TOC

The Narration of Collective Trauma: The “True Story” of Jasper, Texas — Kalina Brabeck and Ricardo Ainslie

“Two Brotherless Peoples”: On the Constitutive Traumas of Class Struggle — Akis Gavriilidis

Psychotherapy and Political Activism: Examining The Israeli–palestinian Case — Nissim Avissar

Other Pasts: Family Romances of Pan’s Labyrinth — Janet Thormann

The Notion of the Work of Culture in Freud’s Writings — Eric Smadja

TOC: Volume 12 Issue Number 1 Spring 2008

Violence and Embodiment — JAMES MENSCH

Personnage, pensée, perception: Entre figure esthétique et personnage conceptuel, oscille le personnage du cinéma — CAROLINE SAN MARTIN

The Sublimity of Violence: Kant and the Aesthetic Response to the French Revolution –RADU NECULAU

Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif? L’analytique sociale de Michel Foucault — SVERRE RAFFNSØE

Deleuze’s Other-Structure: Beyond the Master-Slave Dialectic, but at What Cost? — JACK REYNOLDS

Le commun et le capital: Réflexions sur le récit thérapeutique d’Antonio Negri — DALIE GIROUX

Erfahren and Erleben: Metaphysical Experience and its Overcoming in Heidegger’s Beiträge — JIM VERNON

Sean Homer's Lectures.

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Jacques Rancière’s books, Film Fables and The Future of the Image, are really trying to do what his work in politics often does. If his collection of essays, On The Shores of Politics (1), proposes that we shouldn’t take the end of history seriously, and that politics isn’t necessarily about end goals but ongoing struggle, then in his recent books on the cinema (Film Fables) and on the image more generally (The Future of the Image), Rancière is again wary of declarative eschatology, of making statements that suggest the end of anything. As he says on the first page of The Future of the Image, he wants to examine “how a certain idea of fate and a certain idea of the image are tied up in the apocalyptic discourses of today’s cultural climate” (p. 1). But, he adds, “does not the term ‘image’ contain several functions whose problematic alignment precisely constitutes the labour of art?” (p. 1). Central to Rancière’s project is an aesthetic optimism: a sense that there are stories still to be told, and images constantly awaiting creation.

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When Sophie Fiennes approached me with the idea to do a "pervert's guide" to cinema, our shared goal was to demonstrate how psychoanalytic cinema-criticism is still the best we have, how it can generate insights which compel us to change our entire perspective. The "pervert" from the title is thus not a narrow clinical category; it rather refers to perverting - turning around - our spontaneous perceptions.

The usual reproach to psychoanalytic criticism is that it reduces everything to family complexes: whatever the story, it is "really about" Oedipus, incest, etc. Instead of trying to prove that this is not true, one should accept the challenge. The films which are furthest from family dramas are catastrophe films, which cannot but fascinate the viewer with a spectacular depiction of a terrifying event of immense proportions. This brings us to the first psychoanalytic rule of how to read catastrophe movies: we should avoid the lure of the "big event" and re-focus on the "small event" (familial relations), reading the spectacular catastrophe as an indication of the family trouble. Take Steven Spielberg: the secret motif than runs through all his key films - ET, Empire of the Sun, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List - is the recovery of the father, of his authority. One should remember that the family to whose small boy ET appears was deserted by the father (as we learn in the very beginning), so that ET is ultimately a kind of "vanishing mediator" who provides a new father (the good scientist who, in the film's last shot, is already seen embracing the mother) - when the new father is here, ET can leave and "go home."

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Introduction: One More Effort… (i-vi)
Benjamin Noys

Articles

What is the Gift of Grace?: on Dogville (1-22)
Lorenzo Chiesa

The Politics of Gift-Giving and the Provocation of Lars Von Trier's Dogville (23-37)
Dany Nobus

Antiphusis: Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (38-51)
Benjamin Noys

The Temporality of the Real: The Path to Politics in The Constant Gardener (52-73)
Todd McGowan

'How Very Lacanian': From Fantasy to Hyperreality in Basic Instinct 2 (74-85)
Mark Fisher

Resources and News

Abstract (E): Early film theorists like Epstein, Canudo or Balazs were already fascinated by the idea of cinema as automatic thought-machine, producing purely mental images. The relation of cinema and thinking is the object of study of Deleuze's cinema-books. In the foreword to the Movement-Image Deleuze writes that great movie directors can not only be compared to painters, architects or musicians but also to thinkers and philosophers, only they do not think in concepts but in ‘affects' and ‘percepts'. Like Nietzsche and Foucault Deleuze thinks of artists and philosophers as doctors that keep society healthy and cinema takes up a special place since our contemporary lives have become more and more dominated by the moving image. Cinema for Deleuze is what poetry represented for Heidegger: a medium wherein new forms of thought manifest itself for the first time.

By Ils Huygens

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Via the irreplaceable wood's lot 

MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND RUDOLF CARNAP: RADICAL PHENOMENOLOGY, LOGICAL POSITIVISM, AND THE ROOTS OF THE CONTINENTAL/ANALYTIC DIVIDE — James Luchte. Philosophy

REPRESENTATION AND POIESIS: THE IMAGINATION IN THE LATER HEIDEGGER — John W M Krummel
           
HEIDEGGER'S ETYMOLOGICAL METHOD: DISCOVERING BEING BY RECOVERING THE RICHNESS OF THE WORD — Matthew King

THOUGHTS IN POTENTIALITY: PROVISIONAL REFLECTIONS ON AGAMBEN'S UNDERSTANDING OF POTENTIALITY AND ITS RELEVANCE FOR THEOLOGY AND POLITICS — Alberto Bertozzi.       

A CRITIQUE OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR'S EXISTENTIAL ETHICS — Matthew Braddock

TWO NOTIONS OF OBJECTIFICATION — Iddo Landau.

COMMITTED PERCEPTION: MERLEAU-PONTY, CARROLL, AND IRANIAN CINEMA — Farhang Erfani

ON GIVING HEGEL HIS DUE: THE "END OF HISTORY" AND THE HEGELIAN ROOTS OF POSTMODERN THOUGHT — Jere O'Neill Surber

INNOCENCE, PERVERSION, AND ABU GHRAIB — Kelly Oliver

"OURS IS NOT A TERRIBLE SITUATION" — Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley

Scan: A Journal of Media Arts Culture on “Film as Philosophy”, vol. 4, no. 2, August 2007

A phenomenology of tragedy: illness and body betrayal in The Fly: Havi Carel

Grief’s Testimony: On Almodóvar’s All About My Mother: Fiona Jenkins

A Play of Memory: Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil: Catherine Summerhayes

Grace and Violence: Questioning Politics and Desire in Lars von Trier’s Dogville: Robert Sinnerbrink

Even Better than the Real Thing: Sadism and Real(ity) T.V.: Matthew Sharpe

Thinking cinema(tically) and the Industrial Temporal Object: Schemes and technics of experience in Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time series: Patrick Crogan

The cinematic condition of the politico-philosophical future: Daniel Ross

(Thanks to Robert Sinnerbrink)