The Enigma of Health: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria and the hermeneutic experience of illness through film

Abstract

The hermeneutic experience of illness involves a kind of displacement which estranges us from our own bodies and at the same time demands our sustained attention to our condition. Gadamer explores this disruption of our being-in-the-world in his work, The Enigma of Health, where he draws out the implications of this experience for the evolving understanding of health, care, and mortality. In this article, I argue that a phenomenology of falling ill, and the hermeneutic encounter with illness, is enacted in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film, Memoria (2021). In this article, I explore how Memoria calls into question the very concept of health, offering cinematic meditations on Gadamer’s lectures which explore the culture of care and the relationship between understanding and healing.

I begin by exploring the potential for a Gadamerian film-philosophy. Then, applying these conditions to the case of Memoria, I argue that through the film’s affective atmosphere, temporal structure, and sonic disruptions, Weerasethakul stages a form of aesthetic displacement for the viewer that mirrors the unhomelike experience of illness described by Gadamer and further developed by Svenaeus. The film does not depict illness in a conventional narrative sense but instead creates a sensory and ontological disturbance that invites the viewer into a shared attunement with the protagonist’s condition. Memoria is a dialogical encounter in which illness is not merely represented but revealed as an interpretive event – one that addresses us to consider healing not simply as a return to a sense of internal harmony, but as a process of confronting our vulnerable, embodied being-in-the-world.