Changes

Nowhere is this constellation staged in a more clear way than in the Matrix trilogy. <i>The Matrix</i> movies should be read not as a work sustained by a consistent philosophical discourse, but as a work whose very inconsistencies point towards the antagonisms of our ideological and social predicament. What, then, is the Matrix? Simply what Lacan called the "big other," the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. This dimension of the "big Other" is that of the constitutive alienation of the subject in the symbolic order: the big other pulls the strings, the subject doesn't speak, he "is spoken" by the symbolic structure. The paradox, the "infinite judgment" of <i>The Matrix</i> is the co-dependence of the two aspects: the total artificiality (the constructed nature) of reality, and the triumphant return of the body in the sense of the ballet-like quality of fights with slow motions and defiance of the laws of ordinary physical reality.<br><br>

Perhaps, however - and this would be the only way to (partially, at least) redeem <i>Revolutions</i> - there is a sobering message in this very failure of the conclusion of the Matrix series. There is no final solution on the horizon today, Capital is here to stay, and all we can hope for is a temporary truce. That is to say, undoubtedly worse that this deadlock would have been a pseudo-Deleuzian celebration of the successful revolt of the multitude.

[[Category:Works]]