10. Film and Philosophy: Berkeley and Beckett's

Then another class that I thought went pretty well (two decent classes in one day!) on Beckett's Film.  To put in the form of a paradoxical tweet: the title refers to Buster Keaton's irreducible and insoluble condition, existing in a film of perception, not to the fact that it's a film.

But what I was glad to have articulated was the distinction opposing what I was calling the Descartes/Kant/Emersonian view that the difference between the perceived (empirical) self and the perceiving self redounded to the absolute, transcendental priority of the perceiving self's noetic vector towards freedom to the Beckett/Berkeley view that the perceived self is what actually exists (esse is percipi) and therefore our own feeble, foible-filled, failing, febrile facticity is what we actually are and what we can't escape.  Beckett's Berkeley prevents (paradoxically, again) any sublimation towards idealism, and keeps us as the inescapable sum of our accidents, always covered by, always in fact identical to, a sticky film of the local, limited, particularized being that I am.  (What Philip Roth, in The Counterlife, was parodying when Zuckerman meets a guy who plans to be cryonically frozen in order to achieve immortality when the science catches up with death.  Zuckerman shakes his head at the idea of the guy -- Barry Shuskin -- looking forward to "a billion more years of being himself.... Forever Shuskin.")  "Alas for characteristics," as James Merrill put it.