ABSTRACT
The riddle of how selfhood relates to performance is at the centre of Eileen Chang’s story “Lust, Caution” and is one of the elements that drew Ang Lee to turn it into a film (Ang Lee, 2007d, pp. vii–ix). Yet neither of these works was produced as an attempt to grapple with a philosophical question, and as pointed out by the contributors to this volume, it is impossible to divorce whatever philosophical or artistic reflections they provoke from the historical contexts in which they were produced. Indeed, co-screenwriter James Schamus commented that Ang Lee and his team were drawn to Chang’s story because they saw it as “an ‘act’ – a profound cry of protest against the warring structures of domination that so catastrophically shaped midcentury China” (James Schamus, 2007a, p. xiii). However skeptical one might be of the idea that Chang’s story constitutes a “cry of protest,” – Leo Ou-fan Lee counters that Chang places herself outside the maelstrom of Chinese history and provides very little historical background – both the story and the film can illuminate the ways “structures of domination” reproduce themselves, at both the individual and national levels (Leo Ou-fan Lee, 2008b, p. 235).
