Two Cinematic Trajectories of the Two-Scene

The paper is concerned with the exploration of romantic love in two noticeable cin- ematic works of the recent decade: Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012) and Love (Gaspar Noé, 2015). The suggested analysis employs Alain Badiou’s philosophy of love, which enables to explicate the configuration of concepts structuring romantic love as a field of experience and being thus a priori relevant to its cinematic representations. The methodological presupposition of the article concerning the more-than-illustrative philosophical significance of the reading of films, capable, as it is claimed, to radi- cally transform the conceptual framework applied in their reading, is based on Badi- ou’s understanding of the essential cinematic operation as “the passage of an idea.” Specifically, it is shown that each of the films develops some necessary structural ele- ments of Badiou’s model to the effect of deconstructing its most fundamental onto- logical matrix: the Two-scene. To articulate these cinematic trajectories of love, the article puts Badiou in dialogue with other thinkers. The interpretation of Haneke’s Amour focuses on the ethical dimension of love and its relation to death, while intro- ducing into the discussion the voices of Stanley Cavell and Martin Heidegger. The exploration of the dialectics of love and sex in Noé’s film makes recourse to Roger Scruton and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.