Incendies

Incendies. The latest film by Quebecois director Dennis Velleneuve. This is a brilliant film, at once striking and lyrical, expressive, full of depth and dimension. A tragedy of Sophoclean proportions. Weaving together past and present into an entangled, aporetic whole, the film gives the supple impression of a world where the repercussions of what has happened endlessly unfurl, opening out, spreading into the shape of the present.

The film is adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s celebrated screenplay, Scorched. It is an apt title. I recently discovered that the term violence derives etymologically from a constellation of metaphors—fire, flame, blaze, inferno. It makes sense that this family of terms would supply Incendies its title. It is a film about what Adriana Cavarero calls Horrorism—a form of violation grounded in the experience of disfiguration, disgrace, and massacre.

Incendies projects a vision of a world enfolded in violence, but it is a world no less occasioned by survivance. Survivance, Derrida tells us, is about overliving, survivance underscores a dividend—what Bonnie Honig describes as “that surprise extra, the gift that exceeds rightful expectations, the surplus that exceeds causality.” For Gerald Vizenor, survivance “signifies the undeniable trace of presence over absence of victimry.” And this isn’t just about survival politics. Survivance sacralizes the existence of lifeworlds that persist despite their expected erasure. Survivance catalyzes a new more just future conditioned by shining hope, illumination, and affirmation. This is what Incendies is about.

But what animates survivance? From where does it come? The answer given by Incendies: promising…and forgiveness. Promising and forgiveness wield power in a world of violence and wreckage. Together the two human faculties bear the capacity to interrupt and ultimately break cycles of violence that endlessly feed on each other.

Posthumously, Nawal enjoins her twin children, Jeane and Simon, to fulfill one such promise. Jeane must locate her long lost father, and Simon his long lost brother, each delivering a sealed letter composed by their mother before her death. Distributing these letters is not just a matter of discharging a responsibility owed their mother, the promise also carries with it a promise their mother made while still alive, a promise to find her son lost at birth. This was a promise Nawal made to herself, as well as to her son. According to her final wishes, Nawal is meant to be buried naked in the ground, lacking stone or epitaph, since she failed during her life to fulfill the promise made to herself and her son. “There is no burial rite for those who betray promises,” Nawal explains. Only the promise fulfilled by her children can redeem her failure.

Not only do these promises guarantee the dead the rite of a proper burial, they also perform an important function for the world of the living. Promising dispels violence. Amidst the harrowing turmoil and frenzy of a violent outpouring the promise stands as a beckon of shining hope. Forgiveness works like this too. Nawal forgives and is forgiven. Forgiveness liberates.


This is what Arendt tells us too. Promising and forgiveness belong together, “in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose ‘sins’ hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation; and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which is the future by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men.”

The trouble here though is that Arendt is otherwise clear in her pronouncement that the power of forgiveness is located precisely in its unpredictability. Forgiveness is unpredictable because “it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way…Forgiveness is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore frees from its conseuqneces both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven,” (HC, 241). Forgiveness is unpredictable, in other words, because it avoids the reflexive and “more natural” reaction that seeks revenge and retribution.

There is something disturbing about Arendt’s formulation here. Promising is “the remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future.” But if the promise exists to quell the unpredictable, to supply its “solution,” and forgiveness is only powerful to the extent that it is unexpected, then Arendt, however inadvertently, leaves us promising never to forgive. Arendt would no doubt find such a conclusion terribly perverse. Without forgiveness we are doomed to remain captive to the irreversibility of our actions. Unforgiven, we are liable to carry on barred from further action, caught as we are in the circuit of the past’s eternal resonance. Worse, the victims of action’s irreversibility may be tempted toward the antithesis of the political, the violence of retribution.

How does this square with Incendies?