(Dis)enchanted Taiwanese Cinema, Schizoanalytic Belief and the Actuality of Animism

Taiwanese films abound with religious rites, spirits, specters, ghosts, gods, and other “supernatural” forces. How should we conceive of our involvement in this complex web of dissiminated and animated agencies that populate East-Asian cinema in general, and Taiwanese cinema in particular? Can the essential liminality and heterogeneity of spiritual matters be thought of in terms of active assemblages and transformative becomings? Or, to put it in blunter and somehow naive materialist terms: what does it actually mean to believe in gods, ghosts and spirits? This article aims at outlining a schizoanalytic approach to the complex dynamic of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment at work in Taiwanese cinema. It takes as a starting point the speculative pragmatist question of how to inhabit and activate a sense of the possible in a given, situated, situation, that is: how we conceive of our participation to the ever-going process of (re)animation of our world(s). This investigation into enchantment and disenchantment in contemporary Taiwanese Cinema articulates around three general lines of thought: 1. Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of what it means to believe (in the world); 2. the animist turn in recent post-Deleuzian thought, as put forth in the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Maurizio Lazzarato, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett and many others; 3. a more detailed characterization of the spirits’ virtual presence in terms of metamorphic power, surexistence and propositional efficacy. These three axis ultimately relate to the pragmatist speculative question of how to inhabit and activate a sense of the possible in a given, localized situation – or how do we conceive of our participation to the ever-going process of animation of our world(s).