Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992)

Taking contemporary films from the United States, Russia, Taiwan, France, and the Philippines, The Geopolitical Aesthetic offers a reading of some of the most interesting films of the last decade and a general account of filmic representation in the postmodern world. Fredric Jameson poses some essential questions: How does representation function in contemporary film? How does contemporary cinema represent an ever more complex and international social reality? Jameson’s sophisticated and theoretically informed readings stress the ways in which disparate films—for example, Godard’s Passion, Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Yang’s The Terrorizer, Tahimik’s The Perfumed Nightmare, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev—confront similar problems of representation. The solutions vary widely but the drive remains the same—the desire to find adequate allegories for our social existence.

The Geopolitical Aesthetic, a refinement and development of the arguments put forward in Jameson’s seminal work The Political Unconscious, is crucial reading for everyone interested in both film analysis and cultural studies.

Publisher Indiana University Press, 1992
Perspectives Series
ISBN 0253330939, 9780253330932
220 pages

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Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Uppinder Mehan (eds.): Terror, Theory and the Humanities (2012)

The events of September 11, 2001, have had a strong impact on theory and the humanities. They call for a new philosophy, as the old philosophy is inadequate to account for them. They also call for reflection on theory, philosophy, and the humanities in general. While the recent location and killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, in Pakistan on May 2, 2011—almost ten years after he and his confederates carried out the 9/11 attacks—may have ended the “war on terror,” it has not ended the journey to understand what it means to be a theorist in the age of phobos nor the effort to create a new philosophy that measures up with life in the new millennium. It is in the spirit of hope—the hope that theory will help us to understand the age of terror—that the essays in this collection are presented.

With essays by Christian Moraru, Terry Caesar, David B. Downing, Horace L. Fairlamb, Emory Elliott, Elaine Martin, Robin Truth Goodman, Sophia A. McClennen, William V. Spanos, Zahi Zalloua.

Publisher Open Humanities Press, an imprint of MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor
Critical Climate Change series
Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License
ISBN 1607852497, 9781607852490
248 pages

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John Mullarkey: Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (2009)

Why is film becoming increasingly important to philosophers? Is it because it can be a helpful tool in teaching philosophy, in illustrating it? Or is it because film can also think for itself, can create its own philosophy? Indeed many film-philosophers claim that film does more than merely illustrate philosophical texts: rather, film itself can philosophize in direct audio-visual terms. Too often, however, when philosophers claim to find indigenous philosophical value in cinema, it is only on account of refracting it through their own thought: film philosophizes because it accords with a favoured kind of extant philosophy.

Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image is the first book to examine all the central issues surrounding the vexed relationship between the film-image and philosophy. In it, John Mullarkey tackles the work of particular philosophers and theorists (Žižek, Deleuze, Cavell, Bordwell, Badiou, Branigan, Rancière, Frampton, and many others) as well as general philosophical positions (Analytical and Continental, Cognitivist and Culturalist, Psychoanalytic and Phenomenological). Moreover, he also offers an incisive analysis and explanation of several prominent forms of film theorizing, providing a meta logical account of their mutual advantages and deficiencies that will prove immensely useful to anyone interested in the details of particular theories of film presently circulating, as well as correcting, revising, and re-visioning the field of film theory as a whole.

Throughout, Mullarkey asks whether the reduction of film to text is unavoidable. In particular: must philosophy (and theory) always transform film into pre-texts for illustration? What would it take to imagine how film might itself theorise without reducing it to standard forms of thought and philosophy? Finally, and fundamentally, must we change our definition of philosophy and even of thought itself in order to accommodate the specificities that come with the claim that film can produce philosophical theory?

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
ISBN 0230002471, 9780230002470
282 pages

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