Raúl Ruiz, Poetics Of Cinema And “Intentionality”: Unworking The Soul’s Standardization Against The Government Of The Living.

Abstract

In the 13th century in Europe, with a focus between the Andalusian world and the Catholic reaction in the peninsula and in Paris, a metaphysical battle took place over the determination of what the “soul” is.[1] A hermeneutical dispute over the concept of soul in Aristotle—the invention of the “Arab Aristotle” and the “European Aristotle”—that would be decisive for the history of the “West” (the Occident), but not as a “central conflict”, since such is the fantasy of the “West and its other”, so that we will have to clarify, in what follows, how else we understand here the nature of this cleavage. For the moment, we can say that in the metaphysical battle of the 13th century two “enemy” ways of understanding the soul clashed: 1) according to the falásifa Averroes, the soul is understood as the radical potentiality of immanent exposure of the finite animal to the imminence of the outside, to the world of forms in the being in common in the midst of the event that exceeds it, in a supernumerary logic of being in the world and knowledge; and, in reaction to such a “doctrine,” 2) according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the soul is understood as the personal unity and “form of the body” of the animal—a body subjected to the form (law, word, image, “mask”) that turns it into a persona—whose unity depends on the unity of the world as the order of words and things and events—a unitary order guaranteed by a theological author and meta-reader in pure act—and on the insemination of that order in the perceptive, intellectual and practical soul.