De l’imagination et non de la logique: la physique émotionnelle de Roman Signer

The text places Signer’s Super-8 films in a philosophical context. It looks at theories of the causation and the acausality of art and the poetic, drawing on arguments from Richard Dawkins, Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes, Cornelius Castoriadis and others. Referencing ideas drawn primarily from Cornelius Castoriadis, it argues that the simultaneous manifestation of obviously determinate physical processes and richly poetic emergences in Signer’s Super-8 films initiates a particularly sharply focused enquiry into the indeterminacy of the poetic. It connects the discussion to issues of time, freedom and autonomy. It concludes that Signer’s works demonstrate with particular clarity and brilliance that, as Castoriadis asserted, closed, rationalist philosophical systems are not equal in themselves to the task of describing the universe.

Published in French translation.

English title: Not Logic but Imagination: the Emotional Physics of Roman Signer

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