The Prehensible (The Text Is Thunder) uses various materials recorded between 2023 and 2026 to explore the concept of beginning and origin. What inspired you to bring them together in a film now ? What is the genesis of the project ?
It’s difficult to enrich the film’s statement, which comes down to something very simple: The beginning only appears retrospectively. Genesis is not the beginning, it’s the story told about it. From the beginning, it may be said: I have been there without ever being there. I was interested in that disjunction. The subtitle cites Walter Benjamin’s line: “In the domains of our interest, knowledge arrives only in flashes of lightning, the text is the thunder rolling long afterward”.
The film emerged hand in a hand with a text called the Préhensile, which is to say the capacity for (ap)prehension, that which can extend out and wrap inward, to seize. A human thumb, a monkey tail, reflexive consciousness, the God idea.
Inversely, The Prehensible is that which can be grabbed : A handle for the thumb, a branch for the tail and, for consciousness, mystery’s grabbable parts : the visible and the sayable.
You place great emphasis on text and philosophical and theological thought, drawing on various figures and concepts (Jacques Derrida, Avital Ronell, Benjamin, and others). What is your relationship with these authors ? How have they influenced your film ?
I undertook this research so as not to undergo it. I explored a symptom of mine, a nihilating tendency to my thought which prevented me from formalising anything. Discovering what can be called negative theology, I found a constellation as clandestine as it was pervasive. It is an attitude more than a school, which became the subject of my thesis at NYU. This attitude is also at the core of Judaism, which Christianity comes to positivize. Down with the unsayable name and the prohibition on images: a flesh, a son, a revelation.
Monotheism inherently contains these two modalities because with its “one” idea, it twists itself into a riddle that the Greeks did the math for. But it goes way beyond so-called occidental traditions. I found myself reading texts from 11th century Iranian philosophers, finding the same words, the same protestation that animated mine. It was electrifying to have started with so nebulous a predisposition and arrived at such transhistorical intimacies. All the more so since the experience itself is historicized. Negative theology reactivates throughout the centuries, and most recently in the middle of the 20th, with Jewish writers who have to intellectually survive the wingspan of brutality, its absolute scale. A line of Paul Celan’s says : “Where did the way go when it lead nowhere ?” which could now serve as Judaism’s epitaph since the beginning of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
The poem ends: “O you dig, and I dig, and I dig towards you / And our fingers the ring awakens” The old idea reemerges: a pact with nothing.
With a touch of humor, you also explore—through this text that unfolds before our eyes—the direct relationship between speech and writing. What interested you about this approach ?
The difficulty I attended is two-fold. One is at the level of perception, the second at the level of documentation. First, the constitutively evanescent event of consciousness, second is the constitutive obsolescence of the form in which it comes to be recorded. Speech makes these coincide. But speech must be addressed to be true, so I recorded myself in a taxi pretending to be on the phone. I experienced what might remain one of my biggest regrets as I cut the mic, because the taxi driver – who you hear speak to me in the beginning – turned around and said “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there”, as though an angel had passed. Some months later, at a party, I tried to listen back to the recording with two friends but the surroundings were too loud, so I brought the phone up to my ear and started repeating over myself, the way I do when I translate. When “she” laughed, I laughed double. I think humor succeeds at what theology attempts, in sigh and resuscitation.
The film has a great deal of energy, which stems in particular from the shifts in pace, the plot twists, and the breaks—both in the visuals and the sound. What guided you during the editing process ?
I edited together all that remained from the writing of thesis, all that couldn’t become text. It so happens that the thunderstorm is in Banyuls, where Walter Benjamin spent his last night, thinking he could cross into Spain and from there, America. The letter that would have told him otherwise was late and he found the border closed. Not knowing it would be open the following day, he intentionally overdosed on morphine. When I was editing the darkness out of the storm, I felt that I was using Fincal Cut Pro for its primal function. I was seeing what so many hadn’t : if you pause, the moment when, if the lightning is long enough ; color returns.
Another example is the Derrida clip. It also happens that when arriving in New York, I signed up for Avital Ronell’s class, and one night, around 2 am, I watched Kirby Dick’s documentary on Derrida, who had been her teacher, to get acquainted. A scene delivers what would be the next two years of my life. In it, Derrida is coming off stage after a conference and is being unwired by the sound engineer. A young man comes to ask him about negative theology. I hear the word for the first time. His response is inaudible because, or, thanks to the fingers of the sound guy on the mic. A provisional definition of negative theology could be : There is a thing whose revelation is the form of concealment.
There’s also that Wings song that punctuates the film, “Goodnight Tonight”—an invitation to keep going that comes to an abrupt halt on a dark screen. Does the choice of this song have anything to do with the idea that the beginning can only be understood through afterimages ? Could you tell us a few words about this song and how it was used ?
I didn’t choose it, it played on the taxi’s radio ! I just blended it in as extradiegetic sound, which gets us out of the car with a cinematic feeling. You’re right that that the lyrics refuse the end of love (“don’t say goodbye to love, it’s a feeling that will never end… don’t say goodnight, don’t say anything…) which could echo the mention of a renewed effort, in tension with the real (“the show must go on”).
It may also be a reminder of thought’s origin, which in my case is always more libidinal or romantic than it seems… Or perhaps it seems exactly that way.
Your presence is palpable throughout the film and culminates in an image from your childhood. Why was that important to you ?
The image in question is me in my grandmother’s arm, Marie Zauberman, a Polish Jew who survived the war and from whom I inherit what binds me to the philosophy I mentioned previously. I was born in 1997, it is rare at my age to be of the third generation. I also didn’t receive any religious education, the spirit travels in mysterious ways. In the shot, she holds me tight and says, with her Yiddish accent: « Oh how I love you… Not at all!”, which is curious. I try to reciprocate but I don’t know how yet, so I open my hands as wide as my mouth to grip her with both.
