Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Rebecca A. Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
Avant Garde

The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter rectifies influential misreadings of American avant-garde films by film-philosophers, and goes on to trace philosophy’s influences on the avant-garde, laying the groundwork for putting their films in conversation with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter outlines the various kinds of dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens at work in American avant-garde cinema, and explains the various ways in which American avant-garde filmmakers have used this figure to advance a philosophy that promotes behaviors of re-encounter and review applicable to the off-screen world.

scholarly journals Senses of Echo Lake: Michael Palmer, Stanley Cavell, and the Moods of an American Philosophical Tradition

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Richard Deming
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Active Reading ◽  
Moral Perfectionism ◽  
The Way

This essay explores a philosophical tradition that Stanley Cavell has traced out and which he emphasizes as being American inasmuch as it is arises out of the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It then investigates how the poems of the avant-garde poet Michael Palmer link with, overlap with, this strain of American philosophy in terms of how it enacts an understanding of what we might call “philosophical mood,” on outlook based on the navigation of representation, generative self-consciousness, and doubt that amounts to a form of epistemology. The essay does not trace the influence—direct or otherwise of Cavell and his arguments for philosophy on the poems, despite a biographical connection between Cavell and Palmer, his former student. Instead it brings out the way that one might fruitfully locate Palmer’s work within an American literary/philosophical continuum. The article shows how that context opens up the work to a range of important existential and ethical implications. I endeavor to show that Notes for Echo Lake, Palmer’s most important collection, locates itself, its language, within such a frame so as to provide a place for readerly encounters with the limitations of language. These encounters then are presented as an opportunity for a deeper understanding of subjectivity and for attuning oneself to the role that active reading and interpretation might play in moral perfectionism.

Friend as Enemy

2018 ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
Rastislav Dinić
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
The Difference

Richard Rorty famously claimed that the difference between analytic and continental philosophers, boils down to a political one—analytical philosophers are predominantly liberals who share a belief in the rule of law and the institutions of modern constitutional democracy, while the continental ones tend to be more pessimistic about this political arrangement, and much more prone to experiment with the alternatives. But where does this leave the members of that rare breed—philosophers who see themselves as working in both traditions? In order to answer that question for himself, Rorty has written several books proclaiming his faith in liberalism and America as its most prominent example. But what about Stanley Cavell—a philosopher inspired equally by Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger? It is difficult to answer this question straightforwardly, since, although many of his writings are in some sense deeply political, Cavell rarely wrote explicitly on politics, especially in respect of modern ideological struggles. One way someone interested in this question could go about trying to answer it is by turning to Cavell’s encounters with more explicit representatives of certain ideological positions. That is exactly what I intend to do in this paper—by turning to Cavell’s engagement with Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev.

American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca A. Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
A Priori ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Time Image ◽  
History And Theory

Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde indeed “do” philosophy, and it illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The author traces the avant-garde’s philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how reflections on the creation and reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself. This entails the avant-garde’s locating of cinema’s—and thought’s—ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found, that unites with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rectifying film-philosophy’s neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how, rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde’s interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerge from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. The author reads the avant-garde’s interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as an extension of Pragmatism’s commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson’s influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde’s philosophies to Deleuze’s time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche’s “powers of the false.”

Pierre Hadot as a Reader of Wittgenstein

Paragraph ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Laugier
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Ethical Reflection ◽  
Spiritual Exercise ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Pierre Hadot ◽  
Point Of Departure

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010), professor of ancient philosophy at the Collège de France, published, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of the earliest work on Wittgenstein to appear in French. Hadot conceived of philosophy as an activity rather than a body of doctrines and found in Wittgenstein a fruitful point of departure for ethical reflection. Hadot's understanding of philosophy as a spiritual exercise — articulated through his reading of ancient philosophy but also the American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson — will find an echo in Wittgenstinian thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. Ultimately philosophy for Hadot is a call to personal and political transformation.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Germana
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Feedback Loops ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
The Future ◽  
Lower Frequencies

This introductory chapter traces the origins of Ralph Ellison’s philosophy of temporality, and illustrates how Ellison’s synthesis of the ideas of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche precedes, and in many ways prefigures, the work of Gilles Deleuze. It also demonstrates how Ellison’s Bergsonian critique of spatialized time—a coercive form of temporality that subtends progressive history—anticipates contemporary post-Deleuzian elucidations of the reciprocal relationship between temporality and subjectivity. By attuning his readers to intensities implicit in the present, or the dynamism inherent in what Bergson called duration, Ellison affirms the open-endedness of the future while critiquing all forms of determinism. And by treating race as a matter of time, Ellison shows how the feedback loops by which a racist society chaotically reproduces itself can be destabilized by troubling the coercive temporality with which they are linked “on the lower frequencies” of our immanent existence.

Introduction: Plato’s Nightmare

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marmysz
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Objective Reality

This introductory chapter examines the “problem” of nihilism, beginning with its philosophical origins in the ideas of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. It is argued that film is an inherently nihilistic medium involving the evocation of illusory worlds cut loose from objective reality. This nihilism of film is distinguished from nihilism in film; the nihilistic content also present in some (but not all) movies. Criticisms of media nihilism by authors such as Thomas Hibbs and Darren Ambrose are examined. It is then argued, contrary to such critics, that cinematic nihilism is not necessarily degrading or destructive. Because the nihilism of film encourages audiences to linger in the presence of nihilism in film, cinematic nihilism potentially trains audiences to learn the positive lessons of nihilism while remaining safely detached from the sorts of dangers depicted on screen.

Friedrich Nietzsche

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Lemm
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Point Of Reference

Readers of Giorgio Agamben would agree that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is not one of his primary interlocutors. As such, Agamben’s engagement with Nietzsche is different from the French reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille, as well as in his contemporary Italian colleague Roberto Esposito, for whom Nietzsche’s philosophy is a key point of reference in their thinking of politics beyond sovereignty. Agamben’s stance towards the thought of Nietzsche may seem ambiguous to some readers, in particular with regard to his shifting position on Nietzsche’s much-debated vision of the eternal recurrence of the same.

Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Germana
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Dynamic Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Racial History ◽  
The Face

Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist examines Ralph Ellison’s body of work as an extended and ever-evolving expression of the author’s philosophy of temporality—a philosophy synthesized from the writings of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche that anticipates the work of Gilles Deleuze. Taking the view that time is a multiplicity of dynamic processes, rather than a static container for the events of our lives, and an integral force of becoming, rather than a linear groove in which events take place, Ellison articulates a theory of temporality and social change throughout his corpus that flies in the face of all forms of linear causality and historical determinism. Integral to this theory is Ellison’s observation that the social, cultural, and legal processes constitutive of racial formation are embedded in static temporalities reiterated by historians and sociologists. In other words, Ellison’s critique of US racial history is, at bottom, a matter of time. This book reveals how, in his fiction, criticism, and photography, Ellison reclaims technologies through which static time and linear history are formalized in order to reveal intensities implicit in the present that, if actualized, could help us achieve Nietzsche’s goal of acting un-historically. The result is a wholesale reinterpretation of Ellison’s oeuvre, as well as an extension of Ellison’s ideas about the dynamism of becoming and the open-endedness of the future. It, like Ellison’s texts, affirms the chaos of possibility lurking beneath the patterns of living we mistake for enduring certainties.

The American Art of Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
John Michael Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Space

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document