Philosophy Commons^™

Lost In Adaptation, Caitlin S. Manocchio

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

philosophical societies that send us here as their representatives- can no longer, in this case, allow itself [the philosophical idea] to be enclosed in a single idiom, at the risk of floating, neutral and disembodied, remote from every body of language

(Derrida 1994: 14)

Introduction

In Sending: on representation (1994), Jacques Derrida questions the function of representation that we can use to offer a challenge to the experience and structure of representation as a practice in visual culture and for contemporary spectatorship. When the function of representation is being questioned, rather than its subject, the practice of representation is seen …

Unhinged: Kairos And The Invention Of The Untimely, Robert Leston

Publications and Research

Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and so invention is said to emerge from the timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. But what if invention was thought of as the potential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a situation? This essay argues that kairos has not been able to free itself from its historical constraints because it has been bound to a human sense of temporality. By evolving along patterns different from print, the apparatus of the cinema developed in a way where it was not bound to illustrating …

Surrealism's Revisionist Reading Of Freudian Psychology: Surreal Film And The Dream, James Magrini

Philosophy Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

To say that Memento (2000) is thought-provoking would be, at best, an understatement. One of the main reasons for this neo-noir's popular success is that audiences were hooked by the very puzzles that make the film a challenging one. These puzzles occur at various levels. There is the initial question of what exactly the structure of the film is and, once this is solved, the much more difficult task of extracting the story—what actually happens in the film, and the chronological order of the fictional events—from the fragmented plot. At the same time, however, the film quite explicitly raises philosophical …

Memento, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

The sleeper hit Memento (2000), directed by Christopher Nolan, is a brilliantly structured contemporary film noir, focused through the main character, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), who has a debilitating memory condition. Hit on the head during a home invasion – "the incident" – Leonard can remember his life as an insurance-claims investigator before the incident, but he cannot form new long-term memories. Thus, every fifteen minutes or so, he becomes a partial tabula rasa afresh. The audience comes to understand this condition through Leonard's recounting the story of Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky) in order to explain his own condition to …

The Illusion Of Realism In Film, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

Gregory Currie, arguing against recent psychoanalytic and semiotic film theory, has defended various realist theses about film. The strongest of these is that ‘weak illusionism’—the view that the motion of film images is an illusion—is false. That is, Currie believes film images really do move. In this paper I defend the common-sense position of weak illusionism, firstly by showing that Currie underestimates the power of some arguments for it, especially one based on the mechanics of projection, and secondly by showing that film images exhibit neither garden-variety motion, nor a special response-dependent kind.

Man Searches For Beauty And 'Death In Venice' [Review Of Luchino Visconti's Film Death In Venice, Downer Theater, Milwaukee], Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

None Provided.

Rendt's Radical Good And The Banality Of Evil: Echoes Of Scholem And Jaspers In Margarethe Von Trotta's Hannah Arendt, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Margarethe von Trotta's 2012 film Hannah Arendt suggests that for Arendt the signal problem with Adolf Eichmann had to do with a lack of thinking (the same problem Martin Heidegger diagnoses repeatedly in his book What is Called Thinking). For Heidegger, we are "still" not thinking. For Arendt, what is characteristic of Eichmann is that he does not think, meaning that he does not think as Aristotle defines thinking, namely as characteristic of the human qua human, here conceiving thinking as an inherently philosophical project that is more than practical but always contemplative (i.e., thinking about thinking). Is Eichmann …