Seite - 24 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 02/02

24 | Isabella Guanzini www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 15–32 The Promise (1996) is the mise-en-scène of this dramatic impasse to generate something that lasts, to transmit a legacy that could induce belief in the world, the other and the future. Roger seems to correspond to the “father of the primal horde” whom Freud portrayed in Totem and Taboo:33 omnipotent, pitiless, incestuous, beyond every law and controlling bare bodies. The symbolic function of the father is degraded here to its imaginary semblance, which dissolves every asymmetric dialectic and pursues an ambiguous and symbiotic commitment to illegal business, surrogate sexuality and deceptive intimacy. Igor’s imaginary relationship with his father has to be interrupted; the unlimited power of the totemic figure of his father must be disturbed in order to offer the son the possibility to disentangle himself from the undifferentiated, wordless morass of the paternal jouissance. Igor has to experience exile in order to reach a humanised life where only the encounter with the face of the other can generate a different destiny. CHRONOS AND KAIROS The dying body of the Burkinabe Hamidou, who fell down from a scaffold and whom Igor tries to save by tying his belt around his injured leg, represents his kairos, the insurgence of an imminence, a crisis, a decisive moment that sig- nificantly occurs and informs Igor’s consciousness.34 Hamidou’s last words and breaths, with which he pleads with Igor to take care of his wife, Assita, and of his little son, Tiga, after his death, demand a response that will determine the humanisation of Igor’s experience, generating in him a new awareness of his existing body in a broader human constellation. In assuming his responsibility towards Hamidou, Igor radically contrasts the decision of his father to leave Hamidou to die. With his promise, Igor keeps him alive and begins to actually live himself. The perpetuum mobile of Chronos, who reduces everything to a knowable and expendable sameness, not allowing any encounter with singu- larities and exteriorities, is interrupted by the mysterious force of an urgent in- terpellation, which calls the subject from the outside, endowing him/her with a new symbolic responsibility. This demand from the Other must be primarily interpreted not as the awakening of compassion and piety, but as a provoca- tive and traumatic presence, which breaks Igor’s imaginary and morbid rela- 33 Cf. Freud 1990. 34 In ancient Greek rhetoric, the word kairos originally designated the “proper time”, or “oppor- tune moment” for an action or a ritual performance. The New Testament notion of kairos deals with the meaning of history in the moment of its qualitative fulfilment. Paul uses the term kairos to indicate what the Judaic tradition called “messianic time”. Kairos is God’s time, which con- trasts with the human understanding of time as chronos in its progressive linearity and automa- tism. For Paul Tillich, time as kairos is the “moment at which history has matured to the point of being able to receive the breakthrough of the manifestation of God” (Tillich 1963, 369).