Political Theory and Film

Ian Fraser is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Politics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University, UK. He is the author of: Identity, Politics and the Novel: The Aesthetic Moment (2013), Dialectics of the Self: Transcending Charles Taylor (2007), Hegel and Marx: The Concept of Need (1998), co-editor, with Tony Burns, of The Hegel-Marx Connection (2001), and co-author, with Lawrence Wilde, of The Marx Dictionary (Continuum, 2011).

• Introduction / 1. Theodor Adorno: Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux / 2. Walter Benjamin: Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom / 3. Ernst Bloch: Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris / 4. Gilles Deleuze: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds / 5. Alain Badiou: Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin / 6. Jacques Rancière: Gavin Hood’s Rendition / 7. Julia Kristeva: David Fincher’s Fight Club / 8. Slavoj Žižek: JC Chandor's Margin Call / 9. Cinema and the Aesthetic Self

In eight stand-alone chapters, Fraser (Loughborough, UK) summarizes the political, social, economic, and moral-psychological positions of eight Continental philosophers, pairing each with a film that best exemplifies his or her theories. All are staunch opponents of neoliberal capitalism, seeking in film a means of transforming mass consciousness as a precondition for emancipatory resistance and revolution. Though some theorists conscript philosophers from the Western canon (Kant, Hume), most anchor their primary mode of analysis in poststructuralist or neo-Marxist psychoanalytic theory (e.g., Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek). Given the philosphers' shared political orientations and focus on culture and consciousness, the conclusions Fraser reaches at the end of each chapter are somewhat repetitive. Properly instructed to see and feel what these political theorists see and feel, the art of cinema can transform an agency of mass consumption and escapist fantasy into personal and then revolutionary political emancipation. Culture underwrites politics; like poets before them, filmmakers can become the legislators for a just society. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.