Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Philosophy for a New Generation

Two great themes of film are violence and love. One could press even further and say that there is just one great theme, love. The violence that interests us most is sacrifice: the violent act done for the sake of love. Of the films that I have discussed so far, most have love at the center: The Artist, The Sweet Hereafter, The Secret in Their Eyes, Crazy Heart, Elegy, The Box, The Other Man. The exception is The Hurt Locker, but that exceptional quality is exactly what the film is about. The overwhelming presence of love and sacrifice in these products of popular culture tells us that we continue to live with a deeply Christian imagination.

A film, I have argued, must show us a world of meaning, and it can do so only by relying on common archetypes circulating among its audience. For us, a world of meaning is one in which there is love to be found or achieved, lost or recovered. Love gives us both comedy and tragedy. The former shows us love triumphant in reordering the world. The latter shows us not the failure of love but the demands of love in a world recalcitrant to love’s ordering. Sometimes we are seized by the purity of a love that is innocent of all the sins of the world. Sometimes love will demand of us that we subject ourselves to the possibility of sacrifice. These great themes of innocence and sacrifice are the archetypes on which our narratives of love draw.

In family and state we find our identity in and through the relationships that bind us to the world. We are bound by a sense of care or, I would say, by love. With respect to these communities, small and large, individuals imagine the possibility of sacrifice. We do not condition these obligations of care on meeting a norm of justice. We do not ask of our children whether they deserve our sacrifice. Similarly, we do not choose our state on the basis of justice. It is rather the other way around: because we care about our children and state, we want them to be just.¹ Love comes before justice, sacrifice before law.

Love is not simply a matter of doing the right thing. Indeed, often in love we do the wrong thing. We cannot reason ourselves to love, and reason will not tell us what to do for the objects of our love. We sacrifice ourselves even as we recognize that the demand is unjust. What matters in love is not reason, not desire, but meaning. Love pulls us into the world of ultimate meaning. We often say that falling in love is like seeing the world anew. The point is deeper than the experience of romance. In Judeo-Christian thought God and humanity are bound to each other by love. God creates out of love, and humankind gives back that love to God. In the Old Testament this reciprocity of love produces law and sacrifice. The New Testament adds an idea of redemption and rebirth symbolized by the innocent child. Taking on the burden of Isaac’s sacrifice, Christ promises to everyone the possibility of rebirth into innocence. One symbol of that rebirth is the overcoming of law. The covenant of law is transcended by rebirth in the body of Christ.

We cannot trace a direct route from the Old and New Testaments to the social imaginary that sustains the modern nation-state. In the language I used in chapter 2, the route has been one of reasons, not causes. It has been a matter of analogy and persuasion, not necessity. Nevertheless, these ideas of love and sacrifice, of law and grace, of innocence and rebirth are the elementary building blocks of the Western social imaginary. We find them wherever we look, including in films. They are the sources of our narratives of world creation and world maintenance. In our popular films these symbolic resources have been taken up and inflected through more specific narratives of the American experience.²

The American political experience unfolds within a twofold heritage of revolution and constitution. Revolution marks the appearance of the popular sovereign, while constitution is a representation of this original act of popular sovereignty. Law represents the now-withdrawn sovereign: it is the product of “We the People.” The nation must be—revolution—and it must be something—constitution. Sovereignty captures the existential quality of the state; law captures its character as a distinct normative project. The popular sovereign is the nation conceived as an active unity: a transgenerational collective subject. The rule of law is the nation conceived as an order of representation. Sovereignty and law stand to each other as identity to representation. Seeing ourselves as members of the popular sovereign, we see law as the product of our own free act.³

Before the state can create itself as a project of law, there must be a coming into being of the sovereign entity: we the people. Revolution is that moment of popular, sovereign presence. This moment always has about it the character of the sacred—being and meaning coincide. It appears as if from nowhere, for no set of conditions “causes” a revolution. Not surprisingly, political scientists were not able to predict the revolutions of eastern Europe, or, more recently, the Arab spring. Trying to predict revolution is like trying to predict love. We cannot know in advance when and where revolution will erupt because it is not a natural event but a way of understanding self and community.

There is no scale by which we can measure the value of the existence of the American popular sovereign. Can we answer the question of the point at which surrender is appropriate? We cannot because all political value begins with this singular event of the coming into being of the popular sovereign. There is no revolution without the expression of a willingness to sacrifice and no sacrifice without an experience of ultimate meaning. A claim of sovereignty is always a claim that politics can be a matter of life and death. For this reason the claim that we are entering a new, global, cosmopolitan order in which sovereignty no longer figures is always linked to the idea that war and sacrifice have been displaced by law and courts.

No proposition offered in justification of the revolutionary act is adequate to the meaning at stake. Americans claimed that their revolution was a response to British injustice; they claimed they were being treated as if they were slaves. But the colonists were slave owners, not slaves. They lived in what was arguably the freest political jurisdiction in the world. The fact that their words were not adequate to their experience hardly casts doubt on that experience.⁵ We don’t defeat a revolution by arguing that things are not so bad. We defeat it by showing that not the popular sovereign, but only a mob, is present.⁶

If revolution is the politics of the sacred, it will be as ephemeral as every other manifestation of sacred presence. Just as God gives Moses the law to function as a trace of the sacred presence even after God withdraws, the people give themselves the law as a trace of sovereign presence. We must pass from identity to representation: a revolution that fails to create a constitution fails as a revolution. We know that the revolution was an act of popular sovereignty only because of the law that it left behind. We must see through that law to the popular sovereign whose law it is. Law and sovereignty stand in a reciprocal relationship of truth: law is the truth of sovereignty, sovereignty the truth of law.

In the modern nation-state the popular sovereign wills the product of reason as its law. This is the founding myth of a state that is both democratic and enlightened. These two aspects are contingently related to each other: a sacral monarch could pursue enlightened laws; a popular sovereign can be unreasonable. The narrative of American political formation combines an experience of the sacred and a turn to reason, a violent act of sacrifice and a reasonable plan of order. As sovereign, the state is complete; as a project of reason, law is endlessly subject to reform. American law may have improved during the last two hundred years, but the popular sovereign was total, complete, and fully capable of demanding a life from the beginning. This dualism produces endless confusion and contestation between ideas of the political that emphasize law as a project of rational construction and ideas of the political as the expression of a transgenerational, collective subject whose history is the manifestation of its will. We cannot answer the question of whether law is the will of the sovereign or the expression of reason.⁷ Which expresses the modern nation-state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: law or war? We believe that we go to war to protect law, but the equation can work the other way as well: law gives expression to the identity that will be defended in acts of sacrificial violence.

At stake in these categories of revolution and constitution is the relationship of legitimacy to justice, of sacrificial violence to individual well-being, and of identity to representation. We can align these terms in two groups: the popular sovereign shows itself through violent acts of sacrifice; it has will but not reason; and it grounds the legitimacy of the law in a collective experience of transgenerational identity. The rule of law puts at its center individual well-being, which includes dignity and material prosperity; it is an evolving product of reason working out a system of relationships between rights and duties; and its normative center is justice.

Accordingly, sovereignty and law together structure the state around competing but linked concepts of identity and representation. Sovereign presence is never a matter of representation but of identity. Finding ourselves, we acknowledge the power of the sovereign to demand a life. This is the violent, sacrificial act at the foundation of the state: it is the space within which we confront enemies. Every use of political violence in defense of the nation-state is an imaginative reiteration—a memory—of this revolutionary sacrifice. Constitution is the product of this sacrifice. Thus, law always points beyond itself to its source of authority.⁸ No institution of government—not even lawmaking institutions—is itself the sovereign. Each claims to represent the sovereign. The criminal’s violation of law is not a challenge to sovereignty because the sovereign is not present, but only represented, in law. For this reason the criminal is not the enemy; the enemy challenges state sovereignty, regardless of whether it challenges its law.⁹

The relationship of revolution (sovereign) to constitution (law) is the political form of the relationship of the sacred to a text: a god who leaves no text—written or unwritten—can have no historical existence. Thus, Christ announces both the end of law and the end of history. Conversely, without the experience of the sacred a religion might remain an intelligible system of representation constituting a moral order, but it would be stripped of its claim of ultimate value. The same is true of the state: without the experience of sovereign identity we will have rules without meaning. When we cannot see through law to the popular sovereign whose work it is, we face a crisis of identity, regardless of how just the law is. The popular sovereign is an endless source of meaning that overflows every attempt at legal representation. There is always more at stake in law than law itself can say.

The puzzle—or perhaps mystery—is the movement from sovereign to law (how does identity become representation?) and from law to sovereign (how do we see identity through representation?). At stake in maintaining transparency in both directions is our capacity to understand the political order as the realization of our own freedom and to understand that freedom as a matter of ultimate meaning. To join a legal order of well-being with a sovereign order of sacrifice describes exactly the social imaginary of the modern nation-state, which for two hundred years has brought us law and war, criminals and enemies, individual prosperity and destruction. Thus, we find the pledge of a life at the conclusion of a document—the Declaration of Independence—that tells us that the function of government is to provide for the “pursuit of happiness.” For us, war has never been far from law.

These archetypes of political order are under considerable stress today. We find a fear that violence can no longer be read as sacrifice and a reciprocal fear that representation can no longer be linked to identity. Have word and flesh split apart, leaving behind the political imaginary of modernity? As evidence, we might cite the reappearance of torture in the war against terror. Torture was precisely the form of state violence characteristic of a premodern, sacral monarch. It treats the criminal as if he were the enemy. It emerges from a failure of separation of sovereignty from law.¹⁰ At places like Guantanamo the conditions for law, and thus of representation, can never quite be achieved. We might also cite the emergence of an order of international law—human rights—that disavows any connection to sovereignty. This is representation without identity, law without sacrifice. Now enemies are to be treated as criminals: wars are to end with trials. Indeed, trials and law enforcement are entirely to displace war. In response to both of these forms of contemporary anxiety, we see a longing for the recovery of the traditional connection of representation and identity. When we turn to contemporary films, we find all of these themes; we find the anxiety of separation and the longing for recovery.

Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino offers us a vivid example of the way in which these ideas of love, sacrifice, and law continue to operate in the social imaginary.¹¹ At the center of the film is a failure of representation that can only be overcome through a new act of sacrifice. That failure is seen in the inability of law to constrain violence and in the disappearance of language as a form of dialogue. Language has itself become a form of violence. A shattered working-class neighborhood of Detroit has returned to the state of nature, characterized by violence and loneliness. Violence must be contained by law, but that cannot happen until the law, a shared system of representation, is refounded in love. Before there can be law or language, there must be faith. But in what? Where can we find a love adequate to ground the sacrificial act of faith?

Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War veteran now retired from his job on an automobile assembly line in Detroit. As the film opens, his wife has just died. He is attending her funeral at the local Catholic church. We quickly learn that he is a man without faith: he has little patience for the priest who tries to console him, as Kowalski’s wife had asked him to do. Walt thinks the priest a child who knows nothing about the world. Walt is estranged from his own children as well, living alone in a house that he has occupied for decades. He speaks mostly to himself—and to his dog—in a language filled with racial slurs and insults. His anger at the world seems boundless; he is completely alone.

His isolation and anger result from more than the recent loss of his wife. A larger loss of community sets him apart. He no longer works at the assembly plant; his neighborhood is filling with Asian immigrants as the children of his generation move to the suburbs. There is, however, something even deeper that is driving his isolation: his experience in Korea. He is haunted by the memory of killing a young Korean soldier who was trying to surrender. He carries with him this secret, that he has killed the innocent. However little he may think of everyone else—family, neighbors, priest—he knows that he has killed unjustly. His memory of Korea is not of sacrifice but of murder. This is the fundamental disturbance at the center of his moral universe: he is not innocent. He is unable to find redemption or relief. He is a man without faith and, once his wife dies, without love.

He is the veteran haunted by the knowledge that he is a war criminal. The political has lost its foundation as a source of ultimate meaning. That absence of a transcendent identity now plays itself out as the collapse of the order of representation—of language and law. Having killed, he is now a sort of perpetual outsider inhabiting the edge, always looking in, for he knows a truth that can neither be spoken nor heard. He is exacting upon himself a form of punishment, retreating into the boundaries of his own small plot of land. This he will defend with deadly force; he sits on his porch with a loaded gun. He has become a nation of one, at war with everything beyond the edge of his plot.

Walt has lost the narrative of the state. Driven into himself, he has lost family, workplace, community, and church. None of these communities can offer him absolution for his act of murder. The church literally cannot fathom his sin, concerned more with sexual morality than political killing.¹² Late in the film, when Walt goes for a final confession after many decades of staying away, he admits to a wayward kiss but not to an act of murder. In the church’s view he is a man hardly marked by sin at all. This church no longer speaks to the modern condition.

Walt’s act of violent killing undermines the entire order of representation. When murder displaces sacrifice, the political order loses its foundation. The order of law—the political order—is failing in every dimension: crime, community decay, displacement. His neighborhood is filling with Hmong immigrants who have themselves suffered a similar collapse of their traditional community. They, too, are the victims of a political killing that was not a sacrifice. Just as Walt’s children have gone to the suburbs to pursue the material values of the middle class, the children of his new neighbors are also pursuing material values but now in the form of crime and gang violence. In truth he shares most with the matriarch of the Hmong household next door—a person with whom he cannot even speak. Both of them look out on the world of violent decay from their front porches.

Despite his racial and ethnic prejudices, he is drawn to his Hmong neighbors who are trying to hold on to traditional family values. He is drawn in accidentally, when the young teenage boy who lives next door bungles a burglary of Walt’s prized Gran Torino. The burglary was an initiation ritual into a gang that the boy does not really want to join. The Hmong family forces the would-be criminal to make amends for his attempted crime by helping Walt with various chores. Walt meets the articulate older daughter, who invites him over to share in a family celebration. He soon finds himself intervening to save her from her own poor judgment about a boy. Walt is, in short, becoming a father figure to both of these teenagers.

The movie develops through his growing attachment to this family. To them he is the outsider, who becomes the protector and savior from the surrounding violence.¹³ He is armed and threatens the attacking gang. For this he is welcomed into the larger Hmong community. He finds there the meaningful world that had otherwise escaped him. The outside protector is a familiar anthropological figure, appearing in the myth of kingly origins, as well as in the myth of the savior god.¹⁴ Walt, in the end, must act out the role of savior through an act of sacrifice that reestablishes the order of law. Roles have been reversed: the Polish, blue-collar worker is the outsider in his transformed neighborhood. He must recreate the possibility of the state. Doing so, he not only grounds the new community of law, but he redeems himself from a fallen world.

An uneducated man of deep racial prejudice, Walt elides the Korean youth he killed and the Hmong boy next door. He is determined to “save” the Hmong boy from the violence that threatens him. He wants to teach him “how to be a man,” which for Walt means to be able to support and defend one’s family. Walt must do more, however, for the community in which they live is quickly approaching the violent chaos of a state of nature. The gang attacks the neighbor’s house and rapes the daughter. Self-possession and independence are not possible in the collapsing neighborhoods of Detroit. One cannot live with the threat of violence without the protection of law. What is required is the refounding of the state.

Recovery of political order is possible only with a successful act of sacrifice, which is exactly what we see. Walt stages what we expect to be an act of revenge against the gang members, but, in fact, he offers himself as a sacrifice. He confronts them without a weapon and invites their act of violence against him. He has, however, arranged for the police to arrive just as the killing occurs. There will be no problem of silenced witnesses this time. He literally suffers a violent, sacrificial death to secure again the foundations of law: the police arrest his killers who are also the violators of the children he had come to love. This is his act of atonement for the murder committed long ago. This sacrificial act brings forth the possibility of spoken memory, of familial love, and all of the other virtues of a community secure under law.

This figure who began the film as completely irreligious and alone becomes deeply religious and communal. He takes up the burden of giving himself in an act of sacrifice that founds an order of law. He has no otherworldly faith, only the faith that comes with love. Without this willingness to sacrifice, politics becomes mere violence, communities return to the state of nature, people lose their capacity to speak, and families dissolve. Before there can be law, there must be an original act of sacrifice. Not the violent elimination of the other, but the giving up of the self in an act of love founds the state. Absent that sacrificial origin, law is a weak force—so weak, in fact, that it makes no appearance in the film until that final moment.

There must be a movement from love to law. Without that movement sacrifice is only another killing, and killing—as Walt shows us—is the end of language and community. The polity is secured not simply by the justice of its law but by the knowledge that at stake in this order of representation is a meaningful world—a world founded in love. The film follows the deepest imaginative form that we have, from sacrifice to law, from identity to representation. This is a story that we know so deeply that we need only the barest indications in the film to understand that Walt is the modern sacrificial combatant who has taken on himself the task of reclaiming the world for love.¹⁵

Gran Torino offers us a democratic vision of the founding myth of political sacrifice. Walt is everyman as veteran. We find another version of this founding myth in Taken.¹⁶ Again, the state is in need of a refounding in an act of sacrificial violence; again, there is the problematic relationship of law to love, of representation to identity. But now comedy has replaced tragedy. There remains the willingness to sacrifice the self, but in comedy it never comes to that: the killing of the enemy is enough to refound an order of love. This is the comedy of the superhero, who may not make us laugh but reassures us that all will be well.

That politics can be an order of freedom depends on maintaining the relationship between identity and representation. We must see law as an order of representation that we have given ourselves. We are, however, increasingly uncertain about how to do so. Sometimes our anxieties focus on violence that can no longer be imagined as sacrifice, sometimes on law that tells us what to do but not who we are. Meaningless violence is matched by meaningless law. Taken projects both forms of anxiety onto the relationship of the United States to France. Just as in the mid-twentieth century, France’s failure adequately to defend itself results in a threat to the United States. Again, there is invasion; again, there is collaboration. The questionable political morality of the Europeans results in a defeat that calls for a response from the morally virtuous Americans. Now, however, not the German military but the Albanian Mafia are the enemy. This time the Americans come in the form of a lone combatant.

A teenage daughter on vacation in Paris is seized by Albanian criminals who traffic in innocent girls. The girls are drugged and sold into the sex-slave trade. They become mere bodies, without national or familial identity. Their value is as commodities sold to rich Arabs. This particular girl’s father, however, is an ex-CIA operative. He recently retired in order to reconnect with his daughter. He has, as he puts it, a “very particular set of skills,” learned through fighting the enemies of the state. Those skills are the administration of violent death, including torture.

Here we have all the basic elements of a modern political crisis of the failure of law. There has been an invasion by people—the Albanians—willing to deploy violence against the very heart of the domestic order—the virgin daughter. Their actions are formally criminal. Nevertheless, the instruments of ordinary law enforcement will no longer protect the family. The criminals have already bought off the French police, but one suspects the problem runs deeper. The police have no interest in risking their lives to defeat a criminal who threatens lethal violence. Policing has become just another job within a bureaucracy; it is not a site of sacrifice. If society is to be defended, this criminal must be seen for what he is: the enemy. If the police cannot see the enemy, they will see the virtuous combatant as a criminal. The father, accordingly, must fend off the police even as he attacks the enemy.¹⁷ By the end of the movie every person involved in the attack on the daughter has been killed by her father. None are punished; all are killed. Those who attack the objects of our love are always enemies, not criminals.¹⁸

In the prehistory of the film, the father had acted out of love of country. He had given up his relationship to his own family in order to kill the state’s enemies. He is the modern warrior. There seems, however, to have been no way to manage the relationship between the public and the private in his life. He had chosen to defend the state, but now he has given up that public role in order to try to recapture his private life. As a father he does not quite know what to do. Of what use are his special skills in seeking the love of a teenage daughter? Like his French counterpart—also an ex-agent—he turns those skills into a source of employment to provide for his family. Unlike the counterpart, he remains virtuous. He has the innocence of an American, searching for domestic virtues of love even within the materialistic world of pop culture. Like Walt he is an outsider to contemporary culture, and as with Walt the source of his estrangement is his killing for the state.¹⁹

His sense of displacement suggests a broader theme: mastery of violence is that upon which the state relies but that which it cannot admit. He cannot tell his family that he kills for the state. This silence makes him a stranger to their life. His wife leaves him; his daughter does not know him. Thus, he must choose between warrior and father. The failure of acknowledgment, moreover, threatens the entire political project: not just he, but his entire crew, has abandoned the state for private life, turning their skills to market ends.

The larger point is that contemporary states are turning from deployment of violence against their enemies to law enforcement against criminals. In the United States, where everything is privatized, the ex-warriors become private security guards; in France the ex-warrior becomes a policeman. This turn from enemy to criminal corresponds to a change in the character of the private from the familial as a site of love to the familial as a site of consumption. A world without enemies is strangely a world without love. The family is subject to the same tension of identity and representation that we find in the political. The criminals in the film are always represented as acting for money alone. Doing so, they destroy love. The merchant of sex tells the father, right before he is killed, that “there was nothing personal” in his business of selling the daughter. The father replies that for him “it is all personal.”²⁰

France represents the anxieties of what the United States might become. It no longer has enemies because it will not defend its borders. Paris is completely penetrated by others, from the Albanian Mafia to Arab princes who purchase the enslaved children of the virtuous. The borderless character of Paris is symbolized by Rue de Paradise, where the Albanians process the captured young girls. It is a place of family lost and of police corruption. It must become the place of battle, at which the American tortures and kills the enemy. The problem of not becoming France is simultaneously that of saving love of family and of refounding the state.

We might describe the narrative arc of the film as the effort to find a language for love that can manage the relationship of identity to representation. As the unrecognized warrior, the father performs that which cannot be spoken: the sacrificial killing and being killed that maintains the state. Coming back to his family, he is looking for a way to express his love. At the beginning of the film he is failing: he can do no more than purchase a gift (interestingly a karaoke machine) for his daughter, which is immediately displaced by a larger gift from her stepfather (himself a vaguely corrupt business man). When the father voices concern for his daughter’s safety before her trip to Paris, he is not heard. Only after the violent performance of killing all who threaten his family is there recognition of the warrior’s love. The fundamental point of this combat is to demonstrate the willingness to sacrifice the self for the sake of love. The family has now been refounded on the violent act of combat with the enemy. Saving his daughter from the enemy in a borderless Paris, the father returns with his daughter across the defended border of the United States.²¹

The end of the film shows us love triumphant, not only because he has saved his daughter but because the familial world can now acknowledge its dependence on the violence of killing and being killed. That which could not be said at the start of the film is now fully in view. Stepping back just slightly, we can see that sacrificial violence has been given a script, which is the film itself. A recognized sacrifice is violence given voice; it is identity founding representation. Now, we can move on to the normal order of representation—the world of law and family—without losing ourselves.

The father knows exactly who he is when he puts his own life at risk by engaging the enemy. He has always been the warrior for love. He has not changed, but his family can, at the end, acknowledge its own dependence on that violence. The film succeeds when the audience finds itself in the same position as the family: we read this act of violence as the refounding of the state. The enemy must be killed to refound the state in an act of love. Love unites the public and the private and teaches that both are dependent on a willingness to sacrifice. Law without sovereignty divides us from ourselves and, in the end, will not protect us from our enemies. It will not do so because it is blind to the fact that we have enemies.²²

A very old political drama is being recreated in a democratic form here. The family that is now at the center of the state is not that of the king but of everyman. The sovereign actor is now the people. Before they can represent themselves through law, they must take up the burden of sacrificial violence. Only for love will we risk our own lives and kill others. To the action of love all opposition seems evil. We know just one thing: this threat must be destroyed. Only when love defeats evil, when the border is secured and the state of nature has been left behind, can we again have a world of representation.

Does it matter that the father survives, although injured, in his battle to save his daughter? Only as comedy stands to tragedy. Walt Kowalski is killed in a hail of bullets, but the father in Taken is never touched, no matter how many bullets are aimed at him. The modern comedy of violence is a form of magical realism. It constructs a hero with superhuman powers who cannot be killed by human hands. The point, however, is not funny at all. It is the willingness to die that creates the license to kill. Out of that reciprocity of sacrificial violence comes the modern nation-state. This reciprocal form of violence marks the domain of the political; to enter it is to take on the burden of founding the state. Indeed, survival can be more problematic than death for the veteran. This was exactly Walt’s problem: he survived Korea and thus came to see himself as a murderer rather than a sacrificial combatant.²³

A third film, The Dark Knight (a Batman remake), provides us a more explicit consideration of the mythical character of the act of sacrificial violence that founds the order of representation that is law.²⁴ Again, the film begins with a situation of violence that threatens the destruction of the legal order of the state. The objects of attack symbolize the promise of individual well-being made by modern law: the hospital and the family. Again, there is penetration from abroad; again, there is corruption of the police. Law enforcement is not sacrifice; the police are paid for their services. They are always subject to corruption because they do not act out of love. The police, accordingly, are never up to the task of protecting us from unrestrained violence. That is the point at which the criminal becomes the enemy, and the law does not protect us from enemies. This transition from criminal to enemy is marked in the film by the move from the criminal association—the mob—to the Joker as the source of the violent threat.

If the police will not protect us, the heroic combatant must come from outside, bringing again his special skills. The film presents this mythical theme in its comic-book form, but the point remains serious: a mythic exchange of violence—a willingness to kill and be killed—founds the order of law. When law collapses, there must be a refounding. That act must itself be grounded in love. Rather than the love between father and child, here we have a complex triad involving the figure of law—the DA—and the figure of the warrior—Batman—loving the same person, Rachel. There is only one way to resolve this competition in love: she must die as the sacrificial figure.²⁵

As in the two other films I have discussed in this section, love marks the point of indistinction between the public and the private. State and family intersect at the point of unity that is the willingness to kill and be killed. Sacrifice does not distinguish between family and state as the object of love: one sacrifices for the state to protect the family. In a democratic society we know this as a kind of practical first principle: a necessary condition of a legitimate war is that the state convince the mothers to give up their children. This is a drama that we see acted out regularly with the return to the family of the body of the child who has made what we continue to call “the ultimate sacrifice.”

The person against whom one sacrifices is the enemy. The Joker is the criminal who has become the enemy because he puts at risk family and state. The great choice he puts to Batman is whether to save the law—in the person of the DA—or love—in the person of Rachel. This is precisely an expression of evil for it splits apart what is supposed to be the single order of family and state.²⁶ Batman chooses love, but the evil genius anticipates this choice, reversing the location of the two potential victims.

Killing Rachel, murdering love, signifies the Joker’s transition from criminal to enemy. Now, he literally announces that he will rule the city. To defeat the enemy, the citizens must offer themselves up in an act that expresses their own willingness to sacrifice. This point is expressed in a critical scene of two ferries, in which the people on each boat are told they can save themselves but only by destroying the other. Neither group acts. This is the appearance of the popular sovereign: a democratic taking on of sacrifice for the sake of the nation. Interestingly, one of the ferries is transporting criminals who had been serving time in the state’s prisons. This is their redemptive moment. These criminals are not the enemy. They may have violated the law, but they remain a part of the popular sovereign.

The origin of the state rests in this willingness of citizens to sacrifice themselves. Sacrifice is always violence beyond law. The Dark Knight expresses this idea when we see the DA, the figure of law, literally go insane with the knowledge of the death of Rachel. He cannot translate loss of the beloved into a political narrative of sacrifice. He responds by trying to kill all those associated with her death, including those who tried, but failed, to save her. His violence is the senselessness of love lost. This is violence incapable of founding representation. Law does not have the capacity to found itself; it cannot look at its own origins without going insane.

Taken ends with us asking what happens next: can the moment of unity, of acknowledgment that ordinary life within the state requires the extraordinary act of sacrifice, actually sustain itself? The Dark Knight emphatically answers “no.” After love is murdered and law goes insane, the question of the origin of the state is wide open. Again, the state must be protected by the special skills of the combatant: violence before law. This failure of law and turn to war cannot be recognized, however, without undermining the imaginative construction of the state. Law must win, meaning the originary act of violence must be suppressed from the imagination. Thus, the final act of the movie is one of sacrifice of the warrior for the law. The protector of the state, who acts outside of law for the sake of love, himself becomes the criminal. He is, in René Girard’s terms, “the scapegoat.”²⁷ Ironically, the comic-book film is far more tragic than Taken.

The legal order is a fiction that cannot see the truth of its own foundation. We must believe in law, if law is to have any chance of success, but the conditions of that belief include a denial of the place of violent sacrifice in sustaining the state. This is just where Taken begins; it is where The Dark Knight ends. There is a fear that clear vision would drive us all insane, for what the state demands of us is simply too much to live with. We are reminded of Walt’s isolation in Gran Torino: he saw murder instead of sacrifice on the battlefield. The legal order of the state promises individual well-being—the protection of life and property—but the sovereign state also makes a claim on every life and all of the material resources within its jurisdiction. It will take the objects of our love: the children sacrificed in battle. Since the birth of the nuclear age, the threat of the state to destroy everything it promises to protect has been the background condition of the life of each of us. We cannot bear to look at this. Our films are not far from our philosophers on this point: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”²⁸

The anxiety from which these films begin is the failure of law to protect us from violence. Each constructs an image of the enemy that threatens the order of love. They show us the reconstruction from below of an alignment of the private and public orders of love. This is the modern version of the premodern alignment of love and the state from above: the sacral monarch’s love sustained the body of the state. His life was a drama of sacrificial death and rebirth, as he gave up the finite body and took on the mystical corpus of the state. The sacrificial warrior, whether modern or premodern, comes from outside of the law. He is not a figure of representation but rather the embodied presence of the sovereign. As such, he recovers that unity of being and meaning that is the mystical corpus of the state.

Not the royal family but the family of everyman has become the center of meaning of the state. Not commerce, not wealth, not even physical well-being—but love. The state must be defended by the action of love. These films suggest that only when we are willing to engage in sacrifice can the world sustain an ultimate meaning. If we lose faith in that meaning, then we will lose everything, for a world without faith is a world without love.

Love is not the answer to the question of justice. It is, however, a necessary condition of a state that would seek justice through law. Politics is not exhausted by the system of representation that is law. Before there is representation, there must be identity, and there is no identity without love. When we “know” that love is a matter of life and death, that love is not love unless it will support an act of sacrifice, we are as deep as we can be in the Western social imaginary. This is the lingering presence of the sacred. We see in these popular imaginative constructions a longing for unity, which is also a fear that without sacrificial renewal the double character of the modern state—identity and representation—will simply fall apart.

Here we find an important source of contemporary political anxiety: can we still see violence as sacrifice? Sacrifice cut loose from text is simply violent destruction. The link between identity and representation is broken. The victim dies a “senseless death.” That death is an act of murder, not sacrifice. We cannot give it meaning, beyond the privative meaning of the destruction of personal identity. The loss cannot be read politically; it is only mourned privately.²⁹ The failure of sacrifice, and the consequences of reading a political killing as murder, is just where Gran Torino begins.

The failure of political violence to signify anything beyond personal destruction is, of course, the theme of countless films. If the violent act fails as political sacrifice, then its meaning is limited to the personal narrative of suffering. The cinematic portrayal of the failed sacrifice can attach at the scene of violence, producing a picture of senseless—or insane—destruction; alternatively, it can attach subsequently, as the theme becomes that of personal recovery from destruction without meaning. Not surprisingly, the war in Vietnam gave us many examples of both. The first genre is represented by Apocalypse Now, the second by Born on the Fourth of July.³⁰ A more recent film that attempts to occupy this fracture between identity and representation is Quentin Tarantino’s reimagining of World War II, Inglourious Basterds.³¹

Two ideas are central to Tarantino’s movie: first, film—a system of representation—can speak only to other films; second, violence can only generate more violence. So deep is the divide Tarantino imagines between representation and identity that for film to become effective in the world, it must give up its character as representation and work instead as a flammable material. Films quite literally become the material for a bomb. Similarly, if representation is to breach the wall of fiction, it must be literally carved in the flesh. Thus, the most powerful moment in the film is the insistence on marking surviving Nazis with a swastika carved on their foreheads.

Two plotlines run through the movie, making contact but not intersecting in a single narrative. The first begins with the vicious killing of a Jewish family hiding in a farmhouse in France. Only the eldest daughter escapes. The movie will end when she has her revenge by burning down a Parisian cinema house that she has mysteriously come to own. She burns it down, using a large cache of films as an incendiary device, while it is hosting all of the Nazi leadership at the premiere of a propaganda film. The Nazis’ violent act of destroying her family can lead only to the reciprocal violence of revenge. She herself will die simultaneously with the burning but now in a miniature subplot that again involves an exchange of violence: killing for killing.

The film moves along on these cycles of violence, which mark the political domain as a part of nature as much as something man-made.³² But the movie becomes much more interesting when we see that it is not simply a modern version of a Greek tragedy demonstrating the unlimited demand for revenge. There is a parallel theme moving through the movie, which has to do with the nature of representation. Because the film breaks any link between representation and identity—Hitler dies, and the war ends in the film’s narrative—the film’s meaning is constituted in a closed system of representation. In particular, the film refers endlessly to other films.³³ As representation it places itself not in relationship to a history of violence but in relationship to a network of other representations.

Violence leads only to more violence; representation leads only to more representation. There is a virtually unbridgeable gap between representation and identity. I say virtually because there is one point of contact: the swastikas that are literally the word become flesh. The hero—or is he an antihero?—explains that he carves the swastika on the forehead because he cannot “abide” the idea that these Nazis will take off their uniforms, as if they could remake themselves by adopting a new form of representation. Of course, this is exactly what the film does with history.

Short of the carved image in the flesh, we cannot attach representation to identity. Every history is a fiction. To see the groundlessness of representation is as intolerable as seeing the meaninglessness of violence. Thus, the desire—the need—to mark the flesh in an unalterable manner. To move from the presence of sovereign violence to a stable legal order, there must be a capacity to write the narrative in the flesh of the sacrificial victim. This was Lincoln’s theme at Gettysburg: sacrifice for a proposition, identity become representation. Law must be read out of sacrifice if representation is to find its source in identity. Tarantino splits the world into parallel universes of violence and representation, bridged only by the sign carved in the flesh. This is the only firm point from which we can begin again after the war. Anything else that we might say would be false: a theme picked up internally in the movie by multiple failures of language.

Inglourious Basterds struggles with the postmodern condition of a failing relationship between identity and representation. In the film every narrative is false—from the largest narrative of the successful attack on Hitler and his cohort to false uniforms, to false eloquence. The insistence that the surviving Nazi bear the swastika is a desperate effort to stabilize a single true representation. With that mark we know who we confront. Here we can see the enemy. He is marked as Cain is marked at the moment of origins. From this stable point, where flesh and representation coincide, perhaps we can begin again. Cain went on to found cities. Tarantino is not so sanguine.

Inglourious Basterds offers a similar invocation of that earlier war. It rewrites the narrative of the Second World War to say something about our contemporary war on terror. An earlier generation struggled with much the same problem in interpreting the violence of the Vietnam War. Here we can take an older film, Forrest Gump, as an example.³⁴ Gump has the ubiquity of the popular sovereign. He is present at every decisive moment in the nation’s recent history; he stands with presidents and with protestors; he fights in Vietnam and runs a small business. He is symbolically everywhere. He is the nation, pure but also senseless. The extent of his capacity to represent is drawn figuratively in the happy face and expressed in his singular insight, “Shit happens.” Precisely because he is an innocent, he can be filled by the meaning of the sovereign. Gump is always exactly what he seems; he is America as presence, not instrument to some other end. For Gump representation and identity coincide. What he does, he does without ambiguity or doubt. Without intelligence Gump is of the body—as athlete and soldier. Political identity, too, attaches directly to the body.

If Gump expresses the wholeness of sovereign presence, all those around him are experiencing the failure of representation. For them the violence of the state is without meaning. They are killed or injured for no reason. An unbridgeable gap has opened between identity and representation. That gap is Vietnam, which is both a place and an era. Violence has been detached from any representational claim.³⁵ Without a discernible political purpose it results only in destruction. Instead of a readable politics of sacrifice, we see a counterpolitics in the huge demonstrations on the mall. Who now embodies the sovereign—protestors or soldiers? That counterpolitics fails to become a revolution, however, for it fails to produce a stable representation of itself. Without that, popular political mobilization falls apart as individuals succumb to the pathologies of sex, drugs, alcohol, and eventually AIDS.

Our choices seem stark. The politics of identity, on the one hand, is a tale told by an idiot. A politics of representation, on the other hand, is transparently false. No representational claims can justify Vietnam. Government has become a reckless instrument of our own destruction. Political violence has been unleashed from any plausible representative claim, but still it comes. The uncontrollable character of violence makes a political project that links sovereignty to law, identity to representation, impossible. This is a critical element in the imaginative deconstruction of the modern nation-state: violence has been stripped of its representational significance. What proposition are we defending once the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is seen as a misrepresentation? False claims construct a false sacrifice—there is only the violence. That Resolution stands to that era as the Yoo torture memoranda stand to our own: misrepresentations covering over a world of violence begetting more violence. One has to be an idiot to see it otherwise.

Gump knows one thing: love. He loves his childhood friend, Jenny; he loves his mother; he loves his comrades from Vietnam. Love is at the foundation of community. Gump will sacrifice completely for the objects of his love. One does not need representational intelligence to succeed in love. Indeed, just the opposite. Thinking too much, we may question love. Can faith survive philosophy? Can sovereignty survive jurisprudence?

If violence can no longer support representation, then the modern nation-state is a failed project. That state depended on the capacity of the political imagination to suture identity to representation through sacrifice. But Forrest Gump and the other Vietnam films suggest that violence can no longer bear a political meaning. The political choice for violence ends with destruction, not creation. Violence that cannot be sacrifice exists in a world in which we have no enemies—or at least have no way of determining who they are. If we cannot be sure who our enemies are, then we cannot be sure that the government is not itself criminal. Who is the criminal at Abu Ghraib?³⁶

A History of Violence takes up directly the question of whether violence can have a human, or only a natural, history.³⁷ The human history of violence is the political narrative of the nation. A history of violence stripped of the connection to the political is only a series of causes and effects—the same as any other natural force. If violence is a force of nature that cannot be turned to human purposes, it can only destroy, not create. The history of violence at stake in the film is a natural, not a human, history. The human life of the protagonist only begins with the turn away from violence to the familial virtues of small-town life. The narrative does not extend back before that turn.

In questioning the capacity of violence to suture identity to representation, A History of Violence is in many ways the opposite of Taken. In both films a father has turned to the familial, giving up his special skills in the administration of violence. In both, violence invades the familial, and those special skills must be retrieved to secure the family. But there is no celebration of unity through sacrifice in A History of Violence. There is no recognition of a founding act of sacrifice. There is only the relentless message that violence can destroy but cannot create. Violence produces only more violence. The history of violence is the invasion of a natural force, like a virus destroying members of the family.

The history of violence is not to be celebrated; it is not to be imagined in a narrative of sacrifice. It is history that is best left dead—unrecovered and unseen. Violence cannot enter into the human world of discourse without destroying that world.³⁸ Thus, the protagonist has lived twenty years without speaking of this past. No one suspects anything, for there is no deficiency here. He has a full life, not one that lacks meaning. He is secure in family and community. Violence invades from outside, but this invasion cannot be represented as the threat of the enemy. There is no enemy to be defeated; there is only a disruption caused by the natural consequences of his own past violence.

This world of violence that can only destroy meaning is one in which the categories of criminal and enemy are completely unhinged. The invaders from the past are criminals, but so is the protagonist. We might also consider them enemies, since they threaten the family. Yet it turns out that they are all directed by the protagonist’s brother. Which side of the line is family on? Violence is destructive of every possible representation. It is world destroying, not world creating. Criminal and enemy cannot frame the imaginary at work in the film because no one can speak about violence at all.

Despite its nonpolitical framing, this is a relentlessly political movie. Violence begets violence, and all violence destroys meaning. The protagonist’s history of violence founded nothing. It was, instead, the original sin that might still destroy all that he constructs. Violence has a past, but it is to have no future. The protagonist is not far from the veteran trying to flee the memory of his violent past. That he worked for a criminal organization—the Mafia—does not differentiate him from the Vietnam veteran who believes that he killed for no reason at all or, for that matter, from Walt Kowalski, who believed that Korea made him a murderer. The question for us is whether we still believe in the possibility of the redemptive act of sacrifice that founds and refounds the nation. Can violence any longer be harnessed to a representational end? Can it have meaning? This is not just a question for the narrative of contemporary films but has been deeply a part of our politics for the last decade.

Arguably, the war on terror has failed in this dimension of representation. What is the narrative at this point? Instead of linking sacrificial violence to constitution, violence at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo was linked to pornographic representation. Applying the criminal law to these acts of violence, we hope for a normalization that will dismiss the incidents of torture as “without meaning”—a story of the criminal pathology of a few “bad apples.” But we do this knowing that torture was not aberrational and was not random.³⁹ The torturer threatens to become a symbol of the combatant in the war on terror: we don’t know whether to script our own political violence as murder or sacrifice.

We literally do not know what to make of the detainees. We cannot see in their bodies a representation of any sort of law. We can attach no text to them. A better term for them would have been the “alawful.” Understood as pure violence—senseless violence—they become the object of senseless violence. Is this the criminal or the enemy? How could we begin to answer that question? They are the speechless and the unspoken. They occupy the same position as the “disappeared” in other wars on terror. Their recovery has been a matter of trying again to give them voice by giving them representation within the law. The black hole of Guantanamo is to be illuminated by the extension of a legal regime. But law as a system of representation keeps crashing against their bodies. Thus, they can be tried, but they will not be released.⁴⁰

The detainees are a product of a world in which the relationship of representation and identity can no longer be managed. In that world we go silent in the face of violence. This is the politics of the disappeared and the tortured. Because we cannot speak what is actually happening, they will be held beyond the gaze of law. We will have a political crisis whenever there is a penetration of that sovereign violence by the legal imaginary. That may be the best way to characterize the last decade of experience of the American political imaginary.

We are close to a fictional narrative in all of this. Tarantino is our modern chronicler of the state. With him we wonder whether violence can be controlled to advance an articulable political end. Are narrative and violence no longer capable of supporting each other? We find ourselves again in a “quagmire” that can only be sustained by deception or naive innocence. Cheney was our agent of deception. Was Bush our Forrest Gump?

When sacrifice can no longer link representation to identity, politics becomes a world of words without referents, on the one hand, and uncontrolled violence, on the other. We have claims that we are threatened by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but there are no weapons. We have denials of what everyone knows and affirmations of what no one believes. No one is invested in any particular representational claim because no one believes in the truth of what is said. Words are spoken for their effect, not their truth. Political speech is always on the verge of being exposed as falsehood. Actions taken become the immediate object of regret, for we believe we were not truly ourselves at the moment that we were persuaded. Thus, America goes to war in Iraq in what comes rapidly to be seen as an act of bad faith. We want to affirm the meaning of the combatant’s death as an act of sacrifice, but we cannot actually say for what he died. It was “the wrong war,” but we are not sure we can find the right one.

There is nothing new in this. The law of the state has long been a script read off the body of the citizen-soldier. Lincoln spoke of this in his famous Lyceum speech, when he linked law to revolution through the body of the Revolutionary War veteran. Those bodies provided “a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related—a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned.”⁴¹ A state that can no longer read law off the wounded body is one that can no longer call on its citizens to sacrifice. Lincoln worried that we cannot have reverence for law without the willingness to sacrifice. His own life and death became a test of this proposition linking identity and representation.

Today, our Lincolnesque worries are not presented in formal lectures at the local lyceum but in the imaginative production of film. The longing for the unity of sacrifice as the point of intersection of identity and representation was my first topic in this chapter. It provides the archetype upon which a film like Gran Torino relies. The failure of sacrifice when violence resists representation was my second. This produced the anxiety of senseless violence, that is, a violence that could not be read. This is the archetype we find in a film like Inglourious Basterds. A similar anxiety arises from the other direction, when representation cannot attach to identity. Now, representation closes in on itself; it becomes a symbolic system in which the elements point only to other elements in the system. It has then the closed character of a code. The code knows only itself; it offers no answer to the question “Who am I?” This generates a Kafkaesque anxiety of representation entirely displacing identity. This is a situation in which identity can get no purchase, for it is always outside the borders of representation. If law is a code, how can it be a domain of freedom? The citizen must see through the representational order of the state—law—to the popular sovereign. If the citizen can never see beyond the code, if law leads only to more law, then politics will no longer be an expression of freedom.⁴²

The imaginative linking of representation to identity does not just create the possibility of political freedom; it is the exercise of that freedom. In our ordinary political life we realize this freedom in the task of interpretation—a theme I developed in part 1. Because identity is an unlimited source of meaning, while law is a finite system of representation, the gap between the two can never be eliminated, only temporarily bridged. We can never close off the debate over the meaning of law because it always stands in relation to that inexhaustible source of meaning that is the popular sovereign. When we argue over the meaning of a constitutional norm, we are taking up the task of interpreting who we are. Interpretation is an endless effort to cross the gap between representation and identity. There is no “right” interpretation; there are only more or less persuasive interpretations. To take up this task of persuading and being persuaded is to exercise political freedom.⁴³

Closure of the system of representation would sever the link to popular sovereignty. It would undermine the claim that law is the product of freedom. Here we have the origin of the “democracy deficit” attributed to European Union law: we have law—endless law—but we have no sense that it is our law. The code manages itself as if it were the product of disembodied reason. Technicians of the law constantly adjust the elements of the law to each other through proportionality review.⁴⁴ This law no longer creates history; instead, it manages the present. Interpretation is no longer a free act of rhetorical persuasion building the connection between the transcendent value of sovereign presence and legal representation. A law that is pure representation, we might say, represents no one at all. The more complete the code, the more we gaze upon it from the outside. A law that represents no one can be a global rule, at which point the distinction of inside and outside loses any sense. Such a law would apply to everyone but belong to no one.

The fictional response to this displacement of identity through the closure of representation is to go to war with the code. Violence becomes a performance of human freedom. We are again imagining the refoundation of the political order in an act of sacrifice that will link identity to representation. Thus, the anxiety of code is a reverse image of the anxiety of violence described in the last section.

When the legal realists argued that those who believe in law as a formal system are speaking “transcendental nonsense,” they were saying that a closed system of representation can make no contact with the real forces that determine political practice.⁴⁵ Law closed in on itself is blind and therefore without any force. This is the benign form of a closed code: a fiction that cannot do the work of social regulation. More common is the anxiety that a closed system of representation is authoritarian. This was Kafka’s charge, and it continues today. This perfect system of representation tends toward a specific signature in film: representation becomes code, and code becomes machine. The dystopian vision matches human against machine.

The supercomputer HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, was an early expression of this symbolic equation of machine, code, and authority.⁴⁶ The more complete the order of representation, the more complete the denial of freedom. A computer that can operate by itself will dispense with human beings entirely. The struggle against the computer is, accordingly, a struggle to maintain control over human destiny. The film explicitly draws the connection between representation and tool. The capacity to use tools relies on the same epistemic conditions as the capacity to form a proposition. Human beings arrive on the evolutionary scene with the capacity to work with tools, which is inseparable from the capacity to talk. Language and tools evolve together such that the final tool is the computer. We fear that we will lose control of our lives to what had been brought into being only as a means. The story line is no different from that in which money—another tool of representation—comes to be an end in itself. Computers, money, law—all systems of representation—threaten this inversion in which humanity becomes the victim of its own free creations.⁴⁷

Contemporary films deepen the anxiety over this dystopian vision as the net has increasingly become a part of our everyday life. Is the net a tool for realizing our freedom, or is it creating a closed code? A perfectly ordered representational world is one in which machines govern. They do not govern through violence but through controlling representation. We are in the dystopia of The Matrix. The machine no longer has just a “mind of its own.” Rather, it makes our mind its own: representation grasps us so deeply that identity is no longer even imagined as a free act of self-creation. We are caught within the web and cannot get out.

The Matrix shows us a world in which representation is wholly detached from identity and thus is completely closed to interpretation. The matrix is a perfect system of representation, on the one hand, and a completely illusory world, on the other. Representation is coherent (or nearly so). Every proposition is linked to every other. There is a logic—the code—that guarantees coherence. Nevertheless, there is nothing on the other side of the representational propositions—not identity but illusion. We might find ourselves arguing about events and their significance within the matrix, but we are arguing about nothing. At stake in this argument is never who we are, because we are not there at all. In the end the argument itself is nothing more than a further twist of the code.

To see the closed character of the code is to discover that the freedom one thought one had was only an illusion, for everything we have done has been determined—a thought that already troubled Descartes almost four hundred years ago.⁴⁸ He, however, had to imagine the closed system of code as a sort of dream induced by an evil genius. We have the net. Genuine freedom of the will requires a violent act set against the code. Identity begins with the willingness to sacrifice—an act that cannot be explained by the code. Identity is reconnected to representation through the act that places the body, the real body, at risk. The body must take on a meaning to ground representation in identity. Thus, the point of connection between the representational world of the matrix and the reality of identity is death: to die in the matrix is really to die.

The sacrificial body is always an expression of love, which is exactly the experience of the unity of identity and representation. Morpheus, the leader of the free subjects, explains the unity of death to Neo, the would-be savior of humanity: “the body cannot live without the mind.” The deeper point, however, is about the unity of body and mind, or identity and representation, in love. Love refounds the world. In the film love not only supports sacrifice; it conquers death: Neo is brought back to life by the woman he loves, Trinity. Within the matrix, identity and representation can never be brought together. Love, accordingly, will always fight code.

We might take The Matrix as a dramatization of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant believed that our phenomenal experience constitutes the limits of what we can know. We can speak of what must be true for us within this phenomenal world, but we are never in a position to speak of a truth beyond our possible experience. Of the thing-in-itself we simply can say nothing. Experience is structured according to a set of categories. Most importantly, everything we experience is causally related to some prior event. The phenomenal world, accordingly, is a complete system of representation that allows no space for freedom. Thus, Kant faces the problem of explaining the possibility of freedom. He tries to answer that question by explaining the relationship between identity and representation. We live, he argues, in an epistemic world of representation and a moral world of freely formed identity. We can no more give up our concept of ourselves as free than we can give up the concept of causation. We know ourselves in this double aspect, even if we cannot explain it.

This, too, is where Kant ended up: the phenomenal world is our only world. Moreover, who is to say that the occupants of the matrix don’t have their own religious beliefs? Like Kant they can hold to the belief in a greater truth—the truly real—as a possibility beyond this life. The point is that the entire imaginative structure of identity and representation is always seen from a particular position. There is not some transcendent truth from which we literally build the world anew. It is always our world that we recreate in the free act. We are studying the social imaginary, not doing metaphysics.

This same fear of a dystopia in which the computer has turned against humanity is the theme of The Terminator.⁴⁹ Where The Matrix constructs the tension between freedom and representation in spatial terms—the free space is under the earth—The Terminator uses a temporal frame. Kant is again the essential reference: space and time are fundamental categories establishing the field of representation. The Terminator begins with the effort of the machines to restructure the past in order to control the present. Causation becomes a malleable representation in the world of code. This thought, too, is very Kantian: if time and space are simply categories of representation, then there is no essential reason why they cannot be altered. A perfect world of representation is no more one thing than another; it is literally plastic, as we see in those scenes of The Matrix in which those who completely master the code can change shape, defying cause and effect.⁵⁰

To defeat the machines, in The Terminator, man will have to create himself: the child must become father of the man. We are back to the drama of freedom as self-creation, which is now cast against the complete control, including temporal control, of a closed system of representation. To open up that system is to preserve the possibility of freedom. As in The Matrix, only through a willingness to sacrifice does one seize control of the meaning of one’s own life. To succeed is to link identity and representation. A system of representation—a machine—does not know sacrifice; it does not know love.⁵¹

In the closed system of representation that is this dystopia, there are no enemies, only criminals. There cannot be enemies until there is a free man. In The Matrix Neo’s birth into freedom is also his transition from criminal to enemy. He becomes “the One.” He is Christ, prosecuted as a criminal but proclaiming that the truth is not of this world. It is not code but love. What seemed life had been death, while true life is found only through death. The free man literally creates himself, which is just what we find in The Terminator as well. As in The Matrix, we are left to puzzle about the world that the free man gives himself. Having seen the future, we already know exactly what that world will be. Freedom for the political imagination always threatens to fall into a kind of apologetics.

We would not be far off to think of the contemporary international law of human rights as an image of the matrix. It, too, is a perfectly ordered system of representation: a code that governs every possible proposition. It claims the completeness of every system of law, capable of pronouncing any act legal or illegal. Its home is in the net and in networks.⁵² It purports to be a complete system of ordering a political space that is now global. The completeness of this code, however, is quite independent of its capacity to actually order the world. It is representation turned in on itself. For example, the Torture Convention comes into force in 1987 but has little relationship to state practices. The relationship it actually has may be the opposite of what it purports to command.⁵³ The law of human rights flourishes as code in the last decades of the Cold War, but there is virtually no effort to enforce this code. The conditions of its creation were the separation of law from actual political practice.⁵⁴ A law that is not taken seriously as a prescription for behavior is a law that can develop according to its own internal logic. We can talk endlessly about human rights; we can hold endless conferences and draft legal rights to respond to every need. We can do so because nothing happens beyond the talk itself.

Alongside these cinematic representations of a complete code, then, we should place the drama of the indictment of Sudan’s President Bashir by the International Criminal Court. Once again, we have the self-contained code that constructs a world detached from identity. It is a world of networks and NGOs that is actually nowhere because it purports to be everywhere. Despite its claim to omnipresence, we find ourselves outside of it. We cannot see through it to ourselves. The code would reconstruct in its own propositional logic the political acts of Bashir. He, however, has no reason to enter this matrix. To him the code is a fiction. This will remain true until there is some political community that takes possession of the code as an expression of its own identity.

Under international law Bashir is allegedly a criminal. He is a criminal because he is the “enemy of mankind.” But the enemy of mankind is not the enemy of any particular political community. None see in him an existential threat to their own community—except, of course, those fighting an actual civil war in the Sudan, who would kill him if they could. Bashir is enemy to the rest of us in name only: no one will sacrifice his or her life to defeat this enemy.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not create a single state. No one can look through the various conventions on human rights and see a sovereign act of self-creation. Just the opposite. There is nothing to see because this law is not the product of a free political act. It is “mere words.” As a closed system of representation, it announces the irrelevance of sovereignty to law. We now hear claims that under this law the individual, not the state, is sovereign.⁵⁵ But that is just another way of saying that politics is no longer a domain of freedom. No one believes that this law is given by the citizen to himself. Rather, it is given to him as if a gift, but from whom? Coming from nowhere, it has no foundation. It is not brought back from the mountain by a modern Moses. It comes from a network that has no place, no time, and no identity.

A code that strips representation from identity will verge on comedy, for surely it expresses a kind of comic hubris to think that we can so easily speak a world into being. A code that will not be defended is only words. We speak a language, but we are not speaking about anything. Like Shakespeare’s comic dramas, it is as if the entire affair is a dream: until we wake up, we think we are acting in the world, but we are not.