Volume 81, Issue 2, April-June 2018

New Philosophical Approaches to Cinema

Marc Cerisuelo, New Philosophical Approaches to Cinema

Lire l’article

Hugo Clémot, Thinking about Intimacy through Cinema

Intimacy in cinema is a well-documented theme in film studies. While philosophy has a long history of probing the problematic aspects of privacy, it is nevertheless unusual for philosophers to turn to the movies in order to find fresh perspectives using novel approaches to address and reconsider these conceptual enigmas. Taking the method of Stanley Cavell as a point of departure—a philosopher whose oeuvre belongs as much to philosophical and autobiographical registers as to “cinematographic” ones—this paper tries to show how thinking about intimacy through cinema is a way of enriching and even changing our conceptions on the matter.

Lire l’article

Alice Leroy, A Utopia of Transparency and Projection Devices. On the Nature of the Body in Film

This article questions the paradoxical nature of the cinematic body: what kind of presence does it have? What flesh is it made of? What precisely gives it shape and weight? I will elaborate its peculiar anatomy by going back to the notion of “utopian body,” suggested by the least “cinephile” of French philosophers, Michel Foucault. Although this notion does not concern a theory of film in Foucault’s perspective, it allows us to think of the cinematic body as the product of an epistemic configuration of science and fantasy. When applied to the body’s scale, utopia designates a capacity to overtake and disorder the physical, temporal, and anthropic reality of the filmed body. Conceived as a utopia, the body reciprocally escapes the dualist model of matter and spirit, to the benefit of the multiple space-times and shapes within which it materializes.

Lire l’article

Jean-Michel Durafour, Film. Ontology of the Images and Iconology beyond the Human

This paper presents the ontological side of an iconological and aesthetic approach I call econology. This approach, while it is not only cinematographic, is expressly filmic in that it comes from films and from within the mode of thought that cinema ultimately incarnates. Moving away from the genetic step that leads to it, I have chosen, in these pages, to clarify its links with the new philosophy of objects.

Lire l’article

Marc Cerisuelo, Funny Genres : The Cinematic Legacy of Erwin Panofsky

Equally famous for having written an essay on film, “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture,” Erwin Panofsky defended—and so, later, did Stanley Cavell—a cinematic thesis based upon projection versus recording; his conception was grounded on the fact that film itself was fantastic and that it became an art by inventing genres. Inspired by his phantasmagorical strength, we present here some new and weird genres, especially the psychopomp fictions, another way to express the connection between the living and the dead on the screen.

Lire l’article

Martin Heidegger
Public Thoughts and Private Thinking

Martin Heidegger, On the History of the Philosophical Chair at Marburg University since 1866

Translation by Guillaume Fagniez of Zur Gescchichte des philosophischen Lehrstuhles seit 1866, first published in Die Philipps-Universität zu Margurg 1527-1927, Marbourg, N.G. Elwertsche Verlasbuchhandlung (G. Braun), 1927.

Lire l’article

Antoine Cantin-Brault, In the Shadow of Hegel : Heidegger Reading Heraclitus

For his entire philosophical life, Heidegger was, more or less, an assiduous reader of Heraclitus. Heidegger never knew how to completely liberate Heraclitus from his Hegelian interpretation. In fact, Heidegger was never capable of liberating him from Hegel, and this becomes understandable if one relates both Heideggerian and Hegelian readings to a metaphysics understood as an onto-proto-logy, as posited by Bernard Mabille.

Lire l’article

Inga Römer, Heidegger’s Interpretations of Kant

Heidegger’s interpretations of Kant distinguish three stages in his reception of the critical philosopher: a first preparatory stage (1925-27), a second affirmative stage (1927/28-1929), and a third critical stage (starting 1930). The study shows how Heidegger interprets the transcendental aesthetic, analytic and dialectic, as well as Kant’s practical philosophy. A critical conclusion outlines the philosophical consequences of Heidegger’s readings of Kant.

Lire l’article

David Espinet, Heidegger Reading Kant. Private and Public Viewpoints from 1930 Onwards

Why did Heidegger read Kant? At what point does Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant convey, under the guise of conceptual operations and constructions, convictions that have now been brought to light with the publication of the Black Notebooks but for which the thinker himself maintains ambivalence in his published works and lectures? To answer this question, I aim to provide a double perspective that shows the contrast but also the connections between Heidegger’s private inner viewpoint on Kantian—notably practical— philosophy (which he develops in the Black Notebooks) and his public viewpoint on the same philosophy, which he exposes in his 1930 lecture The Essence of Human Freedom.

Lire l’article

Pierre Fasula, Questioning Subjectivity. “Who Does One Think He or She Is?”

the question “Who does one think he/she is?,” we would like to investigate one way among others of focusing on subjectivity, following both Vincent Descombes’ analysis in Le parler de soi and Stanley Cavell’s in The Claim of Reason. The subjectivity at stake in this question is to be understood as a positioning of oneself in relation to others, the difficulty of which is addressed by both ethics and literature.

Lire l’article

Florence Hulak, The Social and the Historical. Robert Castel versus Michel Foucault

The French school of sociology developed a universal concept of “social,” which was subjected to Foucauldian critics aiming to unveil its hidden historical roots. This article contends that Transformation of the Social Question by Robert Castel puts these critics to the test on their own historical ground. While they describe the invention of the concept of “social” as a by-product of the emergence of a government driven by the “social question,” Castel shows that such politics rather reveal the existence of the social, i.e. the collective need to make up for the failures of solidarity through work. The “social state” should then be understood as the precarious political outcome of social struggles and not be reduced to the domination exercised by a state misleadingly called “État providence.”

Lire l’article

Bulletin of Hobbesian Studies I (XXIX)

Lire l’article