Between Time and Eternity: Reimagining Spiritual Complexity through Musical Meaning and the Cinematic Human Figure

Abstract

In a time defined as both an age of abundant atheism which triumphs in the wake of the death of God, and an age of post-secularism which returns to religion, the discrete forms of music and cinema remain germane sites for theorising the relation between belief and the nature of existence. Taking up the particular relation between the cinematic human figure and musical meaning, how might Marcel Cobussen’s musical-spiritual concept of the threshold problematise the difference between Christian and atheistic belief, so as to reimagine the boundaries of spiritual identity, faith, truth, ethics, choice and possibility? As an original contribution to knowledge, this thesis engages a series of liminal aesthetic modes—the ineffable, the uncanny, utopian desire and absurd feeling—to bring spiritual theories of music and film philosophy into a dynamic dialogue with one another, not only to develop a circuit of reciprocity between the two disciplines that affirms the significance of one to the other, but to work toward a more complex understanding of the spiritual significance of the cinematic human figure and musical meaning than discrete theories of cinema, music or film music have traditionally accommodated alone. Drawing from a range of continental thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Edgar Morin, Gilles Deleuze and Marcel Cobussen, this thesis argues that liminal modes of musical meaning and the cinematic human figure inhabit a dynamic, indeterminate space between a belief in eternity and a belief in time, becoming conduits and catalysts for a mode of possibility I call spiritual complexity. Spiritual complexity affirms the paradox, ambiguity and irony of liminal modes of existence in our post-religious and post-secular time, where the ontological and ethical possibilities of human identity may be reimagined in the thresholds of archaic, Platonic, Christian and atheistic belief.