Alain Badiou: On Beckett (2003)

“This collection of Alain Badiou’s essays on Samuel Beckett is a deliberate intellectual challenge to conventional Beckett scholarship. These essays trace the development of Beckett’s artfrom his first works through the claustrophobic world of The Unnameable to a final engagement with questions of Other and Love. Badiou rejects the stereotypical view of Beckett as the dark existentialist; rather, he claims that the lesson of Beckett is one of moderation, precision, and courage.”

Translation, introduction and selection by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano
Publisher Clinamen Press, Manchester, 2003
ISBN 1903083265, 9781903083260
164 pages

Editor
Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-7-5)

David Norman Rodowick: The Virtual Life of Film (2007)

As almost (or, truly, virtually) every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of “watching a film” is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media competing for an audience, what will happen to cinema–and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, D. N. Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of moviemaking and viewing in the twenty-first century.

Here Rodowick proposes and examines three different critical responses to the disappearance of film in relation to other time-based media, and to the study of contemporary visual culture. Film, he suggests, occupies a special place in the genealogy of the arts of the virtual: while film disappears, cinema persists–at least in the narrative forms imagined by Hollywood since 1915. Rodowick also observes that most so-called “new media” are fashioned upon a cinematic metaphor. His book helps us see how digital technologies are serving, like television and video before them, to perpetuate the cinematic as the mature audiovisual culture of the twentieth century–and, at the same time, how they are preparing the emergence of a new audiovisual culture whose broad outlines we are only just beginning to distinguish.

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2007
ISBN 0674026683, 9780674026681
193 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)

Patricia Ticineto Clough: Autoaffection. Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000)

Explores the connection between new theories, new technologies, and new ways of thinking.

In this book, Patricia Ticineto Clough reenergizes critical theory by viewing poststructuralist thought through the lens of “teletechnology,” using television as a recurring case study to illuminate the changing relationships between subjectivity, technology, and mass media.

Autoaffection links diverse forms of cultural criticism—feminist theory, queer theory, film theory, postcolonial theory, Marxist cultural studies and literary criticism, the cultural studies of science and the criticism of ethnographic writing—to the transformation and expansion of teletechnology in the late twentieth century. These theoretical approaches, Clough suggests, have become the vehicles of unconscious thought in our time.

In individual chapters, Clough juxtaposes the likes of Derridean deconstruction, Deleuzian philosophy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She works through the writings of Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Grosz-to name only a few-placing all in dialogue with a teletechnological framework. Clough shows how these cultural criticisms have raised questions about the foundation of thought, allowing us to reenvision the relationship of nature and technology, the human and the machine, the virtual and the real, the living and the inert.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2000
ISBN 0816628890, 9780816628896
213 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)