Economies of Death - Butch Cassidy, Derrida and Updike

Coffee is the bane of my existence. I love the taste. But it eats my belly lining, and it dances through my nerves at 4:30 in the AM. Which makes me get up and watch the ends of movies that my wife has fallen asleep in half way through and we've never got back to. This morning it was Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Two things to rave about: 1) the cinematography in the first five minutes of the film was exceptionally tight - all shadow work in B&W with nice textured shots of a western town; 2) Death! I've never been so excited about death as I was watching BC&TSK. Death follows them around through the desert after a botched train robbery. I loved it, because I've been thinking about being-toward-death. Heidegger used to claim that authenticity emerged from being oriented towards the ultimate end. He was an atheist, so death takes on that sort of finality for him. I also just finished Derrida's The Gift of Death, where he meditates on how death must be met by each of us. He also looks at the death of the other through the Abraham and Isaac story, via Kierkegaard. He tries to problematize the teleological suspension of the ethical (putting God before man when ethics says no : ie.: Abraham and Isaac and murder). Derrida reasons to the point of redefining God (which should be completely problematic from a deconstructive position):

God is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior. Once such a structure of conscience exists, of being with-oneself, of speaking, that is, of producing invisible sense, once I have within me, thanks to the invisible word as such, a witness that others cannot see, and who is therefore at the same time other than me and more intimate with me than myself, once I can have a secret relationship with myself and not tell everything, once there is secrecy and secret witnessing within me, then what I call God exists, (there is) what i call God in me, (it happens that) I call myself God - a phrase that is difficult to distinguish from "God calls me," for it is on that condition that I can call myself or that I am called in secret (108-9)

And here is the clincher:

"God is in me, he is the absolute "me" or "self," he is the structure of invisible interiority that is called, in Kierkegaard's sense, subjectivity" (109).

I think that Derrida could have used a bit more tact here, perhaps more homework or research was needed (but that would not suit his polemical end). David Bentley Heart distinquishes between that which is God of God and the space of not-God in God. Which is completely paradoxical, but essential for an understanding of creation within a conception of God as the positive. God is the abyss of being, in which all being has it's being, which is so transcendent that even in being there is space for other being. Thus preserving the distinction between subjectivity and, well, God, and swerving around what Ignatieff calls the idolatry of human rights (the idol of the human).

Now let me link this back to BC&TSDK. Death follows them around, yet they have no trouble killing others for their cause. In fact each of their lives is worth about 12 Bolivian lives if I counted correctly, which is quite an economy of death if you ask me. But death hounds BC&SDK, it just keeps knocking at their door. It gives their life meaning. But, unlike Derrida, they have no subjectivity. Their ends are objectively represented. Death is external, on horse back. The law is death, and neither BC or SDK has any authentic relationship to this end. They just seek to evade it. They don't try to understand it, only anticipate how death will move. I was reminded of Bergman's The Four Horseman of The Apocalypse, with the figure of death playing chess, chasing down main characters. But Bergman is much more playful, much more ironic. With Goldman(?) we have a film that is sincere in its brotherly love, nasty in its romantic love, playful with money, and damn serious about death. Could this be the difference between Europe and America? What a huge leap. Interesting to see that America has no God, while Europe has a comedic God. An old God who has seen too many deaths. If America had a God, it would be young and afraid of death. Neither vision gets to the heart of Christianity, which has a God who sees through death, in suffering.

Perhaps America's God is a God of money. Updike had something to say about this last night in In The Beauty of the Lilies: (Speaking about a Minster- Clarence - who has lost his faith and stepped down from the pulpit)

"Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates: dollars were the flourishing sigh of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot" (he now sells encyclopedias, door to door). (90)

Updike has a flare for film in this text, perhaps he's talking about BC&TSDK. One Christian thing about the film: The deaths of others (BC&TSDK) provided great wealth for Redford and Newman! Which reminds me, the death they saw on horse back is immanent in my computer chair. I must retreat! Pow Pow.