Philosophers on Film: From Bergson to Badiou, A Critical Reader

The book consists of 18 individual chapter sections that discuss primary texts on cinema and film by major European philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (including Bergson, Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, amongst others). Through these mediating texts, Kul-Want argues that the conceptual approach of European philosophy to film lies in appreciating the aesthetic theories and legacy of the Enlightenment philosopher Kant.

Methodologically the book utilises a diachronic method of inquiry, representing the ways in which Kant’s aesthetics informs subsequent philosophers’ unilateral claim that the experience of cinema and film is primarily affective and irreducible to the diegetic structuring of the film. The book employs an additional synchronic method, demonstrating how the irreducibility of cinema and film claimed by philosophers is thought through their own original developments of Kant’s legacy (whether, for example, this is in terms of phenomenology, vitalism, or gender, etc.). Finally, as a consequence of the combination of the foregoing methods, the book provides a comprehensive conceptual map of the relationships and differences between the philosophers and philosophical ideas contained in the book. In summary the book develops a complex understanding of how to think the relationship of the disciplines of philosophy and film, whilst also respecting their ‘difference’; offering a multi-lateral conception of this relationship: philosophy of film, philosophy in film, as well as philosophy as film.