Robert Sinnerbrink
Biographic Data
| ID | 461384 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Sinnerbrink |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Sinnerbrink |
| SIGNATURE | SINNERBRINK R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3330-3038 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Introduction: Heidegger and the Phenomenology of Film
Technics: Media in the Digital Age
The Key Debates series was launched in 2010 with the aim of revisiting "the central issues that continue to animate thinking about film and audiovisual media," which we have now done across ten volumes.All of these have followed a pattern of reexamining foundational texts and issues, while also investigating new lines of transmission and interpretation.Our book series' dual interest in foundations and novel lines of inquiry is demonstrated by the…
Contemporary Screen Ethics: Absences, Identities, Belonging, Looking Anew
Domestic Work, Gender, Race, Class and the Ethical Paradox of the Big House in Brazilian Cinema
This chapter explores the recognition, or lack of it, afforded to domestic labour. The chapter takes take a decolonizing feminist approach to representations of the housemaid in films depicting the Big House – an architectural phenomenon synonymous with colonial plantations – in Brazilian cinema, from the 1940s and 1950s to the present. Examining the figure of the black woman housemaid in this cinematic heritage, at the intersection of gender and…
New Philosophies of Film: An Introduction to Cinema as a Way of Thinking
What can philosophy teach us about cinema? Can cinema transform how we understand philosophy? How should we describe the competing approaches to philosophizing on film? New Philosophies of Film answers these questions by offering a lucid introduction to the exciting developments and contentious debates within the philosophy of film. Mapping out the conceptual terrain, it examines both analytic and continental approaches to cinema and puts forward…
Re-enactment and Traumatic Memory: Cinematic Ethics in The Act of Killing and S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2012) and its companion piece, The Look of Silence (2014), are powerful works of cinematic ethics. The former is a ‘perpetrator documentary’ that invites killers to make movie re-enactments of their crimes, the latter a case of ‘ethical witnessing’ in which a victim’s descendant questions his brother’s killer. In what follows, I explore The Act of Killing ’s use of stylised re-enactments, using various movie genre…
David Martin-Jones, Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History
David Martin-Jones commences his ambitious and impressive new book, Cinema Against Doublethink, with a clever but confusing analogy, combining the famous thought experiment concerning Schrödinger’s cat with an imaginary installation of conceptual art. He imagines an art exhibition where world history is like a pair of shoes, or a cat, in a box, where the spectator does not know whether the shoes, or the cat, are there or not; guerrilla filmmakers…
Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment
Thomas Elsaesser’s untimely death on 4 December 2019, less than a week after the publication of European Cinema and Continental Philosophy, lends this volume a tragic and melancholy pathos. A towering figure in the discipline, one who was present, as Dana Polan remarks, when modern film studies – the serious study of film – was really beginning,1 Elsaesser’s brilliant final work offers a remarkable fusion of cognitive mapping and original theoriz…
A philosophy of cultural modernity: Márkus's contribution to the philosophy of culture
As Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney for over 20 years (1978-2001), György Márkus exerted a profound influence on a generation of philosophers and students from many disciplinary backgrounds. His legendary lecture courses, spanning the history of modern philosophy from the Enlightenment through to the late 20th century, were memorable for their breadth, erudition, and philosophical drama. Always modest despite his mastery of the…
Imagining Cinema: Cinempathy' and the Embodied Imagination
Imagination has been the focus of much philosophical inquiry in recent decades. Although it plays an essential role in linking emotional engagement with ethical experience, imagination has received comparatively little attention in film-philosophy. In this article, I argue that imagination plays an essential role in linking emotional engagement with moral-ethical experience. Drawing on phenomenological, cognitive and aesthetic perspectives, I foc…
Truths in Documentary
According to many film aficionados, theorists, and critics, we are currently experiencing a Golden Age of documentary cinema. Indeed, in many international film festivals, it is often the documenta
Love Sick: Malick's Kierkegaardian 'Weightless' Trilogy
Malick's 'weightless' trilogy (To the Wonder [2012], Knight of Cups [2015] and Song to Song [2017]) explores the limits of different conceptions of love, from the romantic and ethical to the spiritual and religious. Focusing on To the Wonder, I argue that this exploration of subjective experiences of love is manifested through Malick's distinctive cinematic style, which aims to present the 'weightless' (groundless, shifting and distracted) subjec…
Division III of Heidegger's 'Being and Time: The Unanswered Question of Being
Introduction: Film and / as Ethics
IntroductionFilm and / as Ethics Robert Sinnerbrink (bio) and Lisa Trahair (bio) The relationship between film and philosophy, along with the idea of film as philosophy, has attracted widespread interest over the last decade. Film theorists and philosophers of film have explored not only the philosophical questions raised by cinema as an artform, but also the possibility that cinema might contribute to philosophical understanding or even engage i…
Film and/as Ethics
Understanding Hegelianism
Anatomy Ofmelancholia
This article analyses some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Lars von Trier's Melancholia, focusing in particular on the film's remarkable Prelude, arguing that it performs a complex ethical critique of rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-italictic allegory of world-destruction. At the same time, I suggest that Melancholia seeks to “work through” the loss of worlds – cinematic but also cultural and natural – that characterises …
György Markus: On the Path of Culture – Editorial Introduction
Critical Theory As Disclosing Critique: A Response to Kompridis
The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality
Why do philosophers (of film) assume that films only represent reality rather than being a part of it? Why does contemporary theory denigrate some films as ‘illusory’ while valorizing others as closer to ‘reality’? Richard Rushton takes up these questions and more in his excellent new book, The Reality of Film, which forges a new conception of ‘filmic reality’ via bold rereadings of ‘classic’ film theorists such as Bazin, Metz and Lacan, as well …
Stimmung: Exploring the aesthetics of mood
Few cinephiles would deny the importance of mood in film, yet the aesthetics of mood are curiously overlooked today. On the one hand, mood is an essential dimension of cinema: we define certain genres, for example, by suggesting the moods they evoke (suspense, the thriller, the romance). On the other hand, words frequently fail us when we try to articulate such moods in a more abstract or analytical vein. I offer in this essay some critical refle…
Cinematic Belief: Bazinian Cinephilia and Malick's the Tree of Life
Given the so-called “crisis” in film theory, the digital mutations of the medium, and the renewed interest in historicism, cinephilia, and film philosophy, André Bazin's thought appears ripe for retrieval and renewal. Indeed, his role in the renaissance of philosophical film theory, I argue, is less epistemological and ontological than moral and aesthetic. It is a quest to explore the revelatory possibilities of cinematic images; not only their p…
The future of critical theory? Kompridis on world-disclosing critique
Nikolas Kompridis has recently argued that the future of critical theory depends upon a critical appropriation of Heidegger’s concept of ‘world disclosure’, and hence on a transformation of critical theory into a form of ‘world-disclosing critique’ oriented towards the future. This article engages in a critical dialogue with Kompridis' account of world-disclosing critique, arguing that critical theory should embrace it as an innovative way of ret…
A Post-Humanist Moralist: Michael Haneke's Cinematic Critique
The films of Michael Haneke, so some critics argue, exploit the nihilism of a media-saturated culture, indulging in a dubious manipulation of audience expectations and our fascination with violence. Such criticisms, however, misunderstand or distort the complex moral, political, and aesthetic purpose of Haneke's work. Indeed, his films are better understood as examining the socially disorienting and subjectively disintegrating effects of our post…
The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Zizek by Geoff Boucher
From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower
This paper develops a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the work of Foucault and Agamben. It shows how Heidegger's reflections on Machenschaft or machination prefigure the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. It develops a critique of Foucault's account of biopolitics as a system of managing the biological life of populations culminating in neo-liberalism, and a critique of Agamben's presentation of biopolitics…
Stimmung: Exploring the aesthetics of mood
Few cinephiles would deny the importance of mood in film, yet the aesthetics of mood are curiously overlooked today. On the one hand, mood is an essential dimension of cinema: we define certain genres, for example, by suggesting the moods they evoke (suspense, the thriller, the romance). On the other hand, words frequently fail us when we try to articulate such moods in a more abstract or analytical vein. I offer in this essay some critical refle…
Cinematic Belief: Bazinian Cinephilia and Malick's the Tree of Life
Given the so-called “crisis” in film theory, the digital mutations of the medium, and the renewed interest in historicism, cinephilia, and film philosophy, André Bazin's thought appears ripe for retrieval and renewal. Indeed, his role in the renaissance of philosophical film theory, I argue, is less epistemological and ontological than moral and aesthetic. It is a quest to explore the revelatory possibilities of cinematic images; not only their p…
A Post-Humanist Moralist: Michael Haneke's Cinematic Critique
The films of Michael Haneke, so some critics argue, exploit the nihilism of a media-saturated culture, indulging in a dubious manipulation of audience expectations and our fascination with violence. Such criticisms, however, misunderstand or distort the complex moral, political, and aesthetic purpose of Haneke's work. Indeed, his films are better understood as examining the socially disorienting and subjectively disintegrating effects of our post…
Deconstructive Justice and the “Critique of Violence”: On Derrida and Benjamin
This essay presents a critical interpretation of Derrida's deconstructive reading of Walter Benjamin's text, “Critique of Violence.” It examines the relationship between deconstruction and justice, and the parallel Derrida draws between deconstructive reading and Benjamin's account of pure violence. I argue that Derrida blurs Benjamin's distinction between the political general strike (which simply inverts state power relations) and the proletari…
Critique Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory
Truths in Documentary
According to many film aficionados, theorists, and critics, we are currently experiencing a Golden Age of documentary cinema. Indeed, in many international film festivals, it is often the documenta
Neo-Anarchism or Neo-Liberalism? Yes, Please! A Response to Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding
Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding makes a timely contribution to contemporary debates in ethics and political philosophy. For all its originality, however, one can raise critical questions concerning Critchley's account of the forms of resistance possible within liberal democratic polities. In this article I question the adequacy of Critchley's ethically based neo-anarchism as a response to neo-liberalism, critically analysing the role of id…
The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover: A discourse on disgust
(1992). The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover: A discourse on disgust. Continuum: Vol. 5, Film — Matters of Style, pp. 352-365
Active slaves and reactive masters? Deleuze's anti‐dialectical niezsche
In this paper I critically examine Deleuze's anti‐dialectical interpretation of Nietzsche. My reading focuses on Deleuze's theory of active and reactive force, his account of history as the development of nihilism, and questions his proposal of a metaphysical overcoming of nihilism through the ‘self‐destruction’ of reactive forces. Is his interpretation as anti‐dialectical as it claims to be? Deleuze's account of the interplay of active and react…
Recognitive Freedom: Hegel and the Problem of Recognition
This paper examines the theme of recognition in Hegel's account of self-consciousness, suggesting that there are unresolved difficulties with the relationship between the normative sense of mutual recognition and phenomenological cases of unequal recognition. Recent readings of Hegel deal with this problem by positing an implicit distinction between an 'ontological' sense of recognition as a precondition for autonomous subjectivity, and a 'normat…
Critique Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory
From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower
This paper develops a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the work of Foucault and Agamben. It shows how Heidegger's reflections on Machenschaft or machination prefigure the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. It develops a critique of Foucault's account of biopolitics as a system of managing the biological life of populations culminating in neo-liberalism, and a critique of Agamben's presentation of biopolitics…
Critique Today
What are the tasks and potentials of critical theory today? How should we critique the present? Critique Today brings together a variety of perspectives in critical social philosophy that question our social and historical constellation. It includes contributions by Genevieve Lloyd, Shane O’Neill, Paul Patton, Paul Redding, Emmanuel Renault, and Nicholas Smith, and examines critical intersections in the work of Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Pier…
From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower
This paper develops a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the work of Foucault and Agamben. It shows how Heidegger’s reflections on Machenschaft or machination prefigure the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. It develops a critique of Foucault’s account of biopolitics as a system of managing the biological life of populations culminating in neo-liberalism, and a critique of Agamben’s presentation of biopolitics…
Deconstructive Justice and the “Critique of Violence”: On Derrida and Benjamin
This essay presents a critical interpretation of Derrida's deconstructive reading of Walter Benjamin's text, “Critique of Violence.” It examines the relationship between deconstruction and justice, and the parallel Derrida draws between deconstructive reading and Benjamin's account of pure violence. I argue that Derrida blurs Benjamin's distinction between the political general strike (which simply inverts state power relations) and the proletari…
Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory
Recognition, Work, Politics includes a range of essays in contemporary French critical theory around politics, recognition, and work, and their philosophical articulations. These issues are addressed from directions that include post-structuralism, the paradigm of the gift, recognition theory, and post-marxism.
Recognition, Work, Politics (Social and Crititcal Theory, a Critical Horizons Book)
Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory
Understanding Hegelianism
Understanding Hegelianism explores the ways in which Hegelian and anti-Hegelian currents of thought have shaped some of the most significant movements in twentieth-century European philosophy, particularly the traditions of critical theory, existentialism, Marxism and poststructuralism. The first part of the book examines Kierkegaard s existentialism and Marx s materialism, which present two defining poles of subsequent Hegelian and anti-Hegelian…
The Politics of the Multiple
Lenin famously recommended that would-be Marxist revolutionaries should study Hegel’s Logic. It is hard to say how many militants heeded Lenin’s call; the set of all those who have both read Hegel’s Logic (and understood it) and engaged in revolutionary activity might well be very modest.1 Devotees of Alain Badiou’s monumental L’Etre et l’evenement (fi rst published in 1988) would no doubt update Lenin’s advice. Today’s militants of thought, poli…
Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future
Understanding Hegelianism
Explores the ways in which hegelian and anti-Hegelian currents of thought have shaped some of the most significant movements in 20th century European philosophy, particularly the traditions of critical theory, existentialism, Marxism and poststructuralism
Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance: Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding
Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance: Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding." Critical Horizons, 10(2), p. 153
Neo-Anarchism or Neo-Liberalism? Yes, Please! A Response to Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding
Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding makes a timely contribution to contemporary debates in ethics and political philosophy. For all its originality, however, one can raise critical questions concerning Critchley's account of the forms of resistance possible within liberal democratic polities. In this article I question the adequacy of Critchley's ethically based neo-anarchism as a response to neo-liberalism, critically analysing the role of id…
The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Zizek by Geoff Boucher
The future of critical theory? Kompridis on world-disclosing critique
Nikolas Kompridis has recently argued that the future of critical theory depends upon a critical appropriation of Heidegger’s concept of ‘world disclosure’, and hence on a transformation of critical theory into a form of ‘world-disclosing critique’ oriented towards the future. This article engages in a critical dialogue with Kompridis' account of world-disclosing critique, arguing that critical theory should embrace it as an innovative way of ret…
A Post-Humanist Moralist: Michael Haneke's Cinematic Critique
The films of Michael Haneke, so some critics argue, exploit the nihilism of a media-saturated culture, indulging in a dubious manipulation of audience expectations and our fascination with violence. Such criticisms, however, misunderstand or distort the complex moral, political, and aesthetic purpose of Haneke's work. Indeed, his films are better understood as examining the socially disorienting and subjectively disintegrating effects of our post…
Critical Theory As Disclosing Critique: A Response to Kompridis
The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality
Why do philosophers (of film) assume that films only represent reality rather than being a part of it? Why does contemporary theory denigrate some films as ‘illusory’ while valorizing others as closer to ‘reality’? Richard Rushton takes up these questions and more in his excellent new book, The Reality of Film, which forges a new conception of ‘filmic reality’ via bold rereadings of ‘classic’ film theorists such as Bazin, Metz and Lacan, as well …
Stimmung: Exploring the aesthetics of mood
Few cinephiles would deny the importance of mood in film, yet the aesthetics of mood are curiously overlooked today. On the one hand, mood is an essential dimension of cinema: we define certain genres, for example, by suggesting the moods they evoke (suspense, the thriller, the romance). On the other hand, words frequently fail us when we try to articulate such moods in a more abstract or analytical vein. I offer in this essay some critical refle…
Cinematic Belief: Bazinian Cinephilia and Malick's the Tree of Life
Given the so-called “crisis” in film theory, the digital mutations of the medium, and the renewed interest in historicism, cinephilia, and film philosophy, André Bazin's thought appears ripe for retrieval and renewal. Indeed, his role in the renaissance of philosophical film theory, I argue, is less epistemological and ontological than moral and aesthetic. It is a quest to explore the revelatory possibilities of cinematic images; not only their p…
György Markus: On the Path of Culture – Editorial Introduction
Epistemology (26 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Art (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (13 works) · Aesthetics (12 works)