THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG: SCAPES LINES, OPPORTUNITY BY OTHER TYPES OF EXISTENCE

Abstract

Paloma has decided to commit suicide on her birthday and during the 165 remaining days, she intends to make a film about her life and to show “why life is absurd”. Over the course of The hedgehog, directed by French filmmaker Mona Achache, with a script based on the book The elegance of the hedgehog, by Moroccan writer and philosopher Muriel Barbery, we can observe ruptures, deconstructions, transformations and reconstructions. In this process, we see a life trapped in hard lines that make her feel like a fish in an aquarium, but also a life being crossed by the unexpectedness of encounters. We propose to discuss some of these events with the support of some of the Philosophy of Difference authors, like Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Suely Rolnik, seeking to track some lines that comprise the character’s life, whether they are more rigid or more malleable, and that point to ruptures in her existence. Our objective, with this study between the book and the film, is to search for some possibilities of new types of existence that emerge from the encounters that provide scape lines.