Richir, Tarkovsky and the Zone of Affectivity

Abstract

The object of investigation is a systematic comparison between Marc Richir’s phenomenology of affectivity and Andrei Tarkovsky’s conception of film as a living image of time, illustrated by the work “Stalker”. The idea of “archaic” or “elementary” affectivity serves as a tertium comparationis. Such a philosophical and aesthetic reflection opens the possibility of examining and reconfiguring the architectural status of classical ideas of philosophy. Both theorists treat the opposition of immanence and transcendence in a way that subverts the basic metahphysical position of ego, world and God and replaces it with a thinking of threshold, transition, or transposition. In the light of Richir, the structure of the “zone” can be read as a hyperbolic phenomenon. Only amid its simulacra and instabilities does humanity emerge as an enigma, i.e. as the self-reflexivity of a self-evolving sense of formation. This reflexivity is phenomenalized, according to our further thesis, on this side of the distinction between thinking and feeling. The essay is an attempt to contribute to phenomenological aesthetics. By means of a constellation analysis, general architectural isomorphies and coherences of both approaches are highlighted in a first approach.