Continental Philosophy

from lacan dot com

http://www.lacan.com/lacan1.htm

Slavoj Zizek
Hollywood Today: Report from an Ideological Frontline

http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=347

[…]
Les non-dupes errent
So when even products of the allegedly “liberal” Hollywood display the most blatant ideological regression, are any further proofs needed that ideology is alive and kicking in our post-ideological world? Consequently, it shouldn’t surprise us to discover ideology at its purest in what may appear as Hollywood at its most innocent: the big blockbuster cartoons. “The truth has the structure of a fiction” – is there a better exemplification of this thesis than cartoons in which the truth about the existing social order is rendered in such a direct way which would never be allowed in the narrative cinema with “real” actors?

TOC

Jacques Rancière: in Disagreement
Paul Bowman; Richard Stamp

Conjunctive Times, Disjointed Time: Philosophy between Enigma and Disagreement
Sudeep Dasgupta

Politics without Politics
Jodi Dean
Read the rest of this entry »

Click here to read the articles

FEATURES

Cinema as a Democratic Emblem
Alain Badiou, translated by Alex Ling and Aurélien Mondon

The Desert Island and the Missing People
Vanessa Brito, translated by Justin Clemens

Althusser and the concept of the spontaneous philosophy of scientists
Pierre Macherey, translated by Robin Mackay

68 + 1: Lacan’s année érotique
Jean-Michel Rabaté

ESSAYS

The Nihilistic Affirmation of Life: Biopower and Biopolitics in The Will to Knowledge
Keith Crome

In the Middle
Sean Gaston

REVIEWS

Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life
Danielle Sands

‘Without wanting to push the analysis further …’: Jean-Michel Rabaté and the Materialities of Theory
Pieter Vermeulen

Volume 13, Issue No. 1, 2009

Articles

’Occupy without Counting’: Furtive Urbanism in the Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (1-15)
R.D. Crano

Hegel and the Impossibility of the Future in Science Fiction Cinema (16-37)
Todd McGowan

Godfathers and Sons: Tripping Over the Unconscious (38-52)
Timothy O’Leary

Consumer Ethics in Thank You For Smoking (53-67)
Stacy Thompson

Meanings and authorships in Dune (68-89)
Tony Todd

Link to articles

Derek Attridge and Henry Staten – Reading for the Obvious: A Conversation

Scott Durham – “The Center of the World Everywhere”: Bamako and the Scene of the Political

Rosalind Galt – The Obviousness of Cinema

Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder – Cinema/Film

Christian Keathley – Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema

David Farrell Krell – The School for Stupefaction

Scott Krzych – Kino Ex Nihilo

Ernesto Laclau in conversation with Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland – Not a Ground but a Horizon

Sam Lipsyte – A Pimple on the Ass of Drew Barrymore Speaks

Karen Pinkus – Nothing from Nothing: Alchemy and the Economic Crisis

Angelo Restivo – The Obvious: Three Reminiscences

Stephen G. Rhodes – Interregnum Reanimated: The Living Cemetery

Jeffrey Sconce – Circuit City Unplugged

The New Extremism: Contemporary European Cinema

Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, 24th-25th of April 2009

Keynote Speakers: Dr Martine Beugnet, Edinburgh University, Professor Martin Barker, University of Aberystwyth

In recent years, the term ‘new extremism’ has been used to describe (and often to decry) a growing body of films featuring extreme and graphic representations of sexuality and violence, seemingly designed with the chief aim in mind of shocking or provoking spectators. The list of filmmakers frequently assembled under this rubric is quite diverse, but often includes Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, Michael Haneke, Bruno Dumont, Fatih Akin, Claire Denis, Philippe Grandrieux, Lukas Moodysson, Marina de Van, François Ozon and Lars Von Trier, to name a few.

Although the films of the new extremism have been decried as reactionary and ostentatious, the recent upsurge of rigorous scholarly attention devoted to this body of work challenges reductive assertions, and confirms the relevance of such provocative and polemical filmmaking. Beyond mere shock tactics, what do these brutal and uncompromising films bring to understandings of cinema today? How do these films solicit, and help to shape, new modes of spectatorship and new ways of relating to cinema?

The aim of this conference is to explore and theorize the paradigm of the new extremism in contemporary European cinema. What new challenges do these filmmakers bring to our understanding of issues of embodiment and intimacy, violation and volition? How do such uncompromising images respond to, or seek to intervene into a set of socio-political and economic realities? In what ways do these films move beyond binaries of passivity and activity, voyeurism and masochism?

With these and other relevant questions in mind, we invite papers that critically examine the ‘new extremism’ in contemporary European cinema. Possible topics may also include (but are by no means restricted to) the following:

Issues of spectatorship – The ethics of extremism and the ‘ethical turn’ in critical and cultural theory

Feminist and psychoanalytic approaches

Questions of trauma (psychological, corporeal, national, historical)

Debates about cinematic realism, materiality and the Real

Theories of sensation and affect

New approaches to sexuality and violence

Temporal/spatial formations in the new extremism

Issues of political agency and social exclusion

Influences on the new extremism: mainstream and avant-garde traditions

Reception studies

Questions of authorship

Proposals (up to 500 word abstracts) should be sent by November 21st, 2008 to:
Tanya Horeck (Tanya.Horeck@anglia.ac.uk)

Tina Kendall (Tina.Kendall@anglia.ac.uk)

Sarah Barrow (Sarah.Barrow@anglia.ac.uk)

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.

youtube link 

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.

Continue reading here

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."

Continue here 

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

Link 

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)

TOC

THE CLASH BETWEEN THEATER AND FILM: Germaine Dulac, André Bazin and La Souriante Madame Beudet
Author: Charles Musser

WALTER BENJAMIN’S SHELL-SHOCK: Sounding the acoustical unconscious
Author: Robert G. Ryder

THINGS THAT COME AFTER ANOTHER
Author: András Bálint Kovács

CONSTRUCTING MOVEMENT IN THE CINEMA
Author: Nick Redfern

CRITICS, CLONES AND NARRATIVE IN THE FRANCHISE BLOCKBUSTER
Author: Bradley Schauer

THE PLANET AT THE END OF THE WORLD FREE ACCESS FREE ACCESS: ‘Event’ cinema and the representability of climate change
Author: Gill Branston

EVERYDAYNESS IN FILM ETHICS
Author: Wim Staat

Exquisite Ex-timacy: Jacques Lacan vis-à-vis Contemporary Horror

Stefan Gullatz

A few brief introductory remarks on the cultural dimension of a subjective economy of pleasure may prove the best avenue to any psychoanalytic reading of the supernatural horror genre. According to Zizek, there are different phases in Freud's differentiation between the pleasure and reality principles. Freud initially posits an ideal state whereby an individual, shielded from the exigencies of the 'reality principle', experiences a pure, undisturbed bliss. At this stage of Freudian theory, the need to accommodate to the reality principle is accomplished via the subordination of the pleasure to the reality principle, so that the direct route to pleasure becomes blocked. By the time of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, [2] the situation looks more complex. Phenomena like the repetition compulsion and the paradoxical recurrence of traumatic dreams lead Freud to the theory of the 'death drive' that entailed a different view of the nature of the pleasure principle. Thus, even in the absence of the reality principle the ceaseless drive for pleasure continuously encounters an internal obstacle. Although this hindrance is experienced as a 'hard kernel', an empirical object, it only objectifies the ontological impossibility of enjoyment. The role of the reality principle becomes evident when we consider symbolic castration which constitutes the social subject imposing a traumatic loss from the outside. The initially internal conflict is transposed to another level as the differentiation between an inside and an outside occurs. The internal obstacle to satisfaction is externalized, so that the subject re-encounters this object as his 'objective correlative' amidst a universe structured by the reality principle. This object, perceived as a meaningless 'stain', a distortion in the 'visual field' of any culture, is the subject's 'ex-timate' core. [3]

Continue reading 

Via I Cite

Philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek provides his commentary and observations about Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men. The filmmakers recently spent time with Mr. Zizek after identifying him as an important element in their research because of the unique philosophical view he offers on both the implementation of governmental power, and the damaged emotional state of a refugee.

In this transcript, he discusses issues including the foreground/background dynamics of the film, infertility and politics. Zizek brings a complex and informative view on Children of Men’s portrayal of London, the emotional state of the characters and overall vision of the film.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK:

For me, Children of Men is a model of a kind of materialist subversion of a reactionary classic, because the novel is obviously a spiritualist Christian parable of resuscitation, bringing new life and so on. The novel ends with baptizing. It’s clear Christian parable. The film is a model of how you can take a reactionary text, change some details here and there and you get a totally, a totally different story. I would say that it’s a realist film, but in what sense? Hegel in his esthetics says that a good portrayal looks more like the person who is portrayed than the person itself. A good portrayal is more you than you are yourself. And I think this is what the film does with our reality. The changes that the film introduces do not point toward alternate reality, they simply make reality more what it already is. I think this is the true vocation of science fiction. Science fiction realism introduces a change that makes us see better. The nightmare that we are expecting is here.

The rest