Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema

by Jeong, Seung-hoon

• ISBN13: 9780190093792
• ISBN10: 019009379X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-06-30
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema takes a new approach to world cinema through critical theory. Whereas world cinema often refers to non-American films deemed artistic or peripheral, Seung-hoon Jong examines its mapping frames: the territorial 'national frame,' the deterritorializing 'transnational frame,' and the 'global frame.' If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, his global frame highlights two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the 'soft-ethical' inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their 'hard-ethical' symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both and suggesting their alternatives, global cinema draws attention to new changes in subjectivity and community that Jeong investigates in terms of biopolitical 'abjection' and ethical 'agency.'

In this frame, the book explores a vast net of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. Jeong comparatively navigates these films, highlighting less essentialist particularities than compatible localities that perform universal aspects of biopolitical ethics and its alternatives by centering the narrative of 'double death': the abject as symbolically dead struggle for lost subjectivity or new agency until physically dying. This narrative pervades global cinema from Hollywood blockbusters and European art films to Middle Eastern dramas and Asian genre films. Ultimately, the book renews critical discourses on global issues—including multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia—through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies.

Author Biography

Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at California State University Long Beach. He is the author of Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media, co-translator of the Korean edition of Jacques Derrida's Acts of Literature, and co-editor of The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema and Thomas Elsaesser's The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: World Cinema in a Global Frame

Part I. Abjection and Agency
Chapter 1. Multicultural Conflicts in Post-Political Double Ethics
Chapter 2. The Narrative of Double Death with Abject Agency
Chapter 3. Sovereign Agents' Biopolitical Abjection in the Spy Film

Part II. Catastrophe and Revelation
Chapter 4. Law, Divine Violence, and the Sanctity of Life
Chapter 5. From the Disaster Genre to the Cinema of Catastrophe
Chapter 6. Human History in (Post-)Apocalyptic Cinema
Chapter 7. The Time Loop of Catastrophe in the Mind-Game Film

Part III. Community and Network
Chapter 8. Narrative Formations of Community and Network
Chapter 9. Nation, Transnationality, and Global Community as Totalized Network

Part IV. Gift and Atopia
Chapter 10. Alternative Ethics through the Paradox of the Gift
Chapter 11. The Abject as Neighbor beyond Cultural Mediation
Chapter 12. Atopian Networking and Positive Nihilism

References
Index