immanence

It arrived a few days ago. Feels good to grasp in the hand: thick, solid, “capacious” (as Steven Shaviro says in one of the cover blurbs). And Tarkovsky has rarely looked as green as on the cover.

But I’ve already found an indefensible oversight: I acknowledged many people for helping me work out the ideas in the book, and even dedicated the whole thing to my son, but I completely forgot to mention the one person who had to live with me every day while I got thoroughly engrossed in writing it (to the detriment, no doubt, of many of those days): my wife, Auriel. Sorry ’bout that, A.

Here’s a snippet from the Foreword (paragraphs 3 and 4):

This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema. My goal is to think through the ecological implications of the moving images—films, videos, animations, and motion pictures of various kinds—that have proliferated in our world since the late nineteenth century. The “eco” in its philosophy does not restrict itself to the material impacts of the production of those images. It also delves into their social and perceptual effects. This book is about how moving images have changed the ways we grasp and attend to the world in general—a world of social and ecological relations—and about how we might learn to make them do that better.

This project is an ecophilosophy in the sense that it develops a philosophical framework for reconceiving our relations with moving images. This framework is intended to be pragmatic and empirical, rooted in actual experience, but it is also metaphysically speculative and radical in its implications. The works of the two philosophers on whom I draw most deeply, Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, have never to my knowledge been brought together for the task of a detailed analysis of cinematic images. To this combination, I bring insights from a broad array of other sources. These include the ideas of other philosophers, such as Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, and a range of post-Deleuzian thinkers; as well as cultural historians’ and geographers’ studies of visuality and landscape, ecocritics’ analyses of representations of nature and the “ecological sublime,” feminist and post-colonial critiques of the “imperial gaze,” cognitive and neuropsychological studies of affect and perception, neo-Marxist theorizations of film’s political economies, and the work of scholars in animal studies, trauma studies, psychoanalysis, and depth psychology, among other fields.

For information about ordering it, see here.