The ethics of becoming a subject // A reading of Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then (2015)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hong Sang-soo’s recent film, Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), features a film director who idly spends a day in a strange city and meets a female artist whom he instantly falls for. Hong constructs an interesting template for this banal encounter: the film’s narrative is evenly divided into two parts, only to repeat the same story twice without any causal connection. The juxtaposition of two versions of the same story, however, weaves a web of minute, insignificant differences the couple improvises in each version. The film’s parallel structure allows viewers to closely observe the protagonists through fissures created between fantasy, desire and act. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s theorization of man as a divided subject and his or her ethical dimension that emerges at the moment of one’s unflinching manifestation of desire through an act, the article will attempt to engage with Hong’s film as an attempt to seek a new ground for human desire. The following discussion will address how the film instantiates Lacan’s definition of the ethical ground for a divided yet desiring subject, which he articulates in a rather confronting question: ‘Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?’ [1992, 314. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company].