The Ethical Turn in Cinema

IF 0.2 4区 文学 0 LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM
J. R. Miller
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract:In this essay I contemplate cinema studies’ undertaking of a disciplinary turn from ideological to ethical analysis. In reaction to empiricist opposition towards ideological critique, David Rodowick has proposed that film theory move beyond the limits of ideological analysis by reviving theory’s ancient philosophical connection to ethics. In this new disciplinary paradigm, film theory (as philosophy) would balance knowledge (empiricism) and ethics (reflective self-examination). While several scholars have heeded this call by summoning the ethical “dimension” of cinema, how this conception of ethics extends and exceeds ideology remains unclear. If the theoretical humanities desire a post-ideological ethics, I propose, they will need to assess two features of their earlier turn toward ideology. The first, evoked through a reading of Louis Althusser, is that ideology subordinated rather than overlooked ethics, rendering it unintelligible for theory. The second is that ideology could draw its critique of ethics from philosophy only because, like theory, “ethics” is also a discursive formation; it too has a history with its own “turns” and moments of crisis. Yet the turn within ethics to which that ideological critique is indebted produced a fundamental revisioning of value as constitutive for differentiated knowledge, contradicting the premise of ethics as a “dimension” separate from our basic epistemic grasping of the world. Although Rodowick cites the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell as examples of the inseparability of epistemology and ethics, leading away from ideological theory, I show how both maintain the subordination of the ethical to the epistemological. Adopting Roland Barthes’s notion of ideology as an “image-repertoire of history,” I argue that such inseparability is better accomplished by thinking ethics as itself historically cinematic rather than as a dimension of thought applied to cinematic or other texts.
电影的伦理转向
摘要:在这篇文章中,我思考了电影研究从意识形态分析到伦理分析的学科转向。作为对经验主义反对意识形态批判的回应,大卫·罗多维克提出,电影理论通过复兴理论与伦理的古老哲学联系,超越了意识形态分析的局限。在这种新的学科范式中,电影理论(作为哲学)将平衡知识(经验主义)和伦理(反思性自我审视)。尽管一些学者通过唤起电影的伦理“维度”来响应这一呼吁,但这种伦理概念是如何延伸和超越意识形态的,目前尚不清楚。我建议,如果理论人文学科想要一种后意识形态伦理学,他们将需要评估他们早期转向意识形态的两个特征。首先,通过阅读路易斯·阿尔都塞,可以发现意识形态服从而不是忽视伦理,使其在理论上难以理解。第二,意识形态之所以能够从哲学中获得对伦理的批判,是因为与理论一样,“伦理”也是一种话语形式;它也有自己的“转折”和危机时刻的历史。然而,意识形态批判所依赖的伦理内部的转变,产生了对价值的根本修正,将其作为差异化知识的组成部分,与伦理作为一个“维度”的前提相矛盾,这个“维度”独立于我们对世界的基本认识把握。尽管罗多维克引用了吉勒·德勒兹和斯坦利·卡维尔的作品作为认识论和伦理学不可分割的例子,从而背离了意识形态理论,但我展示了两者如何保持伦理学与认识论的从属关系。采用罗兰·巴特的意识形态概念作为“历史的图像库”,我认为这种不可分割性最好通过将伦理视为历史电影,而不是应用于电影或其他文本的思想维度来实现。
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来源期刊
DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM
DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM-
CiteScore
0.80
自引率
0.00%
发文量
0
期刊介绍: For over thirty years, diacritics has been an exceptional and influential forum for scholars writing on the problems of literary criticism. Each issue features articles in which contributors compare and analyze books on particular theoretical works and develop their own positions on the theses, methods, and theoretical implications of those works.
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