Robert Sinnerbrink

ABSTRACTIn response to Mohan Matthen's ‘The Pleasure of Art’, I identify three issues that deserve further critical engagement: the scope of his definition of aesthetic pleasure, the role of culture in shoring up its communal and communicable character, and the need to include an account of aesthetic properties in his psychologically grounded approach to aesthetic pleasure. Without due acknowledgment of both aesthetic properties and the intersubjective role of culture, Matthen's activity-based theory of aesthetic pleasure risks lapsing into subjectivism, thereby losing the ‘communal and communicative’ character of art upon which he rightly insists.

Audio recording of roundtable discussion between Robert Sinnerbrink, John Mullarkey, Berys Gaut, David Martin-Jones and William Brown held on October 12, 2009 at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Over the course of at least the last hundred years the intellectual study of cinema has experienced a number of shifts towards and away from theoretical or philosophical attempts to understand the moving image. The twenty-first century sees film-philosophy resurgent, in part due to the interest in cinema that has flourished recently in disciplines like philosophy, and in part due to the interdisciplinary nature of Film Studies. At a time when it is increasingly in vogue to return to theoretical questions previously pushed off the agenda by the dominance of historical approaches to cinema, such as the perennial "What is Cinema?", we are taking this opportunity to ask, "What is Film-Philosophy?" In a context that is witnessing the rise of digital cinema, the global dominance of multi-national media conglomerates, and the worldwide spread of "world cinemas", what role does theory or philosophy play in helping us understand cinema, and indeed, what role can cinema play in transforming philosophy?

Like the fabled black swan of early epistemological inquiry, ‘Australasian Continental philosophy’ seems a kind of chimera apt to raise doubts rather than certainty. Is there such a mythical creature? Is it nothing more than a pale reflection of more paradigmatic instances found ‘overseas’, as we say in Australia, an Antipodean counterpart to the ‘major’ developments occurring in the United Kingdom or the United States? Or are there distinctive features of this phenomenon that, like the black swan, represent an unexpected variation unique to the Australasian environment? For a movement that one can date as first appearing in the early part of the twentieth century—the publication of John McKellar Stewart’s 1913 critical study of Henri Bergson’s philosophy may serve as a convenient starting point—it is surprising that Continental philosophy in Australia has only recently become a topic of historical interest. Part of the problem is the contested nature of the phenomenon in question. ‘Continental philosophy’ is a term that goes back to the nineteenth-century historical contrast between ‘British empiricism’ and ‘Continental rationalism’ ). It emerges more explicitly, however, with J.S. Mill’s essays on the contrast between Benthamite philosophy and the ‘Germano-Coleridgean doctrine’, the latter being identified with the ‘Continental philosophers’, and ‘the Continental philosophy’ as well as ‘French philosophy’. It takes on its more contemporary meaning, however, only after WWII, especially during the 1950s. The term gives way to the political urgency of Marxism and feminism during the 1970s, gains a new sense of institutional valency during the 1980s and 90s, and has more recently become the subject of meta-philosophical reflection.

The relationship between critical theory and psychoanalysis has a long and interesting history. The first generation of Frankfurt School philosophers, particularly figures such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, embraced psychoanalysis in order to explain why, given seemingly propitious historical circumstances, 'the masses' opted for fascism rather than communism during the 1930s. Following the rise of Nazism and the horrors of Auschwitz, Freudian psychoanalytic theory once again proved important, as evinced in Adorno's account of the 'authoritarian personality' and Adorno and Horkheimer's earlier analysis of Nazism and anti-Semitism in the "Dialectic of Enlightenment". Marcuse's famous critique of the domination effects of 'repressive desublimation' is another example of the productive appropriation of psychoanalytic theory as a key element of the critical theory of modernity.

Terrence Malick’s The New World is a poetic evocation of one of America’s founding myths, the story of Pocahontas. While the film allegorises - through the theme of marriage - the possibility of successful cultural exchange and of reconciliation with nature, it also fuses mythic history, subjective reflection, and the self-expression of nature. This unstable point of view has led to a critical ambivalence concerning the film’s romantic naivety: its evocation of ideologically suspect myths or historically anachronistic tropes. My discussion defends the film as knowingly romantic; an aesthetic challenge to our historical scepticism towards the experience of new worlds.

How do movies evoke and express ethical ideas? What role does our emotional involvement play in this process? What makes the aesthetic power of cinema ethically significant? Cinematic Ethics: _Exploring Ethical Experience through Film_ addresses these questions by examining the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience with the power to provoke emotional understanding and philosophical thinking. In a clear and engaging style, Robert Sinnerbrink examines the key philosophical approaches to ethics in contemporary film theory and philosophy using detailed case studies of cinematic ethics across different genres, styles, and filmic traditions. Written in a lucid and lively style that will engage both specialist and non-specialist readers, this book is ideal for use in the academic study of philosophy and film. Key features include annotated suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter and a filmography of movies useful for teaching and researching cinematic ethics.

Understanding Hegelianism explores the ways in which Hegelian and anti-Hegelian currents of thought have shaped some of the most significant movements in twentieth-century European philosophy, particularly the traditions of critical theory, existentialism, Marxism, and poststructuralism. Robert Sinnerbrink begins with an examination of Kierkegaard's existentialism and Marx's materialism. He looks at the contrasting critiques of Hegel by Lukacs and Heidegger as well as the role of Hegelian themes in the work of Adorno, Habermas, and Honneth. Sinnerbrink also considers the rich tradition of Hegelianism in modern French philosophers such as Wahl, Kojeve, Hyppolite, Lefebvre, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Derrida and Deleuze, who articulated a radical critique of Hegelianism.Throughout Understanding Hegelianism Sinnerbrink foregrounds the Hegelian themes of the unhappy consciousness, the master/slave dialectic, and the struggle for recognition and shows how each has provided fertile concepts for both the development of German critical theory and for French philosophy. He examines the problem of modernity, theories of recognition, and the deconstruction of metaphysics in order to show the legacy of Hegelian thought and also explores some of the recent developments in Anglophone Hegelianism.

This paper pursues the lsquo;thinking dialoguersquo; between Hegel and Heidegger, a dialogue centred on Heideggerrsquo;s lsquo;confrontationrsquo; with Hegelrsquo;s Phenomenology of Spirit. To this end, I examine Heideggerrsquo;s critique of Hegel on the relationship between time and Spirit; Heideggerrsquo;s interpretation of the Phenomenology as exemplifying the Cartesian-Fichtean metaphysics of the subject; and Heideggerrsquo;s later reflections on Hegel as articulating the modern metaphysics of lsquo;subjectityrsquo;. I argue that Heideggerrsquo;s confrontation forgets those aspects of Hegelrsquo;s philosophy that make him our philosophical contemporary: Hegelrsquo;s thinking of intersubjectivity and recognition, of the historicity of the experience of spirit, and his critique of modernity. The point of this dialogue is to begin a retrieval of Hegel from Heideggerrsquo;s critical deconstruction, and thus to suggest that the future of Hegelmdash;in Catherine Malaboursquo;s phrasemdash;remains something still to-come

This essay seeks to further the critical reception of Stiegler's philosophy of technology by situating his work within the legacy of critical theory and deconstruction. Drawing on what Richard Beardsworth has described as Stiegler's 'Left-Derrideanism'-his radical re-thinking of the problem of technics and related call for a "politics of memory"-I argue that Stiegler's transformation of both Heidegger and Derrida retrieves and renews the interrupted Frankfurt school tradition of culture industry critique. What we might call Stiegler's 'deconstructive materialism' reinvigorates the project of a cultural politics that would take place in the intersection between culture, technics, and politics in the more conventional sense. In this respect, Stiegler's culture industry redux points to a number of important practical cultural responses to the debilitating malaise that increasingly afflicts politics in liberal capitalist democracies. I conclude by suggesting what such a Stieglerian 'cultural politics of memory' might entail.

This article explores the Hegelian ‘night of the world’ that plays such an important role in Žižek’s theorisation of the subject. In the first part, I examine how the themes of the “pre-synthetic imagination” and “abstract negativity" are crucial to understanding Žižek’s theorisation of the Hegelian subject. In the second part, I consider how this Hegelian model of the subject is decisive for understanding Žižek’s conception of Hegelian “concrete universality,” and how the latter concept figures prominently in Žižek’s analysis of the relationship between the abstract negativity of the subject and the political question of confronting global capitalism. Žižek’s unorthodox reading of the Hegelian ‘night of the world’—the radical negativity that haunts subjectivity—is developed further in an explicitly political direction. This Hegelian theme helps explain Žižek’s recent critique of the ‘Fukuyamaian’ consensus, shared both by moral-religious conservatives and libertarian ‘postmodernists’, that global capitalism remains the ‘unsurpassable horizon of our times’. In conclusion I raise some questions about Žižek’s combining of abstract and determinate negation in his ‘romantic’ reading of the negativity of the Hegelian subject. I then critically examine the implications Žižek draws from this analysis in In Defense of Lost Causes , which presents a sustained argument to reclaim the revolutionary tradition of Leftist politics

This paper examines the theme of recognition in Hegel's account of self-consciousness, suggesting that there are unresolved difficulties with the relationship between the normative sense of mutual recognition and phenomenological cases of unequal recognition. Recent readings of Hegel deal with this problem by positing an implicit distinction between an 'ontological' sense of recognition as a precondition for autonomous subjectivity, and a 'normative' sense of recognition as embodied in rational social and political institutions. Drawing on recent work by Robert Pippin and Axel Honneth, I argue that Hegel's conception of rational freedom provides the key to grasping the relationship between the ontological and normative senses of recognition. Recognitive freedom provides a way of appropriating Hegel's theory of recognition for contemporary social philosophy.

Given the so-called ?crisis? in film theory, the digital mutations of the medium, and the renewed interest in historicism, cinephilia, and film philosophy, André Bazin's thought appears ripe for retrieval and renewal. Indeed, his role in the renaissance of philosophical film theory, I argue, is less epistemological and ontological than moral and aesthetic. It is a quest to explore the revelatory possibilities of cinematic images; not only their power to reveal reality under a multiplicity of aspects but to satisfy our desire for myth ? to allow an aesthetic overcoming of the limits of consciousness and memory. The question I wish to explore is whether cinema has the power to restore our belief in reality, in the worlds that film can reveal, in the experience that it can capture and transfigure. My case study for exploring this question, the question of belief in cinema or what we could call a Bazinian cinephilia, will be Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011); a film whose sublime aesthetics and unorthodox religiosity has provoked polarised critical responses, but whose remarkable ambition is to create a mythology ? personal, historical, and cosmological ? capable of reanimating belief in cinema and in the world