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

The hermeneutical experience of illness involves a kind of displacement that alienates us from our own bodies and, at the same time, demands our constant attention to our condition. Gadamer explores this rupture of our being-in-the-world in his work The Enigma of Health, where he exposes the implications of this experience for the evolutionary understanding of health, care and mortality. In this article, I argue that a phenomenology of illness and the hermeneutic encounter with illness is staged in the film Memoria (2021), by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. In this article, I explore how Memoria questions the very concept of health, offering cinematic meditations on Gadamer's lectures that explore the culture of care and the relationship between understanding and healing.

I begin by exploring the potential of a Gadamerian cinematic philosophy. Then, applying these conditions to the case of Memoria, I argue that, through the affective atmosphere, the temporal structure and the sound ruptures of the film, Weerasethakul stages a form of aesthetic displacement for the viewer that mirrors the inhospitable experience of illness described by Gadamer and later developed by Svenaeus. The film does not portray 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—an event that leads us to consider healing not only as a return to a sense of inner harmony, but as a process of confronting our vulnerable, embodied being-in-the-world.