Proceeding from thirteenth century Judaic readings of the Zohar, Gershom Scholem highlights the ongoing Jewish mystical traditions of the Kabbalists and Hasidim. In his essay titled, Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea, Scholem begins to measure, as subject to revelation, the “utopian content of Messianic redemption as a non-restorative state of the world”. Discussing the Jewish tradition of the Midrash, Scholem describes the marked approaches of Aggadic and Halakhic midrashim, specifically outlining the conditions of the reconstitution of utopian, messianic, and apocalyptical ascriptions, as in the days of the Messiah. Scholem writes of the Messianic age as that in which “a new mode of being will emerge which cannot be pictorially represented”, enumerating from rabbinic literature that “the messianic world will be a world without images”. The present essay will explore scholarly enumerations questioning the essence of the eternal return assuming the non-language of Being as simulacrum.

The Aggadah, a tradition of Judaic oral law, characteristically specifies the Messiah as occurrence of sacred language as conveying medium of fundamental teachings. Scholem discusses multiple exegetical approaches of the Aggadah, which discern a disparity of literal and allegorical dimensions. Forces of presence and non-presence, within literal and allegorical dimensions both ‘overt’ and ‘hidden’, are forces of opposition as aesthetic articles and effects beholding witness to the sacred content and conditions of eschatological temporality. Lending to interpretive modes of reading parables of fantastic and impossible description, aggadot are articles of sacred description.

“The author, who is a Kabbalist deeply rooted in the Halakhah, here deals with the mystical reasons for the commandments and prohibitions of the Torah. He is not, however, motivated in the least by an interest in the catastrophic aspect of the redemption, of which he has not discovered any new, independent features, but rather in the utopian content which in anticipation he seeks to formulate. Here an anarchic vision of liberation from the restrictions which the Torah has laid upon the Jew in an unredeemed world, and above all in the exile, plays a central role. The author expresses his vision by means of old biblical symbols which now become types for the different status of things in the unredeemed world and in the Messianic age.”

While the Halalkhic tradition derives laws from biblical text directly, the Aggadic is the rabbinical path of understanding lineages of the ‘sermonic implication’ of sacred texts and generations’ contemplative ensigncies. As ‘authoritative interpretation’ acknowledges this within Utopianism, such allows the increase and constructive expansion of elements of contemplative thought.

What Scholem describes in these passages as an ‘anarchic breeze’, and ‘anarchic airing’, is reflection of the departure from rationalistic messianism, through otherwise registering the conditions of redemption as in that of the apocalyptic. Instances of this discretion surface from traits of the generation proceeding thirteenth century Judaic scholarship as in the writings of Zohar. Scholem writes:

“The Rival tendencies of apocalyptic and rationalistic Messianism, as we might expect, define their differences on the basis of contradictory biblical exegeses. Exegesis becomes a weapon in constructing and destroying apocalypses… The more colorful and the more complete the picture, the greater the possibility of creating dramatic montage of the individual stages of the redemption and the plentitude of its content. There has been no lack of mystics who on the basis of their assumptions regarding the inherently infinite meaning of Scripture concluded that one of these levels of meaning in every biblical word contained a reference to, or a prefiguration of, the Messianic End. Thus apocalyptic exegesis could be applied without exception.”

In effect, the virtualization of apocalyptical messianism through the nomination of the conditions of messianic Utopianism through eschatological revelation. The non-present as conditions of the dialectic occurrence of representation and repetition of memory and time. In his post-modern treatise, Derrida highlights the

“Pure expenditure, absolute generosity offering the unicity to death in order to make the present appear as such, had already begun to want to maintain the presence of the present, has already opened the book and memory, the want to maintain the present is to want to preserve that which constitutes the irreplaceable and mortal presence, that within it which cannot be repeated to consume pure difference with pleasure[…] the matrix of the history of thought conceptualizing itself since Hegel.”

And as he further notes

“A new epiphany of the supernatural and the divine must occur within cruelty. And not despite but thanks to the eviction of God and the destruction of the theatre’s theological machinery. The divine has been ruined by God. That is to say, by man, who in permitting himself to be usurped from his own birth, became man by polluting the divinity of the divine[…] The restoration of divine cruelty, hence, must traverse the murder of God, that is to say, primarily the murder of man-god.”

Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror, manifests encounters of the sacred through processes of remembrance. Combining the eschatological question of Being with the sacred “conception becomes a living, human witness that can excite and hold an audience only when we are able to plunge it into the rushing current of reality, which we hold fast in each tangible, concrete moment we depict—one and unique in texture as in feeling” [emphasis added]. This auto-biographical film contains proofs of understanding the spatialization of the psyche through the mobilization of linear images. In Tarkovsky’s cinema, new expressions of sifting memory arrange the proceeding of tangible measurements enumerative of time as mobilized temporal dislocations of identity. This includes representations of the past and ‘present’, which borrow from the film’s poetically unified consciousness of reality and non-reality as experienced through memory and remembrance. Tarkovsky’s films involve “a special cognitive process of thinking in images, but even more as an act of remembering various images from the past.”

Deleuze quotes Andrei Tarkovsky where he describes the success of a cinema wherein the nature of ‘time’ is made perceptible through affixing gestures of memory. That Tarkovsky’s films in their own ways transform the materialism of representation, Gilles Deleuze introduces a discussion of his works at the end of the second chapter in his thesis on film titled, Cinema 2: the Time-image. With an understanding of what had evolved through Tarkovsky’s cinematic practice by the year 1985, Deleuze had become familiar with all of Tarkovsky’s seven films except one released in 1986, The Sacrifice.

Deleuze and Tarkovsky bring to life a discussion of the cinema of time – time as ‘signaletic’ material. Deleuze, ends the aforementioned chapter paraphrasing Nietzsche, in a manner reminiscent of Derrida’s concern for the path taken by poetry. Identifying directly with Tarkovsky’s genius, Deleuze writes:

“This is the sign[time-image], it is the very function of the sign. But, as long as signs find their material in the movement-image, as long as they form the singular expressional features, from a material in movement, they are in danger of evoking another generality which would lead to their being confused with a language. The representation of time can be extracted from this only by association and generalization, or as concept… Such is the ambiguity of the sensory-motor schema, agent of abstraction. It is only when the sign opens directly on to time, when time provides the signaletic material itself, that the type, which had become temporal, coincides with the feature of singularity separated from its motor associations[movement-image]”.

With his question of an active role of time in witnessing, Tarkovsky’s film Mirror, is of key interest.

Mirror is the central totem of Tarkovsky’s work, in that it was his fourth film of seven, and in that it operates as a masterpiece of surrealist art expressing questions of ciphers of personal (metaphysical) and cultural (political) identities. Discussing Mirror, and what the difference means between searching for, and the having found, Tarkovsky writes of art and the encounter, quoting from Valéry:

“Search as process (and there is no other way of looking at it) has the same bearing on the complete work as wandering through the forest with a basket in search of mushrooms has to the basketful of mushrooms when you have found them. Only the latter—the full basket—is a work of art: the contents are real and unconditional, whereas wandering through the forest remains the personal affair of someone who enjoys walking and fresh air. On this level deception amounts to evil intent. ‘the bad habit of mistaking metonym for revelation, metaphor for proof, a spate of words for fundamental knowledge, and oneself for a genius—that is an evil which is with us when we are born,’”

Tarkovsky, continuing his thread, concludes his chapter titled Cinema’s destined role, writes: “[a]nd the limp word, ‘search’, clearly does not apply to a triumph over a muteness that demands unrelieved, superhuman effort.”

Alexandra Smith, has a keen eye for the essence of Mirror. Smith identifies the question simulated by “his identity as a filmmaker who writes with his camera and distances himself from the Russian cultural tradition of privileging the printed word.” In the formation of Mirror, Tarkovsky’s consciousness of cinematic practice can be understood in relation to the narrative text of the film, of which Smith writes in her article titled Andrei Tarkovsky as Reader of Arsenii Tarkovsky’s Poetry in the Film Mirror:

“Tarkovsky’s Mirror aims to subvert attempts at transcendent ordering[…] as subjective, and aspires to restore the world outside the subject in all its inaccessibility, materiality, and mystery, instilling a radical ontological doubt into the dialogue with the past. Tarkovsky’s film exemplifies what can be defined as intellectually responsible postmodernism and points to historical and cultural causes that are responsible for the loss of objective reality.”

In Andrei Roublev, the young bell-caster, kneels before the Royal proprietors at the blessing of his creation. As a mercenary, Boriska is to lose his life, should the bell not prove to function. This story arrives late in the film to elucidate the tragedy that the truth of art occurs within the realms of imperfection of which only poetry can attest. Concerning his subject matter, as written in Tarkovsky’s book, Sculpting with Time: “I wanted to use the example of [Roublev] to explore the question of the psychology of artistic creativity, and [analyze] the mentality and civic awareness of an artist who created spiritual treasures of timeless significance.”

Boriska, the young bell-caster in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Roublev, was played by Kolya Burlyaev, an actor Tarkovsky had directed as the title character of his second film, Ivan’s Childhood, 1962. Here, with Tarkovsky, we are interested his portrayal of time as the effectuation, of Difference. In 1965, Tarkovsky began filming Andrei Roublev, a film about the life of a hermeneutical Russian religious icon painter of the fifteenth century.

In the final scenes of the film, Boriska is taken in arms by the aged painter Roublev, who consoles the young boy after he has been devastatingly upset that the bell he cast had been made inaccurately – that the secret of the family trade with which he had been entrusted, had been a forgery. Boriska had carved within the earthen mold, an icon of the Cantonese raider upon horseback, an emblem of that which laid pillage upon his pastoral village and caused the death of his family.

Should not Boriska have reason to feel less dismayed by a more ambiguous cause of failure? Might the fluke have occurred due to an over-simplification of the instructions given to Boriska, as something as merely: “inscribe the image of the ‘enemy’ onto the bell”? Or could the cause of falsification have been specific to Boriska’s dislocation, his lacking of a more appropriate interpretation, through his reduction of the secret of his tradition? These questions occur as after-thoughts which hedge the margin left to the chronicle of the poetic genius of the Russian painter, led astray, who is present in the final passage of this film as aid to the cathartic young child.

The ‘non-written’, and ‘non-language’, refer to abyssal effectuations of the Other. Time becomes rates of change abstracted through witnessing the Other and its effectuation.

In his writing on Shibboleth, Derrida writes, “[w]ithout writing, non-written, the unwritten switches over to this question of reading on a board or tablet that you perhaps are.” Derrida’s essay titled, “Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation”, may suffice in part to describe…

The year 1960. Paul Celan was awarded The Georg Büchner Prize. The award was established in 1923, in memory of the German dramatist and author of prose. Nominations for this title were considered after the year 1951 as to be specific only to authors of Germanic language. What was delivered as Celan’s acceptance address, The Meridian, is Celan’s longest work of prose, and contains innumerable placards essential to the debates of Jacques Derrida’s ethics of postmodern phenomenological ontology.

WORKS CITED

Scholem, Gershom. The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, 34. Scocken Books, New York, 1971.

Ibid, 35.

Ibid, 22.

Ibid, 32.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time, 94. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1989

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: the Time-image, 43. The Anthlone Press, 1989.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time, 98. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1989.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time, 103. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1989.

Smith, Alexandra. “Andrei Tarkovsky as Reader of Arsenii Tarkovsky’s Poetry in the Film Mirror”, 48

Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 40, no. 3, Summer 2004, pp. 46–61. 2004.

Ibid.

Ibid, 35.

Ibid, 35.

Derrida, Jacques. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, 3. Fordham University Press, New York, 2005.