The Vicious Circles of Postmodern Representations

Abstract

A “Vicious Circle” is described by Pierre Klossowski as a single point which recurs, suggesting a new conception of “destiny”. Our previous work on “Ones and Twos”, in the first chapters, cannot help us when confronting a Vicious Circle. Thus, from the “point of no return” in Chapter 2, at which a situation becomes an “irreversible once and for all”, we arrive here in Chapter 3 at the “point of Eternal Return”. This is Nietzsche’s concept for a break with an irreversible situation. The Eternal Return is described by Klossowski as that “which suppresses every goal and meaning, since the beginning and the end always merge with each other”.¹ It is the theory that the universe is infinitely recurring, where everything that takes place will take place in a second time, exactly as before, and numerous times again. The problem of Eternal Return raises crucial questions apropos a film history, which itself recurs through remakes. Any hope of delineating the history of a text on the basis of when it was released is dashed with a remake, which unlike a sequel that aims to drop in on the characters to see how they are getting along, wants to have those events again; it restages. Anat Zanger uses the word “chain” to describe a film series. But what happens to a film “chain” if a section rejoins itself at the beginning, again? What happens to the “break” in this chain, if what it breaks from establishes, at the same time, that from which it broke?

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.

(Walter Benjamin)