A Claim to Community : The Trotsky

Abstract

A distinction between an earlier and later Charles Taylor might be drawn between Charles Taylor the political activist versus Charles Taylor the intellectual. Certainly the nature of the writing going on in a political tract like The Pattern of Politics (1970) is at removes from intellectual forays into the malaise of modernity or the crisis of the self and identify. I won’t attempt to square what an earlier Taylor says with a later Taylor. But Taylor’s politics were local enough in the 1960s to make a book he wrote during that time pertinent to what I want to say about The Trotsky (2009), a film shot entirely in Montréal and engaged in its own way with “radical” Canadian politics. I am not applying a Taylorian reading to the film than suggesting that the film itself is a reading of this particular political text of Taylor’s—that the movie ingests and thereby depicts some of its most pertinent lessons. Even if a later Taylor does not square with an earlier Taylor, what The Trotsky attempts is to make something like the “politics of polarization” matter once again, which is to say it attempts to reclaim some of the lessons put forward in The Pattern of Politics. One could also say this film attempts to reclaim the dialectic, in particular the notion that holds conflict (between clearly opposing viewpoints) as the lynchpin of social change. How the film reinterprets the dialectic will be considered here.