Harman’s treatment of Heidegger’s tool analysis takes it a step further to claim that the things hide qualities not only to the perceiving individual but also to other things, that is, not only to things (or beings) that bear consciousness. I view the cigarette in von Trotta’s film as a cinematic object insofar as the cigarette’s meaning in the many scenes in which it appears cannot be exhausted to operate as a unified, non-contradictory entity of signification.

¶ 1:56 PM