Garin Dowd

This chapter explores the rather striking manner in which at key moments in the history of philosophy, in the discipline’s attempts at self-definition, the genre or literary form of poetry plays a key role. Philosophy, at these moments, has been defined, inter alia, as the enemy of poetry, the guiding light for the philosopher who can only try and inevitably fail to emulate its brilliance, or as the anomalous guest at the philosophical table with whom the host discipline has relations which result in either generative or degenerative effects. Insofar as it lays claim to or liaises with philosophy – as we have come to know it today – poetry has thus played a part in the self-definition of genre theory. The aim of this chapter is to capture a very specific set of transfers, transpositions, metonymies and other modes of reversible relations of substitution and surrogacy between philosophy and poetry, and along the way between genre-theory-as-philosophy and poetry.

This paper explores the framing qualities of architecture in conjunction with the framing operations of cinema. In doing so it refers to philosophical inquiry into architecture and to architectural philosophy as well as to attempts to think film and the architectural together. In what sense or senses can architecture be considered 'primary' in relation to cinema? This first question will be explored by considering the inscription or encompassment of the architectural as a foundational gesture in cinema. Even if film does not necessarily figure the built environment, even if it need not be dependent on the presence or generative force of buildings, film will always participate in its own version of architecture's modelling into a form of territory.