Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field (2008)
In his theory of subjectivity, Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of ‘abandoned being’: ‘From now on the ontology that summons us will be an ontology in which abandonment remains the sole predicament of being, in which it even remains—in the scholastic sense of the word—the transcendental’. For Nancy ‘abandoned being’ is a solution to the problem of western discourse with its obsession with representation defined in such terms as appropriation, fulfilment, destination and so forth: ‘“the West” is precisely what designates itself as limit, as demarcation, even when it ceaselessly pushes back the frontiers of its imperium’. I engage with Nancy’s problematisation by analysing a film that situates knowledge, literally, at the frontier of the ‘imperium’. Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field (2008) deals with the problems of presence as identified by Nancy, by means of exploring post-imperial subjectivity in crisis whereby post-imperial legacy designates the demarcations of knowledge and being after crisis, involving re-negotiations of being in a world that has escaped the ontological ‘closure’ determined by the imperatives of representation. I argue the symbolic mode opens being to transcendental inferences when the subject confronts gaps in discourse in the state of impartation and dislocation.