of the dangerous days ahead: ‘Bridge a broken, hide below. Hands a bleedin, can’t let go. Enemy’s sleepin, don’t slit that throat’. In a cheap hotel, Robert Frobisher signs a letter to his lover with ‘Yours Eternally’, then shoots himself with a stolen Luger. Timothy Cavendish beams. After all the awfulness of the last few days, yes, ‘tomorrow life can begin afresh, afresh, afresh!’ Cloud Atlas (Wachowskis, Tykwer | 2012) concerns six very different characters traversing very different times and very different spaces across the world over some 500 years. These vectors are a loop composed of a disjunctive mosaic of images rendering a complex narration of disparate genres and tones, where the life of each character is captured in the crisis of their present while synchronously effecting and affecting the future vector. Accordingly, I argue, Cloud Atlas has a narrative that sees futurity as polysemous – a perspectival simultaneity of stasis and flux; anticipation, destiny, and novelty; circularity, progress, revolution, and decay. To make this argument I employ Nietzsche, expressly Beyond Good and Evil (1886), sub-titled as it is Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Such resonance with the film, in turn, provides a lens on Nietzsche’s text, as staging the problems of the subject, society, drives, bodies and will in the present as a concern of a fundamental philosophy of the future: beyond brute oppositions of open or closed, static or dynamic, freedom or necessity (§2;§24). Biography: Dr David Deamer is a free scholar whose research focuses upon cinema, culture, and the philosophy of Deleuze, Bergson, and Nietzsche. He is the author of two books on Deleuze (EUP 2016; Bloomsbury 2014). His most recent essay is ‘Deleuze’s Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood’ (2019), written for Film-Philosophy and shortlisted for the journal’s Annual Article Award 2020 (losing out to something far better). Deamer irregularly appears at conferences and invited seminars, tries to maintain a couple of blogs, and is co-presenter of the philoscifiz podcast (exploring on-screen sci-fi and philosophy). He has been working on a book on Nietzsche and cinema for some time. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/