Mechanical Creativity in the Shift from the Absolute of German Idealism to Real Thinking: Towards a Transcendental Materialism of Film-Philosophy

Abstract

Film-philosophy’s tendency to dissolve boundaries between subject and object, materiality and ideality, the sensible and the intelligible, recalls the moment in German Idealism when these limits collapsed in conceiving the Absolute as the real of thinking itself—an incomprehension within thought. This gesture invokes “transcendental materialism … the emergence of self-determining, auto-reflexive transcendental subjectivity out of asubjective substance” (Johnston 18). J. G. Fichte first identified this real of incomprehension in his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre as an alien element within the loop of self-identity (I = I), which in his 1804 revision becomes a generative principle of oneness mediated by pure light—resolved in principle yet remaining in fact as the openness of an I-We realizing itself in communal life. Recognizing generative difference in the I-We as Grundreflex—an originary reflex action—opens the apperceiving eye to creative freedom in engaging with films, where light’s passage through organic machines becomes mechanical creativity. The genetic principle of pure light must be understood within the cinematic system as technical memory materializing filmic ideation in non-cinematic life as a moral imperative or “should” (Soll). Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s ciné-mnemotechnics, I apply Fichtean insights to Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, grasped in real thinking as a matrix of superpositional relations whose memory structure generates entwinements between ideation and materialization through quantum doubling. The philosophical problems confronting film-philosophy, I argue, trace back to this Idealist structure, where idealism remains essential to any materialist philosophy of film.