Description
Book SynopsisDavide Panagia's Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity is volume fifteen of Modernity and Political Thought, the Rowman & Littlefield series in contemporary political theory. Through close attention to Hume's theories of sensation, Davide Panagia conceptualizes the modern even more radically (though also more literally) than many of the previous authors in this series. While devoting attention to how a historical thinker such as Hume is read and misread, used and abused in the modern intellectual world, Panagia also focuses on developing a theory of Humean perception and by so doing emphasizes the contemporaneity of Hume's thought. In what at first seems to be an anachronistic as well as wildly curious claim about a philosopher of the eighteenth century, Panagia holds that Hume was a cinematic thinker.
Trade ReviewDavide Panagia has offered a very important contribution to Hume scholarship that promises to show the relevance of Hume to a number of contemporary debates and discussions. * Theory & Event *
In a terse and vivid reading Panagia affiliates Hume’s Treatise with the experience of cinema: evanescent, kaleidoscopic, flickering, forever unsettling. Resisting regulation or consensus, Hume’s writings on sensation enable us to put an aesthetic of film in the service of a politics. A committed and sustained reflection on every page, Impressions offers a pragmatic and historically informed treatment of philosophy and cinema. -- Tom Conley, Department of Romance Languages, Harvard University
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Roll Credits Editors’ Introduction Introduction: Impressions of Hume Approaching Hume On Beholding 1 Film Matters: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity The Action-Image Discontinuity and the Fact of the Series Actors, Artificial Persons, and Human Somethings Political Resistance and an Aesthetics of Politics 2 A Treatment of Human Parts On the Close-Up Empiricism and Typographic Culture Hume’s Train of Thinking Of Human Parts Discomposing One’s Character Conclusion: A Micropolitics of Impressions 3 Hume’s Iconomy An Excess of Images Fluid Supports Conclusion 4 Hume’s Point of View: Or, the Screen Single-Point Perspective and the General Point of View Impartiality, Sympathy, Reputation from a Cinematic Point of View The Imagination and Hume’s train of thinking The “im” of Impartiality The Hold of Sympathy Reputation, Promising, and Projection Conclusion: Sympathy’s Claim Conclusion: Hume and Cultural Politics Bibliography Index
