Best gift received: Carl Jung’s Red Book. Very beautiful, with nice overviews and interpretations by Sonu Shamdasani. If this doesn’t revive an interest in Jung, I don’t know what can (though, as I’ve argued, we’re overdue for a new, more integrated theory of imagination).
Stupidest film to show on an airplane that’s just spent two hours sitting on the runway, on a Christmas day when another plane has almost been bombed by an attempted terror attack, with news of it available on CNN on another channel on Jet Blue’s free television and video service: District 9. Not that the film itself doesn’t have its redeeming qualities — there were enough to keep me watching it instead of switching to CNN like the person next to me — but the waves of adrenaline and cortisol flowing through the plane don’t exactly make for a relaxing ride.
What did I make of the film itself? Its reptilian aliens look B-movie hilarious, but the filmmakers deserve credit for thinking they could get us to sympathize with them. They are clunky stand-ins for refugees and illegal aliens of all kinds, from the bantustans of pre-Apartheid South Africa (where the film was made) to the Gaza Strip, and therefore an echo of (the much better) Children of Men, and the rapid-fire montage of cable-news/reality-TV/surveillance-camera action aesthetics gets a little wearying. One of these days someone influential will articulate a natural/organic/holistic aesthetic for film viewing which, like the slow-food movement, will begin to cultivate a shift in audience tastes away from the Peckinpah/Tarantino/Woo/Lucas/Spielberg/Scorsese/Cameron trajectory and back, if not to an Antonioni/Tarkovsky/Angelopoulos slowness, at least to something less jarring than today’s norm.
As for me, I’m happy enough sitting in a large room facing only the shimmering blue screen of Derek Jarman’s Blue. With its immersive, poetic soundtrack, it’s the best antidote to all things Action.
My original supervisor Brian Elliott (who left for the States in my first year) worked on imagination in relation to Kant, Husserl and Heidegger: http://www.amazon.com/Phenomenology-Imagination-Heidegger-Twentieth-Century-Philosophy/dp/0415324033
It’s a completely underrated book precisely because the area is not so well respected in philosophy despite the Kantian emphasis on the role of the imagination.
I delivered a paper on this theme called ‘Shared Spaces: Between the Thinker and the Poet’ dealing with imagination in Heidegger and Bachelard. People seemed receptive at least in related disciplines (philosophers not so much). On your advice page you left out Sartre’s The Psychology of Imagination (1940) which is not so well known as a minor work of Sartre who is also somewhat out of style.
Thanks for that advice list. I’ll try to work my way through it. If you ever develop this area further I’d be immensely interested as I’ve been meaning to tie up my dissertation with something in this area.
Paul
Thanks for the Elliott reference – I will definitely look it up. And you’re right that Sartre should have been included.
I’m trying to work a theory of imagination into one of the two manuscripts I’m working on, but the question is whether it’ll hang together or if I should leave it for a separate book (in which case the question becomes whether I’ll ever get to it)…
I should also note that Kearney is also at my University (for some of the year at least) and usually gives a seminar on the imagination although this year it is on the ‘Phenomenology of the Stranger’. So I suppose my own department is at least somewhat sympathetic to this area in its phenomenological form.
It would be interesting if you could synthesis the Zizekian approach to the imagination (all those symbolic orders), the ever-present imaginative tint to ecological thinking (since eco-logy is always somehow yet-to-come) and link this up with cinema (see the recent spat of posts on Avatar which circle around the themes of ecology, imagination, and ideology). Mind Zizek is probably already on the case!
I have been thinking about District 9 some more since seeing it. While I didn’t think it was the best film to watch on a flight (on a day when another flight was being bomb-threatened and we could watch that news story unfolding live on our seatfront TV sets), there were things about it that have haunted me since. Hearing it was nominated for an Oscar reminded me of that – the news made me happy because it is such a non-Oscar film (Clint Eastwood’s Invictus being a much more logical South Africa-themed film to nominate). I may post more about it…
films (& best-of lists)
The decade isn’t really over yet: there was no “year zero,” which means that the year 2000 was the two-thousandth year of its calendar, and that this year is the 2010th, the last of the third millennium’s first decade, not the first of its second. But …