Richard,
Check out Colombat's essay on Deleuze's death as event (happily found
online!): http://www.philosophy.ru/library/pdf/113444.pdf
It draws on the distinction Deleuze made between 'two types of death':
the (bourgeois) everyday anxiety around death realised in the
individual (ego) and the 'pure event' of death that is never fully
actualised. Nice primer if you want to use Deleuze's distinction
between two types of death (which he derives from Maurice Blanchot).
I thought of bereavement recently when watching _The Wedding
Crashers_...
Actually, an interesting mediation of bereavement may be found between
_The Wedding Crashers_ and _Garden State_. Both films address the
affective and social dimensions of mourning and loss in such a way that
brings into question the expected 'structures of feeling'.
In _The Wedding Crashers_ the institutions of marriage and 'death' are
separated from the events which mark a social (overcoding) threshold -
the wedding and funeral respectively. The events are highly-charged
with the affectivies of the assemblages that come together: family,
husband and wife, church/state, and so on. They are used to facilitate
cynical romance where nothing matters beyond 'hooking up'. It is a
cynical production of the 'false'; in the sense that the Vaughn and
Wilson's characters are wedding guests-more-than-wedding guests, they
are false, but expert, super wedding guests.
_Garden State_, on the other hand, has the main character coming back
to his 'home town' for his mother's funeral from the 'non-place' of Los
Angeles. His chemically induced dissaffection means that, as an actor,
he plays 'retards' so well that people actually think 'he really was
retarded'. The funeral, or rather the home-coming, serves as a
different kind of event (less Deleuzian, more Lacanian). Perhaps best
represented by the slightly cheesy 'gaping hole in the ground'
aka 'void' (the Real) scene. The 'home-coming' serves as rupture and
catalyses the main character into a transfiguration of his relation to
time (paraphrasing: 'no longer waiting to live the rest of my life,
this is part of the rest of my life').
So both represent a passage towards an (imagined) authentic or real.
However, one is produced by way of a realisation of a non-cynical
romance, the other is produced by remaking contact (an affection) with
the unspeakable 'void' of the world.
Ciao,
glen.
--
PhD Candidate
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney
Read my rants: http://glenfuller.blogspot.com/
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