Consuming Desire's Deferral: A Theological Shadow in the Culture of Image

Carlson, Thomas A.

doi:10.1080/135346499249830

Cited by 4 publications

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“…The nature of the film as event is what sets it apart from other artifacts and challenges the status of the idol. Carlson (1999) argues that there is something of the icon in the idolic in general, that in fact the closed circuit of Marion's idolatrous relation is not entirely closed. This fact can be gleaned from Marion's text itself, due to the double impotence involved in the experience of the idol.…”

Section: The Iconmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Resurrection of the Image

Jackson

2009

Theory, Culture & Society

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In this article I wish to elucidate a form of receptivity in our relation to televisual images that cannot be reduced to the postmodern formula of a closed circuit of desire through which the self(same) infinitely reproduces itself. Through analysis of the peculiar experience of viewing Gore Verbinski's 2003 film The Ring (a remake of Hideo Nakata's Ring), I argue for the possibility of an experience of alterity in and through the televisual. I pair this event with the religious experience of viewing the icon that Jean-Luc Marion opposes to the televisual in his recent works collected in The Crossing of the Visible. The purpose of the comparison is not to conflate the two experiences but rather to suggest that the possibility for reclaiming a space for difference in a postmodern world lies within the televisual itself, the very medium that Marion credits with the bankruptcy of the aesthetic. In The Ring, the process through which the viewer expects to see her own desire reproduced is violently interrupted by a vengeful image that shatters the mirror of reflection between viewer and viewed and threatens to cross over that threshold -to cross the visible, in Marion's terms.

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Section: The Iconmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Resurrection of the Image

Jackson

2009

Theory, Culture & Society

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When God Walks in History

Friedland

1999

International Sociology

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Religious nationalism represents an institutional project to transform the ontology of the social, to redefine the substance of collective representation, the principle of domination and the criteria for membership. Religious nationalism transforms the territorial nation-state into a vehicle in and by which to extend the materiality of its culturally specific categories, codes, values and narratives. It thereby challenges social theories, like that of Bourdieu, that deculturalize power, as well as those, like Alexander, that culturalize it in an institutionally restrictive manner. Religious nationalism is not a retreat to the premodern, but an effort to bound and energize the elemental modern moments, that of the self and the national-state. Religious nationalism represents the return to text, to the fixity of signs, the renarrativization of the nation in a cosmic context. It returns us to bodies and souls, a zone to be defended against things on the one side and beasts on the other. It offers a way to secure morality against an increasingly post-humanist world. Its discourse of difference seeks to bound the nation. Religious nationalism restores the binaries of inside and outside, us and them, good and evil, man and woman and centers them in sacred space.

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Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineffable

Pence¹

2004

Poetics Today

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Cinema's power to represent animate life, and produce a profound impression of reality, warrants and supports its other fascinating capacity, namely, to fabricate frank yet appealing illusions. In certain instances, audiences may respond to the fantastic creations as if to a new reality. Cinematic realism thus raises questions about the nature of belief and reality that are of perennial, yet acutely contemporary, interest in film history. A genre of the spiritual film—distinct from religious films that rely on traditional sources of religious authority—explores these questions of being and the limits of the knowable. Recent film criticism has inadequately responded to this genre. Film studies has aligned itself in various ways behind Walter Benjamin's call for an iconoclasm that would sever art's connections with cultic traditions and contribute to social progress. The consequent suppression, or translation to secular terms, of films' spiritual aspirations comes at great cost. Complex works that address spiritual topics in form and content, such as Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996), are treated as evidence by a self-affirming and secularizing critical method. In neglecting the central concerns of such films, critics are complicit with the worst features of modernity. A criticism that evades an open engagement with the limits of the knowable becomes instrumental; a criticism geared exclusively toward demystification ultimately produces reification. A more proper analytic response is to attend to the ways in which such films produce experiences, and call for responses, at the edge of the knowable. Such an approach begins with abandoning methodological certainty; the spiritual film demands an alignment of perception that cannot be contained by a predetermined goal. This aesthetic response may contribute to an open-ended ethical self-fashioning and may protect critical discourse from itself by preventing the standardization of cultural experience.

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Consuming Desire's Deferral: A Theological Shadow in the Culture of Image

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The Resurrection of the Image

The Resurrection of the Image

When God Walks in History

Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineffable

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