David LaRocca

This collection of new work on the philosophical importance of television starts from a model for reading films proposed by Stanley Cavell, whereby film in its entirety—actors and production included—brings its own intelligence to its realization. In turn, this intelligence educates us as viewers, leading us to recognize and appreciate our individual cinephilic tastes, and to know ourselves and each other better. This reading is even more valid for TV series. Yet, in spite of the progress of film-philosophy, there has been a paucity of concurrent analysis of the ethical stakes, the modes of expressiveness, and the moral education involved in television series. Perhaps most conspicuously, there has been a lack of focus on the experience of the viewer. Cavell highlighted popular cinema's capacity to create a common culture for millions. This power has become dispersed across other bodies of work and practices, most notably TV series, which have largely appropriated the responsibility of widening the perspectives of their publics, a role once associated with the silver screen. Just as Cavell's reading of films involved moral perfectionism in its intent, this project is also perfectionist, extending a similar aesthetic and ethical method to readings of the small screen. Because TV series are works that are public and thus shared, and often global in reach, they fulfil an educational role—whether intended or not—and one that enables viewers to anchor and appreciate the value of their everyday experiences. Contributions from: William Rothman, Martin Shuster, Elisabeth Bronfen, Hugo Clémot, David LaRocca, Jeroen Gerrits, Stephen Mulhall, Michelle Devereaux, Thibaut de Saint-Maurice, Hent de Vries, Catherine Wheatley, Byron Davies, Sandra Laugier, Paul Standish, Robert Sinnerbrink.

Stanley Cavell discerned early on that philosophy and literature as practised by contemporary academics made for a contentious pairing. Writing, as he so often did, across disciplinary gaps and contested isthmuses, Cavell occasionally found himself foreign on his home turf or risking rebuke when visiting other intellectual terrains, texts, and traditions. Travelling between cultures, he took upon himself the art of acculturating one to another; such transit or translation regularly—if inimitably—addressed the very sound of the prose that gave expression to rival factions. Consider how he closes his magnum opus by asking ‘But can philosophy become literature and still know itself?’ Part of his own measured reply, by way of testing and exemplification, was a perpetual practice of writing philosophy as literature. In this article, borrowing and adapting Garrett Stewart’s notion of ‘phonemic reading’, I propose Cavell as a phonemic writer—one who sought to teach philosophy and literature about one another through the sound and soundness of the lettered wor(l)d.

Boba Fett's cultural significance stands in striking contrast with his minimal screen time, and even more so with his infrequent and tersely spoken lines. With Boba Fett, a small head tilt, as well as how he cradles his gun become important signs. Boba Fett's status as an intermediary might make him seem amoral relativist. As is often the case with characters in Star Wars, Boba Fett has father issues. Bounty hunting in Boba's work occupies a gray zone between the white of his clone trooper brethren and the black of Vader. Boba may be a “good son” who takes up his father's business, but the business itself is a troublesome affair. Repeated screenings of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi may have convinced many viewers that Boba Fett's iconic status as an “antihero” was grounded in the appearance of amoralism being at the heart of mercenary work.

Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind provides a first-of-its-kind intervention by leading philosophers and scholars of music into an intellectual landscape in need of such charting. As a performer and a devoted student of music, the arc of Cavell's wide-ranging investigation maps consistently with a proximate concern with features of human experience that involve music and sound, including the sound of prose, authorial voice (including its possession and its divestment), the presence/problem/potentiality of silence in human communication, and related features of sonic experience central to life lived at the scale of the everyday.

But then I think of how often I have cast the world I want to live in as one in which my capacities for playfulness and for seriousness are not used against one another, so against me. I am the lady they always want to saw in half. Just as there was a time when it was uncommon, not to say unfashionable and perhaps professionally treacherous, for philosophers to write about Ralph Waldo Emerson, there was also a time when the pertinence of Stanley Cavell’s work for philosophy was a point of controversy. For some philosophers, as well as literary scholars who read and use work by philosophers, Cavell’s achievements were in evidence early and consistently—even as he ably ventured into new fields of research..

Wars have played a momentous role in shaping the course of human history. The ever-present specter of conflict has made it an enduring topic of interest in popular culture, and many movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to independent films, have sought to show the complexities and horrors of war on-screen. In The Philosophy of War Films, David LaRocca compiles a series of essays by prominent scholars that examine the impact of representing war in film and the influence that cinematic images of battle have on human consciousness, belief, and action. The contributors explore a variety of topics, including the aesthetics of war as portrayed on-screen, the effect war has on personal identity, and the ethical problems presented by war. Drawing upon analyses of iconic and critically acclaimed war films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), Rescue Dawn (2006), Restrepo (2010), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), this volume's examination of the genre creates new ways of thinking about the philosophy of war. A fascinating look at the manner in which combat and its aftermath are depicted cinematically, The Philosophy of War Films is a timely and engaging read for any philosopher, filmmaker, reader, or viewer who desires a deeper understanding of war and its representation in popular culture.

In Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, some of the scholars who have become essential for our understanding of Stanley Cavell's writing on film gather to use his landmark contributions to help us read new films-from Hollywood and elsewhere-films that exist beyond his immediate reach and reading. In extending the scope of Cavell's film-philosophy, we naturally find ourselves contending with it and amending it, as the case may be. Through a series of interpretive vignettes, our group effort situates, for the expert and novitiate alike, how Cavell's writing on film can profitably enrich one's experience of cinema generally and also inform how we might continue the practice of serious philosophical criticism of specific films mindful of his sensibility. The resulting conversations between texts, traditions, disciplines, and generations creates propitious conditions for discovering what it means to watch movies with Stanley Cavell in mind.

"The notion of Geschlecht - denoting gender, genre, kinship, and more - exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the transnational and transdisciplinary structures of contemporary humanities. What happens in the transference from one language, tradition, or form to another? Combining detailed case studies of "category problems" in literature, philosophy, theatre, media, cinema, and performing arts, with excerpts from canonical texts-by field-defining thinkers such as Derrida, Malabou, Nancy, and Irigaray-the volume presents "the Geschlecht complex" as a fulcrum for any interpretive endeavor, as an invaluable mode of thought for the present and inevitable complexities of theorizing in the 21st century"--

Perhaps nowhere in the broad expanse of types of film is the old "quarrel between philosophy and poetry" more evident--and also more vitally relevant--than in the genre or mode of film known as documentary. Documentary film is just another form of poetic imitation, in its variety of instances and complexity of fabrication, it is just as much caught up with the limitations--and effects--of mimetic art, including fiction film. This book affords a prismatic perspective on documentary cinema, inviting the dynamism and diversity of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences together into a shared conversation.

How can one teach what one does not know? Most film depictions of teaching follow a satisfying (and it would seem endlessly entertaining) Aristotelian dramatic structure. But what if the teacher does not know what she is summoned to teach? And what if there were a theory of pedagogy that celebrated a teacher's ignorance rather than her authority (power, position, privilege, pre-established role) or expertise (knowledge, experience, judgment)? How or why, in Jacques Rancière’s parlance, an ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ may have a talent for teaching – that is, an efficacy and influence on student learning that trumps antecedent knowledge – becomes a locus of inquiry in these pages. Several of Wes Anderson’s films can be said to include an ignorant schoolmaster, or ‘New Master’. Arguably, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) features the highest achievement of expression of the ignorant schoolmaster in Anderson’s work: M. Gustave teaches without knowing, teaches inadvertently as he learns what needs to be taught. By way of contrast – that is, as a way of illuminating M. Gustave’s representative qualities as an ignorant schoolmaster – I will also consider the character of the professional, authoritative, and knowledgeable preparatory school teacher, or 'Old Master', William Hundert in The Emperor's Club (2002).