Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema

Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film is a contribution to an aesthetics of cinema rooted in Marxist theory. Rather than focusing on the role that certain films, or the cinema as an institution, might play in political consciousness, the book asks a different question: how can the subject of politics in film be thought? This problem is presented in a systematic-theoretical rather than historical manner. The main aim of this book is a retrospective rehabilitation of the psychoanalytical concept of suture, whose political core is progressively revealed. In a second step, this rereading of suture-theory is mediated with the Marxist aesthetics of Fredric Jameson. From the perspective of this reconfigured aesthetics of negativity, films by Hitchcock, Antonioni, Haneke and Kubrick are analyzed as articulations of a political unconscious.

Sulgi Lie teaches in the Division of Film Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has co-edited a German anthology of Jacques Rancière's film writings and has recently completed a book on comedy and critical theory with the title Gehend kommen. Adornos Slapstick (Come Walking: Adorno's Slap stick) to be published in early 2021 by Vorwerk 8 press. Daniel Fairfax is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and an editor of the online film journal Senses of Cinema.

New Preface to the English Edition, Preface, Part I: The Absent Cause of Film: On the Theory of Enunciation and Suture, Introduction, 1. On Enunciation in Apparatus Theory, 1.1 Imaginary Enunciation, or the Place of the Spectator: Christian Metz (1), 1.2 Voyeuristic Enunciation, or the Place of the Author: Raymond Bellour, 1.3 The Double Énoncé, or the Division of the Filmic Image: World Projection as Rear-projection in Marnie, 2. On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture, 2.1 Negative Enunciation, or the Place of the Absent One: Jean-Pierre Oudart, 2.2 Masked Enunciation, the Place of the Apparatus: Daniel Dayan, 2.3 The Schizoid Suture, or the Division of Body and Voice: Acousmatics as Schismatics in Psycho, 3. On the Pragmatics of Enunciation, 3.1 Deictic Enunciation, or Film as Speech Act: Francesco Casetti, 3.2 Impersonal Enunciation, or Film as Writing: Christian Metz (2), 3.3 Looking at the Camera, or the Theatricalization of Film: Jean-Luc Godard, 4. On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture, 4.1 External Enunciation, or the Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye: Jacques Lacan/Kaja Silverman, 4.2 Extimate Enunciation, or the Gaze as Bodiless Organ: Joan Copjec/Slavoj Zizek, 4.3 From the Hors-champ to the Hors-lieu, or the Transsubjective Point of View: The Unrepresentable in Rossellini and Antonioni, 5. The Political Uncanny, or the Return of the Repressed: Caché, Part II: Allegories of Totality: Fredric Jameson's Political Film Aesthetics,Introduction, 6. The Dialectics of Mass Culture 6.1 Reification and Utopia: Jaws and The Godfather, 6.2 Class and Allegory: Dog Day Afternoon, 6.3 The Political Unconscious, 7. Cartographies of the Postmodern, 7.1 Nostalgia und Historicism, 7.2 The Totalization of Totality: Cognitive Mapping, 7.3 The Implosion of the Referent: Blow-Up, 8. Geopolitical Aesthetics, 8.1 Totality as Conspiracy, 8.2 Conspirational Enunciation, or the Acousmatics of the Paranoia Film, 8.3 Digital Cinema in the Age of Globalization: Miami Vice, 9. The Political Uncanny, or the Return of Domination: The Shining, Filmography, Bibliography, Index.