Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media, co-translator of the Korean edition of Jacques Derrida's Acts of Literature, and co-editor of The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema and Thomas Elsaesser's posthumous book The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology.
Jeong applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema, and reported the following:
Page 98 (instead of page 99, the “Part II” title page) is the last page of Chapter 3 “Sovereign Agents’ Biopolitical Abjection in the Spy Film,” where the James Bond series and the Jason Bourne series are comparatively analyzed. Most of the page content is the following paragraph:Learn more about Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema at the Oxford University Press website.It is clear where Bond and Bourne meet and part. Secret agencies as a protective gear of global systems driven by info-capitalist tech-networking inevitably generate symptoms of precarious labor and bare life, and agents as competitive professionals, once excluded, can turn into dangerous hackers or whistleblowers. Bond, particularly in Skyfall, undergoes abjection too (evoking On Her Majesty’s Secret Service [Peter Hunt, 1969], For Your Eyes Only [John Glen, 1981], and especially Licence to Kill) but fights against such terrorist abject-agents by repeatedly reaffirming the sovereign agency of supralegal power. Conversely, while Bourne’s former network agency is more globalized and corrupted at the same time, his traumatic abjection puts him under harsher conditions of bare life in a radically normalized emergency with no room for the hedonistic privileges of the early Bonds. His cognitive-corporeal struggle with a lost memory and threatening space nonetheless unfolds as a convoluted journey for self-discovery in the form of terrorist resistance to the unethical system that trained him. In sum, the continuation of the Bond and Bourne series, in opposing ways, tells us that the sovereign system and the abject agent are inseparable and that their antagonistic hide-and-seek network has no outside. This cinematic logic allegorizes the impossibility of one’s ultimate release from the global system, leaving only the fantasy of choice: Bond or Bourne? A blue pill or a red pill?As seen above, this page provides a concise overview of the conclusion to Chapter 3. It encapsulates a fundamental facet of global cinema discussed earlier in the book, if not the gist of the whole book, and thus turns out to be partly pertinent to the Page 99 Test.
This chapter reevaluates the psychoanalytic theory of “abjection” within a biopolitical framework. It redefines abjection as the community’s supralegal exercise of sovereign power over its members, who are consequently degraded into the abject, or what Giorgio Agamben terms “bare lives” cast out of the law. In this context, the abject can potentially become an agent who pursues reintegration into the community or resistance against it. The chapter extensively explores this concept of “abject agency” in global mainstream cinema, shedding light on the spy genre represented by the James Bond series. More specifically, close attention is paid to Skyfall (2012), which signifies the secret agent’s identity crisis within the post-9/11 context of a schizophrenic digital terror landscape. Both Bond and his adversary find themselves internally excluded from their agency, MI6, leading to divergent outcomes: sovereign reaffirmation and terrorist revenge. A comparable analysis is extended to Jason Bourne, the ex-CIA agent in the Bourne series. He undergoes a similar process of abjection but does not become a vengeful terrorist or a sovereign agent. Instead, he represents a symptom of a perpetual mind game between sovereign power and its never-dying abject. This comparative examination allows for a cognitive mapping of the contemporary spy genre reflecting today’s global system of sovereignty and abjection.
--Marshal Zeringue
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