scholarly journals Ghosts in the Closet: Catastrophizing and Spectral Disability in Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Apologies

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 142
Author(s):  
Ely
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Manic Depression ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Mental Disability ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Psychological Concept ◽  
Final Scene ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nervous Breakdown ◽  
Organic Coffee

Anne Charlotte Robertson, who died in 2012, was a Super 8 experimental filmmaker whose primarily diaristic films record her experience with a diagnosis of manic depression and the corresponding nervous breakdowns. This article specifically addresses Robertson’s film Apologies (1983–1990), which features 17 min of the filmmaker apologizing to the camera for everything from drinking non-organic coffee to returning her camera a day late to her eventual nervous breakdown in the final scene of the film. Beginning with the psychological concept of catastrophizing, this paper shows how Robertson’s film engages with larger contemporaneous philosophical conceptions of disaster, or apocalypse, and its corresponding temporality. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot, mental disability is shown to be more thoroughly understood through shifting and multiple temporalities, termed as ‘spectral disability’ within this paper. Apologies not only reveals the personally specific details of Robertson’s experience and identity, but also responds to a larger history of representing madness in photography and film. Robertson’s engagement with the moving image is not only related to philosophy and history, but predates similar techniques devised in psychology as well. Ultimately, through disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of misfitting, this paper explores how Apologies exposes the creative possibilities of mental disability.

‘Pardon for not meaning’: Remarks on Derrida, Blanchot and Kafka

Derrida Today ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Sheaffer-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Maurice Blanchot

Jacques Derrida returns relentlessly to the question of literature which is already a prominent concern in early texts such as Writing and Difference. The focus of this article is the conception of literature in ‘Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation’, in which Derrida discusses filiation with reference to Abraham and Isaac, the fundamental necessity of secrecy and the notion of the pardon. Above all, it is Kafka's Letter to His Father which perhaps provides a paradigm for defining literature. In this specular address, the promise of a heritage is in the balance. Writing incessantly on Kafka, Maurice Blanchot also reflects on literature. The notion of literature put forward by Derrida in ‘Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation’ is considered in this article, as well as reflections by Blanchot, to show what might be at stake in Kafka's Letter to His Father.

Specters of Colonialism - Sven Augustijnen's Haunted Cinema

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrzej Marzec
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Presence And Absence

The author analyzes Sven Agustijnen's Specters from the philosophical perspective. He tries to prove that the cinema of the Belgian director is haunted because it presents the reality as made out of traces, which disturb the traditional division into presence and absence. The author analyzes Augustijnen's film techniques and uses Jacques Derrida hauntology to show, how contemporary cinema tries to face the difficult and unfinished colonial history of Belgium (the genocide in Congo during the reign of the Belgian king Leopold II and the murder of the first prime minister of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba).

Cinema Expanded

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Film History ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of

Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.

scholarly journals The Stranger as Friend: The Poetics of Friendship in Homer, Dante, and Boccaccio

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franco Masciandaro
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Natural Extension ◽  
Divine Comedy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
The Divine Comedy ◽  
The One ◽  
The Stranger

The principal aim of this study is to participate in the current renewed discourse on the meaning of friendship, initiated in 1994 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida with his Politics of Friendship, by combining the philosophical method of inquiry with the hermeneutical approach to poetic representations of friendship in the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and the Decameron. It examines friendship not only as the unique love between two persons based on familiarity and proximity, but as the love for the one who is far away, the stranger, for this is a natural extension of the implicit love of the distant other, of the other-as-stranger – what Emmanuel Levinas has called "the infinity of the Other" – which is concealed in our friend, and which, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, puts us "authentically in relation" with him or her.

scholarly journals The Evolution of the Text: The Author’s Comment by N. V. Gogol on the Poetics of the Comedy “The Government Inspector”

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-174
Author(s):  
Igor A. Vinogradov
Keyword(s):  
Last Judgment ◽  
Whole Number ◽  
Final Scene ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Concept ◽  
Rough Draft ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Government ◽  
Numerous Author ◽  
Preliminary Description

<p>The article touches upon the analysis of the historical and literary circumstances of the appearance of one of the numerous author&rsquo;s comments by Gogol on the comedian &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo;, such as the article &ldquo;The Prenotification for those who would like to play &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo; as it should be&rdquo;. A&nbsp;whole number of facts indicate that the origin of the &ldquo;The Prenotification&hellip;&rdquo; is related to the history of the creation by Gogol of the second edition of &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo; in late December 1840&nbsp;&mdash; February 1841. Together with the new edition, Gogol, unsatisfied with the staging of his comedy in St.&nbsp;Petersburg and Moscow theatres, first of all with the impersonation of Khlestakov, conceived a new presentation of &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo;, believing that the revised edition would contribute to the theatrical updating of the play&nbsp;&mdash; performed &ldquo;as it should be&rdquo;. The text of the &ldquo;The Prenotification&hellip;&rdquo; precedes the creation of those fragments of &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo; that Gogol sent for the new edition of the play in spring 1841 from Rome to Moscow for M.&nbsp;P.&nbsp;Pogodin and S.&nbsp;T.&nbsp;Aksakov and is a kind of a test experiment, a &ldquo;rough draft&rdquo; for &ldquo;The excerpt from a letter written by the author shortly after the first presentation of &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo; to one writer&rdquo;, sent at that time to Aksakov, and simultaneously it is a preliminary description for subsequent explanations of the &ldquo;silent scene&rdquo; of &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo; in the text of the very comedy. In addition, there is a connection between the &ldquo;The Prenotification&hellip;&rdquo; with drawings made by the artist A.&nbsp;A.&nbsp;Ivanov for the same final scene of &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo;, which were created during the author&rsquo;s reading of the comedy in Rome in February 1841. Thus, it is established that the &ldquo;The Prenotification for those who would like to play &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo; as it should be&rdquo; properly was written not in the autumn 1846, as it is common to think, but five and a half years earlier, in early 1841. It is an opening article in the manuscript for the second edition of &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo; in 1841, instead of which Gogol published here an accompanying article &ldquo;The excerpt from a letter written by the author shortly after the first presentation of &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo; to one writer&rdquo;. The study allows us to conclude that Gogol&rsquo;s interpretations are deeply organic to the original religious concept of comedy. The plot stem of the &ldquo;The Government Inspector&rdquo; is the &ldquo;thunderstorm&rdquo; of a distant government law, and of the even more inevitable Last Judgment. &ldquo;The Prenotification&hellip;&rdquo; addressed to the actors, and containing an appeal to take seriously and conscientiously the performance of the roles they were cast in, to pay special attention to the final scene, is an important component of Gogol&rsquo;s strategy to bring back to his play the meanings lost due to inept staging. The presence of a number of motifs in the &ldquo;The Prenotification&hellip;&rdquo;, traditionally attributed only to the &ldquo;late&rdquo; Gogol, in the light of a new dating allows asserting the idea of the indissoluble unity and integrity of the artist&rsquo;s creative path.</p>

Cruelty and Its Vicissitudes

2019 ◽  
pp. 120-138
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rottenberg
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of

This chapter tracks the history of cruelty in the administration of the death penalty. It moves from the history of blood (cruor) and bloody cruelty (e.g., the guillotine) to a history that involves the disappearance of blood and the non-bloody process of interiorization. It argues that psychical cruelty makes cruelty not only difficult to determine but also, as Jacques Derrida insists, one of the horizons most proper to psychoanalysis. This chapter begins by following the signs of the mutation of the death-dealing discourse in the Christian, European West; it ends by reading the Jewish joke as the sign of a psychoanalytico-philosophical alliance that is explosively out of tune with the political theology of the death penalty.

Hammer and British Cinema

2016 ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Victoria Grace Walden
Keyword(s):  
Social Responsibility ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
The Press ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship between Hammer Films and British cinema. The history of British cinema has been characterised by a strong dedication to realism, in its many forms. From the documentaries of the 1930s with a focus on social responsibility to the gritty kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s, and even the naturalistic aesthetic of television police dramas, the British moving-image industries have a strong heritage of realism. If this is the case, Hammer horror, despite its international fame as a specifically British brand of filmmaking, does not seem characteristic of British national cinema at all. On one hand, Hammer's horrors are clearly fantastical; on the other hand, they amalgamate infrequent and abrupt moments of gore with a 'neat unpretentious realism'. Moreover, the films were lambasted in the press for not exhibiting 'good taste' or restraint. The chapter then assesses to what extent Hammer horror can be understood as British.

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 215-222
Author(s):  
Landon Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
History Of

This chapter concludes the volume with a concise coda that problematizes the genre and medium specificity of categories such as “rock” and “cinema,” and interrogates their relevance to understanding popular music stardom onscreen in the twenty-first century. By exploring several recent visual albums, this coda demonstrates how the history of rock stardom onscreen paved the way for the unification of the feature film and the music video on display in this unique form. Yet, at the same time, visual albums present musicians with renewed opportunity for overt political expression and aesthetic experimentation not seen since late 1960s rock movies. Visual albums are ultimately the latest intersection between the recording industry and moving image media—an intersection that, as this book demonstrates, has a rich and enduring history.

Contexts (II)

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-132
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
De Man

Chapter 3, continuing Chapter 2’s intellectual history of the impression, begins by exploring British aestheticism and its roots in Kant and romanticism (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth). It then turns to twentieth-century theories of performativity, which, it argues, combine elements of the empiricist and the aesthetic (J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). James followed Pater in resurrecting the ‘impression’. Pater found in Hume’s impression a role for the imagination at the heart of consciousness. But the interpretive excesses of James’s protagonists’ cognitive impressions must also be understood alongside the more flamboyant aestheticism of Pater’s disciple Wilde, and his ‘critic as artist’. The most active of James’s impressions, however, are performative: they are impressions made, not received. Performativity helps frame an account of the impression that encompasses both the receiving and making of impressions, and the confusion between the two.

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