Robert Sinnerbrink

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.

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.

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.

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.

Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding makes a timely contribution to contemporary debates in ethics and political philosophy. For all its originality, however, one can raise critical questions concerning Critchley's account of the forms of resistance possible within liberal democratic polities. In this article I question the adequacy of Critchley's ethically based neo-anarchism as a response to neo-liberalism, critically analysing the role of ideology in his account of the motivational deficit afflicting capitalist liberal democracies.

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.

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 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