The Aesthetics of the Spectral and the Permanent Crisis in Tsai Ming-liang’s Art

Abstract This paper focuses on the motif of permanent crisis and the “ghost” in Tsai Ming-liang’s art through a close analysis of films such as I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Hei yan quan, 2006), What Time Is It There? (Ni na bian ji dian, 2001), Vive l’amour (Ai qing wan sui, 1994), The Skywalk is Gone (Tian qiao bu jian le, 2002), The Hole (Dong, 1998), and the relevant discourse of Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, pointing out new, previously undiscussed connections between What Time Is It There? and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups, 1959). The aesthetics of the spectral is presented as a possible way of approaching films that not only reckon with the increasing immaterialization of the medium in the digital age, but also extend this to understand and represent new qualities of human relationships and existence in the world, using the motif of the ghost as an allegory of the medium and a “haunting” of traditional cinematic plot organization and narrative.