Differently Married: Revising Wittgenstein, Remembering Bergman

In the first part of the paper the author offers a frank reassessment of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He dismisses the Tractatus as philosophically irrelevant but points to the unshaken validity of the main tenents of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, especially the idea of speech acts being inevitably interwoven with extralinguistic, bodily practices. In the second part the author identifies radical limitations of Wittgenstein’s thought, which he tries to eliminate by combining it with Foucault’s understanding of power and Derrida’s understanding of iterability. The latter link opens the path to viewing language-games as theatrical spectacles. In the third part of the paper the author illustrates the revised model of language-games/spectacles by relating it to two films, Scenes from a Marriage (directed by Ingmar Bergman) and Faithless (written by Bergman and directed by Liv Ullmann). This connection enables the author to enrich the model with an affective dimension which comes to the fore in Bergman’s analysis of the breakup of a marriage.