Ideology and finitude in Martin Heidegger and John le Carré.

Though both The Constant Gardener and Being and Time critique the ideological relationship to time that conceives time as an infinite series of nows, the alternatives that they propose differ radically. For Heidegger, authentic temporality involves accepting one’s constitutive finitude and being-towards-death. In this position, one constantly experiences the limit that time represents and comes to grasp the productivity of that limit. Existence itself becomes identical—and reduced to—the limits of finitude. In contrast, The Constant Gardener sees the embrace of finitude as yet another version of the ideological relationship to time (or a failed attempt to escape it). By fully acceding to the limit of its finitude, the subject fails to see the possibility of transcending limits. The embrace of finitude misses, in other words, the infinite nature of subjectivity itself, which is the origin of the subject’s political drive.

Surprisingly, the article never once mentions le Carré. In the XXI Century the film is now the primary objet d’arte, and the original novel merely an inconsequential antecedant - at least in film mags.  ¶ 3:08 PM