There are many people I wish to thank for their help, friendship and guidance along the way. This work began in Oxford and it has been written in three countries: the UK; Ireland; and finally, New Zealand (Aotearoa), which is my original home. It is ongoing work and I plan to do other things with my existing datasets and build upon them in the future. It is hoped that this book will provide an introduction to this complex area, but it is just that: an introduction. The references provided in the footnotes and bibliography should allow readers to explore issues they are interested in further.

I should firstly like to express my gratitude to Lilian Edwards, Burkhard Schafer and Edina Harbinja, the editors of the Future Law series for Edinburgh University Press. This is my first book and I am delighted to be able to contribute to such an interesting and timely series. I should also like to thank Laura Williamson, David Lonergan, Eddie Clark, Naomi Farmer, Zuzana Ihnatova, Rebecca Mackenzie and everyone at Edinburgh University Press, and my copy-editor Helen Johnston and my indexer Lesley Wilson.

I wish to particularly thank Jonathan Herring for his guidance and invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this book. I also wish to particularly thank Stuart Newman for his comments at a much later stage. A special thank you also to my friend Saira Mian. From my time at Oxford, I also wish to thank my doctoral supervisor Jane Kaye and everyone at Oxford's HeLEX Centre, and thank you as well to my friends and colleagues, Charles Foster, Marina Jirotka, Sigrid Sterckx, Julian Cockbain, Donna Dickenson, Thana de Campos, Teresa Finlay, Michael Morrison, and Fiona Coldwell.

In this chapter, I begin to explore ‘total pain’ in the context of Saunders's interest in silence, starting with her use of photography in her lectures and published work. Saunders ‘snap’-like photographs aspire to de-medicalise how professionals look at dying patients, reframing them as people rather than medical subjects. Assessed alongside Saunders's interest in Christian existentialist theology, these images echo Saunders's wider ethos of attention and looking in which the assumed complexity of ‘total pain’ begets a form of looking that anticipates, and seeks connection with, complexity and ambiguity without recourse to narrative articulation. I link this approach to Saunders's redemptive sense of bearing witness to her patients as existing on the edge of time, both living and dying – an idea with ambiguous implications for clinical practice.

LOOKING AT PERSONS: SAUNDERS's PHOTOGRAPHS

‘Total Pain’ and Silence

I have demonstrated how Saunders's use of fragments to depict ‘total pain’ supports a holistic interpretation of the term which emphasises the affective power of episodic or incomplete verbal communication to evoke experiences that resist narrative explication. This version of ‘total pain’ might seem to sit uneasily with Saunders's promotion of talk to break down the ‘barrier of unshared truth’ in mid-twentieth-century British healthcare, which she claimed separated a patient from their family and friends when a diagnosis went untold (1978b, p. 4). Yet, Saunders's awareness of the psychic ramifications of things unsaid demonstrates that to be attentive to ‘total pain’ is to understand that silences are palpable and often, as she notes, ‘more revealing than words’ (1965b, p. 149).

All philosophies have had to deal, in one way or another, with the problems posed by our encounters with matter and with thought, by means of the sensible and the intelligible.

There is matter and there is thought, and we perceive their parts, both inside and outside of ourselves. However, matter and thought appear to us as two different things, or different realities. One is extended in space, and we perceive it through bodies located in space, including our own body; the other is not extended and appears to be located both everywhere and nowhere, and we perceive it through ideas, or more generally in souls or mental states, which we suppose to be immaterial. For ideas, while never perceived without bodies, have no spatial or material properties as bodies do, and seem to belong to a different, immaterial world. For centuries, Western philosophy has maintained the Platonic distinction between the world of bodies and the deceitful senses on the one hand, and the world of ideas proper to souls on the other – ideas which lead these souls to the light of truth.

In the seventeenth century, under the influence of the emerging modern sciences, Descartes took up this same distinction but in a modified form, considering matter and thought as two different substances, which he named ‘extended thing’ (res extensa) and ‘thinking thing’ (res cogitans). Furthermore, he marked a grammatical distinction between them, with the passive ‘extended’ and the active ‘thinking’. Despite this duality, however, and given that thoughts are never perceived without bodies, we also experi¬ence their association, notably in voluntary movements and conscious per¬ceptions where our mental and bodily states seem to interact in some way. The question thus arises of the nature of such interactions – a question that remains controversial.

Between 11 October and 5 November 1968, teenager Nagayama Norio murdered four people in a killing spree across Japan with a handgun stolen from a United States army base. In November 1957 at Plainfield, Wisconsin, Ed Gein was arrested for the murder of Bernice Worden and, confessing to the killing of another person, he was later convicted for a series of now infamous crimes. In June 1984, sixteen-year-old cheerleader Bernadette Protti stabbed her classmate to death in Orinda, California. Between 1978 and 1995, mathematician Ted Kaczynski, nicknamed the Unabomber, planted and posted handmade bombs in a nationwide attack in the United States, killing three people and injuring another twenty-three.

Spanning a spectrum of motivations from personal to political, what the four cases have in common are not only that their actions ended the lives of others but also that they became subjects of films which abided by an ethics of representation that portrayed them as fellow people. Disconcerted with the ways in which the news media illustrated these criminals, the makers of the films sought alternatives to the lures of narrative to which such outlets succumbed, and resorted to a film-making strategy that accommodates many of the tropes which have been described in this volume as slow cinema. The first, Nagayama Norio, was depicted in the film Ryakusho¯ renzoku shasatsuma (AKA Serial Killer, 1969) shot by a collective of young Japanese film-makers who sought an alternative mode of address to what was offered by the media in the illustration of their subject's life.

In a Calabrian village in southern Italy, an elderly goatherd tends to his flock by day and copes with his cough by night, workmen meticulously build a mound-like kiln to turn wood into charcoal, and an enormous tree is felled and trimmed before being erected in the centre of the village for a celebratory ritual. Seasons come and go, the goatherd dies, and a lamb is born. Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte (2010) bears the trademark of what has been called a cinema of slowness, and exemplifies a resurgence, within contemporary world cinema, of a commitment to the use of non-professional actors, location shooting, natural lighting and the long take. In this chapter, I shall delineate the context in which this cinema of slowness emerges, explicate the concept of cinematic slowness, and provide an illustration of this slow cinema by drawing on examples from the films of Tsai Ming-liang. I shall argue that Tsai's cinema of slowness challenges us to rethink the relationship between stillness and movement through a temporal aesthetics of drifting.

Fittingly, Le Quattro Volte comes from a nation that christened cinematic neorealism over sixty years ago. Not coincidentally, this country also gave birth to the Slow Food movement in 1989 when McDonald's plan to open a branch at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome triggered demonstrations at the proposed site and a movement that was founded in Paris in December that year (Kummer, 2002: 20–2). Taking a cue from the Slow Food movement, many organisations and enterprises promoting the concept of slow living have since flourished.

From the nature of things, Spinoza deduces a theory of the individual as an indispensable stage in his attempt to ‘lead us, by the hand, as it were, to the knowledge of the human Mind and its highest blessedness’ (Ethics II, Praef.). It is at this point that Spinoza formulates what may be called his solution to the mind–body problem, with his conception of the unity of the psychical and the physical, in the context of a philosophical monism as original as it is radical and which will serve as the guiding thread for the rest of the Ethics.

Some premises on the nature of bodies

Before we examine in more detail the nature of the union of mind and body as Spinoza understands it, we shall, as Spinoza himself does, take a detour past an apparently quite strange passage inserted into the second part of the Ethics: ‘On the Nature and Origin of the Mind’. Often called Spinoza's ‘abridged or small physics’ – a title that has given rise to many misunderstandings – this passage consists of a set of axioms and lemmas along with a definition and postulates. Situated between propositions 13 and 14, this passage has often been considered an anachronistic and insignificant parenthesis. The chief way it has been misunderstood consists in reading it as a draft of Spinoza's theory of physics, thereby making it comparable to the contributions his contemporaries made to the foundations of modern physics.

However, if we place this passage in its proper context, we can recognise in it a theory of the individual conceived as a composite body, as opposed to a theory of physics.

Henri Atlan's book is an essential contribution to the development of Spinoza studies. By staging a confrontation between Spinoza's philosophy and contemporary neurobiology and artificial intelligence, Atlan sheds a new and powerful light on both this philosophy and these sciences. This is primarily because the insights that emerge from this confrontation are shared, and therefore reciprocal: they result not from a unilateral application of one of these fields to the other, but proceed from a perpetual back and forth between them, a movement that preserves their specific natures as these have been determined by their inscription in their own singular histories. The aim of Atlan's book is therefore neither to philosophically ground contemporary scientific discoveries by means of some dizzying backflip, nor to use these discoveries to validate philosophical arguments developed in a different con¬text and a different language. His aim is instead to make two distinct types of intellectual activities react, in a timeshift, to one another, their irreducibility being no obstacle to their encounter and to the emergence of surprising cor¬respondences between them. To characterise this encounter, one might be tempted to use the concept of synthetic identity, which is distinct from that of analytic identity, and which Atlan introduces to account for the union of the corporeal and the mental in such a way that, despite there being no perfect overlap between the two discourses at stake here – philosophy (or Spinoza's philosophy) and science (or contemporary biology) – both can nevertheless come to understand this union in their own specific way.

It is always instructive to consider the extent to which film spectators speak in the tongue of slow cinema. Let us start with those at a loss for words, some of whom have warmed my movie memories with their inarticulacy. There is the colleague who tugged my sleeve at the start of Wavelength (1967) with the instruction to wake her up ‘when the zoom reaches the other side of the room’. (‘Why?’, I inquired. ‘Just do it’, she snapped. ‘I need my kip’.) Or the day in graduate school when a classmate brought his friend to Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976), evidently without having clued him in on what to expect. I do not know who the young visitor was, or why he came to the screening, but I do know that the daft sap sat through the entire 201 minutes – first struggling politely to hide a few yawns, then trying less successfully to stifle the hysterical giggles escaping from his mouth, and finally, approximately one shake of a duck's tail after it ended, leaping to his feet, punching the air and shouting out ‘Yeeessss!’, as plainly as if he had screamed his boredom and exasperation in capitalised italics. Then, too, I’ll never forget the irritated individual who stormed out halfway through Blow Job (1964) for no discernible reason but while audibly having kittens.

The cries of the disappointed and the disgruntled compel advocates of such ‘difficult’ works to enunciate distinct answers to the question of what they are worth, why they matter.

A new legacy of Paul, as I argued in the previous chapters, can only be found if his letters are read beyond dualist and nihilist interpretations. However, with the rejection of the Marcionite and Nietzschean version of the apostle, the ghosts of dualism and especially nihilism have not yet been fully exorcised in favour of a dialectic of exception. This is due to one of the foci of the present-day debate. The apostle’s understanding of the world, kosmos, is often approached by focusing on what one might call the nihilistic passages in the letters. In them, Paul announces for instance the end of the world, evoking in some of his readers images of the apocalypse; and in them, he claims there is a divine partiality for non-beings over beings (Cor. 1:27–8).

When a legacy of Paul is based on such passages, does this not irrevo¬cably lead to a nihilistic Paul? This seems to be Critchley’s argument, among others. He concludes that such readings end up being ‘crypto-Marcionite’. Incapable of finding a positive ontology, these passages advocate a Pauline meontology, a doctrine of nothingness and of non-beings. Yet, rather than removing these ‘nihilistic’ passages from my reading, I will argue that they actually offer important building blocks for a Pauline dialectic of exception. Therefore, let us address these pas¬sages, and confront the possible problems they produce, head-on.

As I turn now to these ‘nihilistic’ passages I note that they play a twofold role in my examination of Paul’s ontology and ethics. The second role concerns the question of time and event and is taken up in the next chapter.