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By Root 474 0

From Luke’s still-clouded perspective of things, Yoda is simply too small to be a Jedi, just as Luke’s X-wing fighter is simply too large to retrieve from the swamp. Luke is still very young, though, and not yet well-trained in the ways of the Force—“Too much of his father in him,” as Luke’s perceptive Aunt Beru foresees. But before he leaves Dagobah, Luke will learn a great many things—and beginning precisely here, with his own inverted view of the world. Yoda tells Luke:

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Mm? Mmmm . . . And well you should not. For my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us . . . You must feel the Force around you. Here, between you . . . me . . . the tree . . . the rock . . . everywhere! Yes, even between the land and the ship!

This description of the Force also closely resembles Heidegger’s conception of being. Like the Force, being is everywhere, all around us. It binds all the elements of the universe together: it’s that which undergirds the rocks just as surely as starfighters. Yet, in being everywhere, the Force, or being, is equally nowhere. For being everywhere at once, it isn’t easily locatable, which makes it so easy to forget. But we must learn to experience it through the art of the ready-to-hand and above all through meditation, as Yoda advises Luke on Dagobah. Similarly, Qui-Gon tells young Anakin that when he learns to quiet his mind and meditate, the Force will speak to him. For Heidegger, too, we must meditate on being in order for it to speak to us. For just as there is a voice of the Force, so too is there a voice of being. As Heidegger puts it, “For, strictly, it is language that speaks. Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal.”81 And language, according to Heidegger, is speaking as being: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.”82

Enframing and the Eye of the Empire

Powerful as the Light Side of the Force may be, however, the Dark Side is also very strong. And those who follow its path are the Dark Lords of the Sith. Rather than emphasizing the importance of a passive and quiet, contemplative mind, the Sith are trained in aggression and technical thinking, control and domination. In a word, they’re trained in the mode of the present-at-hand, rather than the illumined ready-to-hand. Instead of feeling the Force, the Sith are trained visually to control nature as a set of external objects. All of reality, on this view, is ready to be subordinated and controlled, and all for the sole purpose of increasing their power over nature. Filled with anger, filled with fear, the Dark Side of the Force—taken to its logical limit—is precisely what gives rise to the darkest phenomenon of reality: enframing.83

Perhaps nowhere in Star Wars is this combination of the present-at-hand and enframing more evident than in the Death Star. Resembling a “small moon,” the Death Star is, in fact, a space station. But on even closer inspection, it actually resembles a massive artificial eyeball (much like the gigantic eye in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings). It has a windowed iris and a distinct pupil, out of which Darth Vader and the Emperor watch—and the entire structure rotates to observe its territory within a massive solar socket of space. Moreover, under this present-at-hand gaze, the Empire steadily builds masses of standing reserve, most evident in the droid army and the clone factory on the ocean planet Kamino. These clones are enframed “internally” through genetic engineering, to decrease their autonomy and increase their collective thought. While later they are enframed “externally” as they are sheathed in the hard white armor and helmets of the Imperial stormtroopers. One should note here, however, that the standing reserve is not all on the Empire’s side. Both sides use masses of droids and spacecraft. And the Republic (before it becomes the Empire) uses the clone army to fight the Separatists in Attack of the Clones.

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