Hong Sang-soo meets Quentin Meillassoux

Contingency and repetition in Right now, wrong then

Abstract

The article explores the relationship between contingency and repetition in the cinema of Hong Sang-soo, with a focus on the film Right Now, Wrong Then (2015). We identify three previous critical approaches (inspired by Deleuzian, humanist-existential, and psychoanalytic perspectives) that emphasize the viewer’s subjective role in constructing the film’s meaning. However, we suggest that this emphasis tends to obscure the role of contingency in the very repetitive structure conceived by Hong. To highlight this dimension, we draw on interviews with the director and on the speculative philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux (2008, 2016), for whom contingency is the only necessity – that is, there is no sufficient reason for any given state of affairs to persist. In his statements, Hong advocates the idea of “infinite possible worlds” and embraces the inclusion of unplanned elements in the filming process. This affinity between Hong’s cinematic gesture and Meillassoux’s philosophy allows us to understand repetition in the film not as a bearer of meaning, but as a sign of the precariousness of meaning itself. Even when certain events appear to repeat, they do so by force of a contingency indifferent to human interpretation. At this point, a psychoanalytic reading becomes useful: meaning emerges as a function of jouissance, not as a reflection of rational order. Thus, by foregrounding the role of contingency, we argue that Hong’s cinema does not affirm meaning, but rather destabilizes it – revealing the subject’s effort to project intelligibility onto worlds that, in their structure, lack any reason for being.