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?

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.

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.

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 paper develops a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the work of Foucault and Agamben. It shows how Heidegger's reflections on Machenschaft or machination prefigure the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. It develops a critique of Foucault's account of biopolitics as a system of managing the biological life of populations culminating in neo-liberalism, and a critique of Agamben's presentation of biopolitics as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality. Foucault's ethical turn within biopolitical governmentality, along with Agamben's messianic gesture towards a utopian community to come, are questioned as political responses to biopower regimes.

How can Benjamin's theses help us to understand the secret architectures of the present? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number of innovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholars on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs, the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and much more. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays in this collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work of Walter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities of our own present.

Some of the most innovative philosophical engagement with cinema and ethics in recent years has come from phenomenological and cognitivist perspectives. This trend reflects a welcome re-engagement with cinema as a medium with the potential for ethical transformation, that is, with the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience. This paper explores the phenomenological turn in film theory, emphasizing the ethical implications of phenomenological approaches to affect and empathy, emotion, and evaluation. I argue that the oft-criticized subjectivism of phenomenological theories can be supplemented by cognitivist approaches that highlight the complex forms of affective response, emotional engagement, and moral allegiance at work in our experience of movies. An empathic ethics or “cinempathy” is at work in many films, I suggest, such as Ashgar Farhadi’s A Separation, which offers a striking case study in cinematic ethics.

Few cinephiles would deny the importance of mood in film, yet the aesthetics of mood are curiously overlooked today. On the one hand, mood is an essential dimension of cinema: we define certain genres, for example, by suggesting the moods they evoke. On the other hand, words frequently fail us when we try to articulate such moods in a more abstract or analytical vein. I offer in this essay some critical reflections on the significance of mood, suggesting that mood works in narrative film by the disclosure of cinematic worlds. To explore variations in the aesthetics of mood — what I call disclosive, episodic, transitional and autonomous moods — I shall consider some selected mood-sequences from Brokeback Mountain, Fa yeung nin wa/In the Mood for Love, Habla con ella/Talk to Her and Mulholland Drive. My aim is to suggest the virtues of taking a more phenomenological approach to the aesthetics of mood, understood as a way of revealing or opening up a cinematic world; and to show how mood, in revealing distinctive cinematic worlds, is essential to our aesthetic and emotional engagement with film.

Introduction: why did philosophy go to the movies? -- The analytic-cognitivist turn. The empire strikes back: critiques of "grand theory" -- The rules of the game: new ontologies of film -- Adaptation: philosophical approaches to narrative -- From cognitivism to film-philosophy. A.I.: cognitivism goes to the movies -- Bande à part: Deleuze and Cavell as film-philosophers -- Scenes from a marriage: film as philosophy -- Cinematic thinking. Hollywood in trouble: David Lynch's Inland empire -- "Chaos reigns": anti-cognitivism in Lars von trier's Antichrist -- Song of the earth: cinematic romanticism in Malick's The new world -- Coda: "the six most beautiful minutes in the history of cinema".

Film, Theory and Philosophy brings together leading scholars to provide a detailed overview of the key thinkers who have shaped the field of film philosophy. The thinkers include continental philosophers, post-continental philosophers, analytic philosophers, film-makers, film reviewers, sociologists, and cultural theorists. The essays reveal how philosophy can be applied to film analysis and how film can be used to illustrate philosophical problems. But more importantly, the essays explore how film has shaped what philosophy thinks and how philosophy has lead to a reappraisal of film.

This essay presents a critical interpretation of Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Walter Benjamin’s text, "Critique of Violence." It examines the relationship between deconstruction and justice, and the parallel Derrida draws between deconstructive reading and Benjamin’s account of pure violence. I argue that Derrida blurs Benjamin’s distinction between the political general strike and the proletarian general strike. As a consequence, Derrida criticises Benjamin’s metaphysical complicity with the violence that lead to the Holocaust. Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Benjamin, I conclude, underplays its Marxist dimensions, privileging the theological and textual dimensions of Benjamin’s thought over the political and historical.

Nikolas Kompridis has recently argued that the future of critical theory depends upon a critical appropriation of Heidegger’s concept of ‘world disclosure’, and hence on a transformation of critical theory into a form of ‘world-disclosing critique’ oriented towards the future. This article engages in a critical dialogue with Kompridis' account of world-disclosing critique, arguing that critical theory should embrace it as an innovative way of retrieving the forgotten tradition of aesthetic critique of modernity

he enigmatic films of David Lynch have been interpreted from a variety of perspectives. Among these we can find Lynch the postmodernist ironist, Lynch the transgressive neoconservative, and Lynch the visionary explorer of the unconscious. Martha P. Nochimson's recent study, for example, presents an eloquent case for regarding Lynch as a Jungian 'surfer of the waves of the collective unconscious', whose films combine the intuitive embracing of subconscious Life Energy with a celebration of the creative power of Hollywood mythology. [1] For Nochimson, Lynch's transformation of the masculine action hero into intuitive 'boundary crosser' shows the redemptive quality of his cinematic vision, which we experience sensuously rather than comprehend rationally