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Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni
published the manifesto "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism," helping to set
the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a
means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film
studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the
productive ways in which theory understands the relationship
between cinema, politics, and art. In Cinema/Politics/Philosophy,
Nico Baumbach revisits the much-maligned tradition of seventies
film theory to reconsider: What does it mean to call cinema
political? In this concise and provocative book, Baumbach argues
that we need a new philosophical approach that sees cinema as both
a mode of thought and a form of politics. Through close readings of
the writings on cinema by the contemporary continental philosophers
Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, he asks us to
rethink both the legacy of ideology critique and Deleuzian
film-philosophy. He explores how cinema can condition philosophy
through its own means, challenging received ideas about what is
seeable, sayable, and doable. Cinema/Politics/Philosophy offers
fundamental new ways to think about cinema as thought, art, and
politics.
In 1984 Fredric Jameson wrote that "everything in our social
life-from economic value and state power to practices and to the
very structure of the psyche itself-can be said to have become
'cultural' in some original and yet untheorized sense." The essays
in this special issue track the status of this claim some thirty
years later, inquiring into the relationship of art, aesthetics,
and cultural production to political economy today. At a moment
when interpretation (including "ideology critique" and "symptomatic
reading") has been variously supplanted by descriptivism,
empiricism, and the return of metaphysics, contributors here pursue
the possibilities for an engaged cultural criticism that is
attentive to form while rejecting a depoliticized formalism.
Spanning a wide range of cultural sites-from recent Hollywood
cinema to post-broadcast television, manufactured landscape
photography, contemporary West African art, and "new materialism"
in philosophy-they ask what the "formal tendencies" of contemporary
cultural production (including theory itself) can tell us about the
cultural logic of contemporary capitalism. The collection includes
a new interview with Jameson conducted by the editors.
Contributors: Jennifer Bajorek, Nico Baumbach, Jonathan Beller,
Alexander R. Galloway, Fredric Jameson, Sulgi Lie, Alberto Toscano,
Amy Villarejo, Damon R. Young, Genevieve Yue
Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni
published the manifesto "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism," helping to set
the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a
means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film
studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the
productive ways in which theory understands the relationship
between cinema, politics, and art. In Cinema/Politics/Philosophy,
Nico Baumbach revisits the much-maligned tradition of seventies
film theory to reconsider: What does it mean to call cinema
political? In this concise and provocative book, Baumbach argues
that we need a new philosophical approach that sees cinema as both
a mode of thought and a form of politics. Through close readings of
the writings on cinema by the contemporary continental philosophers
Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, he asks us to
rethink both the legacy of ideology critique and Deleuzian
film-philosophy. He explores how cinema can condition philosophy
through its own means, challenging received ideas about what is
seeable, sayable, and doable. Cinema/Politics/Philosophy offers
fundamental new ways to think about cinema as thought, art, and
politics.
Jacques Ranciere's work is increasingly central to several debates
across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a
question at the heart of his thought: How should we conceive the
relationship between the "politics of aesthetics" and the
"aesthetics of politics"? Specifically, the book explores the
implications of Ranciere's rethinking of the relationship of
aesthetic to political democracy from a wide range of critical
perspectives. Distributions of the Sensible contains original
essays by leading scholars on topics such as Ranciere's relation to
political theory, critical theory, philosophical aesthetics, and
film. The book concludes with a new essay by Ranciere himself that
reconsiders the practice of theory between aesthetics and politics.
A pioneering figure in film studies, Christian Metz proposed
countless new concepts for reflecting on cinema, rooted in his
phenomenological structuralism. He also played a key role in
establishing film studies as a scholarly discipline, making major
contributions to its institutionalisation in universities
worldwide. This book brings together a stellar roster of
contributors to present a close analysis of Metz's writings, their
theoretical and epistemological positions, and their ongoing
influence today.
In 1936, an American ornithologist named James Bond published the
definitive taxonomy Birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming, an
active bird-watcher living in Jamaica, appropriated the name for
his novel's lead character. He found it "flat and colourless," a
fitting choice for a character intended to be "anonymous. . . a
blunt instrument in the hands of the government." In Field Guide to
Birds of the West Indies, Taryn Simon (*1975) casts herself as
James Bond (1900-1989) the ornithologist, and identifies,
photographs, and classifies all the birds that appear within the
twenty-four films of the James Bond franchise. The appearance of
many of the birds was unplanned and virtually undetected, operating
as background noise for whatever set they happened to fly into.
Simon's ornithological discoveries occupy a liminal space-confined
within the fiction of the James Bond universe and yet wholly
separate from it. This taxonomy of 331 birds is a precise
consideration of a new nature found in an alternate reality.
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