•  578
    This essay provides an interpretation of the potential and limits of Michael Fried's difficult claims in his essay "Art and Objecthood" (1967) that cinema by its nature escapes the problems of modernism and also escapes the problems of theater. By focusing on Stanley Cavell's account of how cinema as an automatic medium escapes problems associated with variability across performances, I try to render a version of Fried's claim about cinema and theater that can ground a figurative version of his …Read more
  •  367
    The Specter of the Electronic Screen: Bruno Varela's Reception of Stanley Cavell
    In David LaRocca (ed.), Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, . pp. 72-90. 2021.
    An analysis of some work by the Oaxaca-based Mexican experimental filmmaker and video artist Bruno Varela via the latter’s reading of the late U.S. philosopher Stanley Cavell, especially Cavell’s 1982 essay “The Fact of Television.” This essay focuses on the aesthetic possibilities of the very constitution of the electronic image, based in Cavell’s understanding of television’s dependence on notions of “switching,” as opposed to “succession,” as well as how those notions play a role in Varela’s …Read more
  •  303
    The Affective and the Political: Rousseau and Contemporary Kantianism
    Tópicos: Revista de Filosofía 59 301-339. 2020.
    Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often associated with a certain political mode of relating to another, where a person (“a Citizen”) is a locus of enforceable demands. I claim that Rousseau also articulated an affective mode of relating to another, where a person is seen as the locus of a kind of value (expressive of their being an independent point of view) that cannot be demanded. These are not isolated sides of a distinction, for the political mode constitutes a solution to certain problems that the …Read more
  •  289
    Remembering Stanley Cavell
    Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies 7 65-68. 2019.
    Memorial notice for Stanley Cavell originally published on the Harvard Philosophy Department website.
  •  271
    Individuality and Mortality in the Philosophy of Portrait Painting: Simmel, Rousseau, and Melanie Klein
    Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 23 (3): 27-52. 2018.
    This paper explores some connections between depictions of mortality in portrait-painting and philosophical (and psychoanalytic) treatments of our need to be recognized by others. I begin by examining the connection that Georg Simmel makes in his philosophical study of Rembrandt between that artist’s capacity for depicting his portrait subjects as non-repeatable individuals and his depicting them as mortal, or such as to die. After noting that none of Simmel’s explanations of the tragic characte…Read more
  •  249
    Cavell on Color
    Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies 9 90-113. 2021.
    This essay aims to understand the relations between Stanley Cavell’s theoretical generalities regarding the medium of film and his readings of individual films, with a particular focus on his writing on color in his book The World Viewed. I argue that a specific idea of color as connected to abstraction (as well as a correlative idea of black-and-white as connected to figuration) grounds the relations between Cavell’s general statements about color and his readings of individual color films, and…Read more
  •  230
    TV Time, Recurrence, and the Situation of the Spectator: An Approach via Stanley Cavell, Raúl Ruiz, and Ruiz’s Late Chilean Series Litoral
    In Sandra Laugier David LaRocca (ed.), Television with Stanley Cavell in Mind, University of Exeter Press. pp. 191-221. 2023.
    This essay distinguishes some significant commonalities and differences between the film-philosophies of Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (especially in his book Poetics of Cinema) and U.S. philosopher Stanley Cavell. I argue that despite shared senses of the poetics of the film image and certain shared philosophical references, Ruiz and Cavell differed over their conceptions of the model spectator and their relations to autonomous films and worlds from which spectators are excluded (on Cavell's pict…Read more
  •  184
    Spanish translation, with some additions, of "Spectators and Giants in Rousseau and Víctor Erice."
  •  179
    This essay explores how some themes in the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau—particularly having to do with what it is to be a spectacle before others—might illuminate two feature films by the Spanish director Víctor Erice, The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena, 1973) and El sur (1983).
  •  111
    Discussion of two documentaries by the Oaxacan filmmaker and anthropologist Sandra Luz López Barroso, Artemio (2017) and The One Amongst the Shadows (El compromiso de las sombras, 2021), both focused on the Costa Chica of Guerrero.
  •  83
    Spanish version of essay discussing two documentaries by the Oaxacan filmmaker and anthropologist Sandra Luz López Barroso, Artemio (2017) and The One Amongst the Shadows (El compromiso de las sombras, 2021), both focused on the Costa Chica of Guerrero.
  •  46
    La máquina de futuro
    Los Experimentos. 2024.
    Spanish version of collaborative essay with Oaxaca-based Mexican experimental filmmaker Bruno Varela on his found footage project La máquina de futuro. Published on the website Los Experimentos together with the release of Varela's diptych Anáhuac contra los robots, consisting of the films La máquina de futuro and La ranura en el tiempo.
  •  43
    Found footage at the receding of the world
    Screen 23 (1): 123-129. 2022.
    This essay argues that, despite the potential for an encounter between Stanley Cavell’s thought and found-footage experimental filmmaking, this has not yet taken place because the early Cavell’s picture of films as autonomous “wholes,” together with his "global-holistic" conception of modernism, prevented him from appreciating the expressive possibilities of filmic fragments. I then argue that these impediments to an encounter with found footage recede in Cavell’s later thought, as he moves away…Read more
  •  37
    In this paper, I investigate under-explored moments in Rousseau’s and Adam Smith’s writings in which each presents speech, and particularly testimony, as a manifestation of the desire for others’ recognition. I begin by considering some features of Rousseau’s understanding of amour-propre (or the desire for recognition from others) as well as that desire’s relevance for the conception of vocal speech (as in its nature passional) at the center of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages. Since…Read more
  •  36
    Spanish version analysis of Oaxaca-based experimental filmmaker Bruno Varela's 2022 feature-length film El Prototipo, which draws on ideas from Philip K. Dick's novel Valis.
  •  35
    An Autobiography of Companions
    Modern Language Notes 126 (5): 972-978. 2011.
    Part of a symposium on Stanley Cavell's memoir Little Did I Know held at the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center in 2011, this brief essay connects some themes from that book to concerns about knowledge of "what we say" as treated in the opening essays of Cavell's first book, Must We Mean What We Say?; and it attempts to illuminate the latter concerns by comparing them to recent philosophical work on self-knowledge, especially Richard Moran's book Authority and Estrangement.
  •  24
    English version of collaborative essay with Oaxaca-based Mexican experimental filmmaker Bruno Varela on his found footage project La máquina de futuro. Published on the website of Hangar, the Lisbon, Portugal-based Artistic Research Center, to mark the online exhibition of La máquina de futuro as well as three other works by Varela.
  •  18
    Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often associated with a certain political form of relating to another as a person, where a person is seen as a locus of enforceable demands. Nevertheless, as I argue in this dissertation, Rousseau also articulated an affective form of relating to another, where relating to another as a person in this sense involves seeing them as a locus of a kind of value that cannot be demanded. I consider the significance of this affective form for Rousseau’s understanding of the pass…Read more
  •  7
    Este artículo explora ciertas conexiones entre la representación de la mortalidad en el retrato y el tratamiento filosófico de nuestra necesidad de ser reconocidos por los demás. En primer lugar, se examina la conexión que establece Georg Simmel en su estudio filosófico sobre Rembrandt entre la capacidad del artista para representar en sus retratos individuos irrepetibles, y su capacidad para capturar la finitud de los mismos en tanto que seres mortales. Tras señalar que ninguna de las explicaci…Read more
  •  3
    Lo afectivo y lo político: Rousseau y el kantismo contemporáneo
    Tópicos: Revista de Filosofía 59 301-339. 2020.
    Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often associated with a certain political mode of relating to another, where a person is a locus of enforceable demands. I claim that Rousseau also articulated an affective mode of relating to another, where a person is seen as the locus of a kind of value that cannot be demanded. These are not isolated sides of a distinction, for the political mode constitutes a solution to certain problems that the affective mode encounters in common social circumstances, allowing us t…Read more
  • Analysis of Bruno Varela's 2022 feature film El Prototipo.