Robert Sinnerbrink

In the first part of the paper I consider the relative neglect of hope in the tradition of critical theory. I attribute this neglect to a low estimation of the cognitive, aesthetic, and moral value of hope, and to the strong—but, argue, contingent—association that holds between hope and religion. I then distinguish three strategies for thinking about the justification of social hope; one which appeals to a notion of unfulfilled or frustrated natural human capacities, another which invokes a providential order, and a third which questions the very appropriateness of justification, turning instead to a notion of ungroundable hope. Different senses of ungroundable hope are distinguished and by way of conclusion I briefly consider their relevance for the project of critique today.

One of the questions that Gilles Deleuze explores is the relationship between cinema and belief: can cinema restore the broken link between us and the world? Does modern cinema have the power to give us ‘reasons to believe in this world’? My case study for exploring the question of belief in cinema, or what I call a Bazinian cinephilia, is Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011); a film whose sublime aesthetics and unorthodox religiosity have provoked polarized critical responses, but whose ambition is to create a mythology—personal, historical, and cosmological—capable of reanimating belief in cinema and in the world. At once a religiousmetaphysical work and a meditation on the origins and ends of life, The Tree of Life expresses a philosophical version of cinephilia: a love of existence, an aesthetic response to nihilism, affirming the world’s dialectic of nature and grace via cinema’s revelatory powers.

In Žižeks Werk ist Hegels Konzept der „Nacht der Welt“ zentral, um die radikale Negativität des Subjekts zu verstehen. Die Textpassage, die Hegel in seiner Jenaer Zeit verfasste, beschreibt die dunkle, unbewusste Seite der menschlichen Subjektivität. Žižek verwendet sie, um die Lacan’sche Psychoanalyse mit postkantischem und hegelianischem Idealismus zu verbinden, wobei die destruktive Kraft der Negativität im Mittelpunkt steht. Im ersten Teil das Kapitels wird die Bedeutung der präsynthetischen Einbildungskraft und abstrakten Negativität für Žižeks Verständnis des hegelianischen Subjekts in TheTicklish Subject untersucht. Der zweite Teil zeigt, wie dieses Modell des Subjekts Žižeks Konzept der „konkreten Allgemeinheit“ prägt. Abschließend werden kritische Fragen zu Žižeks romantischer Lesart der Negativität des hegelianischen Subjekts und dessen Implikationen diskutiert, wie sie in InDefense of Lost Causes dargestellt werden.

In Organs without Bodies (2004) setzt sich Žižek kritisch mit Gilles Deleuze auseinander und stellt provokativ die These „Deleuze equals Hegel“ auf. Žižek versucht, Deleuzes Philosophie der Differenz in sein eigenes neohegelianisches Paradigma zu integrieren, indem er Deleuzes Begriff der Differenz unter Hegels Konzept des „konkreten Allgemeinen“ subsumiert. Er argumentiert, dass Deleuzes Dualismen – zwischen Virtualität und Aktualität sowie Werden und Sein – die Instabilität der Opposition von Idealismus und Materialismus wiederholen. Žižek kritisiert die politischen Implikationen von Deleuzes Ontologie, insbesondere die deterritorialisierenden Ströme des globalen Kapitalismus, die reflektiert, aber denen nicht widerstanden wird. Er plädiert für eine Politik des „konkreten Allgemeinen“, die den „Anteil der Anteillosen“ zum Ausgangspunkt emanzipatorischer Bemühungen macht und sich gegen die postmoderne Politik der kulturellen Anerkennung wendet.

Hegel ist in Žižeks Werk allgegenwärtig. Dessen Dialektik bildet dort zusammen mit Lacans Psychoanalyse und zeitgenössischer Ideologiekritik eine triadische Struktur. Drei hegelianische Schlüsselkonzepte sind dabei zentral: die spekulative Dialektik als Kritische Theorie, das Subjekt als ‚selbstbezogene Negativität‘ und eine neohegelianische Ideologiekritik der Gegenwart. Žižek betont die Notwendigkeit, Hegels radikale Negativität zu wiederholen und eine hegelianisch-lacanianische Ideologietheorie zu rekonstruieren, um die Dynamiken des globalen Kapitalismus zu erfassen und eine kritische Reflexion über zeitgenössische Politik zu fördern.

"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. The first part of the book examines Kierkegaard's existentialism and Marx's materialism, which present two defining poles of subsequent Hegelian and anti-Hegelian movements. The second part looks at the contrasting critiques of Hegel by Lukacs and Heidegger, which set the stage for the appropriation of Hegelian themes in German critical theory and the anti-Hegelian turn in French poststructuralism. The role of Hegelian themes in the work of Adorno, Habermas and Honneth are explored. In the third part, the rich tradition of Hegelianism in modern French philosophy is considered - the work of Wahl, Kojeve, Hyppolite, Lefebvre, Sartre, de Beauvoir as well as the radical critique of Hegelianism articulated by Derrida and Deleuze. Although the focus is primarily on German and French appropriations of Hegelian thought, the author also explores some of the recent developments in Anglophone Hegelianism.

In this imagined dialogue, I explore three significant challenges for film-philosophy arising from contemporary cultural, and technological developments: 1) The ‘digital revolution’ that challenges the traditional conception of the medium (‘film’); 2) cultural-political developments putting ‘identity politics’ at the centre of film-theoretical debate; 3) the challenge to extend the ‘film as philosophy’ debate into other domains of cinema (documentary, television, animation, and digital media). As in any philosophical dialogue, my aim is to pose questions, identify tensions, clarify problems, and disclose new perspectives that may shift our ways of thinking about the future relationship between philosophy and cinema.

Since the early 1990s, phenomenology and cognitivism have become two of the most influential approaches to film theory. Yet far from being at odds with each other, both approaches offer important insights on our subjective experience of cinema. Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience explores how these two approaches might work together to create a philosophy of film that is both descriptively rich and theoretically productive by addressing the key relationship between cinematic experience, emotions, and ethics.

Imagination has been the focus of much philosophical inquiry in recent decades. Although it plays an essential role in linking emotional engagement with ethical experience, imagination has received comparatively little attention in film-philosophy. In this article, I argue that imagination plays an essential role in linking emotional engagement with moral-ethical experience. Drawing on phenomenological, cognitive and aesthetic perspectives, I focus on perceptual imagining and suggest that an account of embodied cinematic imagination — encompassing both perceptual/sensory and propositional/cognitive imagining — is especially relevant to theorizing cinematic experience. The interplay of first-person empathic and third-person sympathetic perspectives is another essential feature of our emotional and ethical engagement with cinema. By synthesizing ‘bottom-up’ sensory, affective responses to audiovisual images, with ‘top-down’ cognitive processes associated with mental simulation, an account of embodied cinematic imagination can explain how emotional engagement and ethical responsiveness work together in our experience of audiovisual narratives.

As Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney for over 20 years (1978–2001), György Márkus exerted a profound influence on a generation of philosophers and students from many disciplinary backgrounds. His legendary lecture courses, spanning the history of modern philosophy from the Enlightenment through to the late 20th century, were memorable for their breadth, erudition, and philosophical drama. Always modest despite his mastery of the tradition, Márkus’s approach to this history of philosophy never failed to emphasize its continuing role in shaping our inherited understanding of philosophy as ‘its own time comprehended in thoughts’ (Hegel). This is especially true of his contribution to the philosophical discourse of modernity, which we could summarize as comprising an original philosophy of cultural modernity. In what follows, I briefly reconstruct Márkus’s account of the adventures of the concept of culture, focusing on his definitive essay ‘The Path of Culture: From the Refined to the High, From the Popular to Mass Culture’ (2013) but also referring to other relevant Márkus texts, offering some critical remarks on his account of culture and its relationship with modern aesthetics, both classical and contemporary.

This chapter offers a critical discussion of the relationship between poststructuralism and film theory. I commence with a brief account of poststructuralism’s distinctive features. I then turn to the key poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze, and explore why poststructuralist thinkers themselves may have eschewed reflecting on the medium. I then consider the critique of poststructuralist contribution to film theory, suggesting what elements of that critique remain pertinent. Finally, I consider Deleuze, the only poststructuralist thinker to have focused on cinema, and argue that much of his cinematic philosophy implies a critical distancing from the psycho-semiotic/poststructuralist approach to film theory.

This chapter offers a critical discussion of the idea of filmosophy or film as philosophy. I explore the debate surrounding the idea of “film as philosophy”, distinguishing this approach from more traditional philosophy of film, and suggesting that it has a long history going back to key figures in early film theory. I then focus on the seminal work of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, often described as the inaugurators of film-philosophy. Finally, I examine recent proposals concerning the idea of “film as philosophy”, which argue for a more transformative relationship between philosophy and cinema, and offer some concluding reflections on how we might respond to some of the objections raised against this approach.

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.

The films of Michael Haneke, so some critics argue, exploit the nihilism of a media-saturated culture, indulging in a dubious manipulation of audience expectations and our fascination with violence. Such criticisms, however, misunderstand or distort the complex moral, political, and aesthetic purpose of Haneke’s work. Indeed, his films are better understood as examining the socially disorienting and subjectively disintegrating effects of our post-humanist world of mass-mediatised experience. At the same time, they are highly reflexive cinematic works that force us to reflect – both morally and aesthetically – upon our relationship with cinematic and media images. These two strands of Haneke’s work comprise a sustained meditation on what we might call the “post-humanist condition”: a cinematic critique of the disintegration and fragmentation of affect and subjectivity, a disintegration closely linked with contemporary forms of mediatised spectacle and the cynical consumption of images of violence. Given the mediatised nature of contemporary social experience, the only effective way to engage in cinematic critique is by means of the very images that capture and captivate us.

Lars von Trierjeva Melanholija ponudi fascinantno raziskovanje filmske romantike in estetike filmskih razpoloženj. S pomočjo dramatizacije katastrofične izkušnje »izgube sveta« glavne junakinje Justine [Kirsten Dunst's], nam predstavi uničujočo podobo melanholije, ki najde ustrezni konec v sublimni filmski fantaziji izničenja sveta. V pričujočem članku analiziram nekatere estetske in filozofske sklope Melanholije, še posebej Von Trierjevo raziskovanje uporabe romantike in predstavitve filmskega razpoloženja. Von Trierer ne raziskuje namreč zgolj estetike melanholije, temveč tudi njene etične razsežnosti, s čimer ustvari umetniški film katastrofe, katerega sublimna upodobitev uničenja sveta ima paradoksni učinek razkritja ranljivosti in končnosti življenja na Zemlji.