philosophical conversations

A Japanese Story

Exhausted. Depleted. Wasted. That is me today.

I'm unable to write. Or read. I just sit soaking up as much of the sun in my study that I can. Outside the shack it blows a gale.

Life has been sucked out of me by living and trying to do philosophy in the political life. That involves deconstructing the workings of instrumental reason as it constructs a water and an energy market and trying to figure out the history of this construction in national competition policy. A history that conceals, is covered over by a forgetting of sustainability and is rewritten as being concerned with efficient competitive markets.

I saw a film last night on video. It was called A Japanese Story. A review here and here.

This is the bland description of the philosophical heart of the film:

"But they come to see each other in a different light when their four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser gets bogged down in the desert miles from anywhere. They experience shared danger and develop a deep affection for each other. From then on the movie is anything but predictable."

It is bland because the two characters----Sandy, a geologist, and Hiromitsua Japanese man on the road in western Australia---come face to face with the possibility of death when they are stranded in the sandy Pilbara desert. They affirm an authentic existence for themselves in the face of certain death.

This desert encounter has Heidegger all over it, even if Heidegger never gets mentioned. The word 'authentic existence' never gets mentioned in the film, but it is there in their sexual encounter that affirms both of them. That is how they understand themselves.

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 26, 2004 11:52 PM | TrackBack