Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel’dovich’s The Target (2010)

In the final chapter, I am concerned with the confirmation of the subject as a transcendent category in the moment of self-recognition whereby the finite identity is rejected in favour of the infinite Self. Zel’dovich’s The Target employs the sublime as a drama of subject-formation—both as a story of emergence and obliteration—whereby the limits of the self are conceived as a movement away from the self into the topography of solitary subjectivity confronted with open-ended being. The subject becomes an excess of discourse itself, that is, it centres on self-preservation which ensures infinity in stasis. The subject enters the divine state of amnesia after cataclysmic disruptions: the subject is no longer a tyrannous architect of the fallen world but a pre-eminent observer of the unfolding universe. I am particularly interested in the cinematic materiality of the sublime and the immateriality of subjectivity existing outside the temporal framework of history. I centre on issues of scale and amplification as matters of cultural vibration in a post-apocalyptic world. I conclude by demonstrating how Zel’dovich’s The Target with focuses on transient spaces and the epiphany of the universal monad. Thus, this chapter summates the key points presented in the book.