Books by Daniele Rugo
For more than forty years, the experimental filmmaker James Benning has been engaged in a systema... more For more than forty years, the experimental filmmaker James Benning has been engaged in a systematic investigation of the relations between man, landscape, and the filmic medium, and during the last decade it has become increasingly clear how much these investigations have to offer to contemporary debates about ecology, the age of the anthropocene and the potentialities of new digital technologies. In James Benning’s Environments a range of international scholars highlight the thematic and formal coherence of Benning’s practice, whilst providing readers with an artistic and historical context to understand his experimental film work. The volume offers a number of interpretative frameworks drawing on film theory, environmental humanities, visual culture and philosophy, explaining why Benning has emerged as one of today’s essential filmmakers.
With a foreword by Jean-Luc Nancy.
Philosophy and the Patience of Film presents the first compa... more With a foreword by Jean-Luc Nancy.
Philosophy and the Patience of Film presents the first comparative study of the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Stanley Cavell. It discusses the effect of their philosophical engagement with film, and proposes that the interaction between philosophy and film produces a power of patience capable of turning our negation of the world into a relation with it.
Through detailed readings of cinematic works ranging from Hollywood classics to contemporary Iranian cinema, this book describes the interaction between film and philosophy as a productive friction from which the concept of patience emerges as a demand for thinking.
Nancy and Cavell’s relationship with film demands the surrendering of philosophical mastery, and it is precisely this act in view of the world that brings Cavell and Nancy to the study of film. While clarifying the nature of their engagement with film this book suggests that film does not represent the world, but ‘realizes’ it. This realization provides a scene of instruction for philosophy.
Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness is the first book in English to provide a sustained ... more Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness is the first book in English to provide a sustained account of the relationship between Nancy, Levinas and Heidegger. It investigates Jean-Luc Nancy's reading of Heidegger, focusing on the question of Being-with, and starting with the problem of otherness in Heidegger, the book goes on to establish a dialogue between Nancy and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
With intellectual agility and command of cinema, literature and visual art, Daniele Rugo insists on the critical significance of Nancy's project for any future philosophy attempting to define itself beyond foundational acts, and according to the continuous crossings at the heart of existence. By discussing Nancy alongside Heidegger and Levinas, Rugo underlines the essential indecision between philosophy-as-literature and philosophy as the re-appropriation of the question of Being. Rugo offers unexpected associations which return thinking to the play of specificity, rather than restricting it to the passage of abstract formulations.
Papers / Chapters by Daniele Rugo
Screen, 2023
Chris Marker’s Level Five (1997) is a dense, self-reflexive, and fragmented film that investigate... more Chris Marker’s Level Five (1997) is a dense, self-reflexive, and fragmented film that investigates a crucial event in the final months of World War II: the battle of Okinawa. This article focuses on the relationship between two key strands in Marker’s film: (1) the critical examination of images and their ability to render events; and (2) the reflection on the status of historical knowledge in the digital world. We contend that Marker’s film not only queries a number of conventional epistemological foundations in documentary filmmaking, but also searches for new ways to relate to history. By elaborating on the notion and practice of montage, and reading Marker’s work alongside Karen Barad, Vilém Flusser, and Georges Didi-Huberman, the article argues that Level Five should be read as a ‘non-representational historical documentary’. The film does not merely bear witness to the Battle of Okinawa, but enacts a different way of doing history.
Chiasmi International , 2017
While it is possible, as Vivian Sobchack and others show, to illuminate film through Merleau-Pont... more While it is possible, as Vivian Sobchack and others show, to illuminate film through Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, it is more difficult to find within Merleau-Ponty’s work a coherent and systematic reflection on cinema. This absence is seldom interrogated. This article addresses what this absence might reveal by analyzing the reasons why Merleau-Ponty stopped short of an explicit discussion of film. The argument builds on these analyses to show how what Merleau-Ponty found problematic about cinema might turn out to be one of cinema’s most resourceful features. For Merleau-Ponty, cinema is caught between a deadening exactitude and a disappointing partiality. It is because of these two apparently opposing extremes that Merleau-Ponty sidelines cinema. However, the pairing of exactness and partiality provides an interesting moment for reflection. Intuitively the two should not coexist, since they appear mutually exclusive. Yet their coexistence seems to renew rather than foreclose a thinking of film. Guided by these two terms, Jean-Luc Nancy produces his own thought on cinema. To show how film is apt at capturing the essential excess and ambiguity of the world, the article will turn to the Lebanese film Je Veux Voir, which offers a powerful instance of cinema’s simultaneous exactitude and partiality.
Bien qu’il soit possible, comme Vivian Sobchack et d’autres l’ont démontré, d’illuminer le cinéma à partir de la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty, il est beaucoup plus difficile de trouver dans l’oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty une réflexion cohérente et systématique sur le cinéma. Cette absence est rarement interrogée pour elle-même. Cet article considère ce que cette absence peut révéler en analysant les raisons pour lesquelles Merleau-Ponty ne s’est pas engagé dans une réflexion explicite sur le cinéma. En nous appuyant sur ces analyses, nous montrons que ce que Merleau-Ponty trouvait de plus problématique dans le cinéma est peut-être sa ressource la plus précieuse. Pour Merleau-Ponty, le cinéma est pris entre une exactitude abrutissante et une partialité décevante, et c’est pour cette raison que Merleau-Ponty le met sur la touche. Cependant, le jumelage de l’exactitude et de la partialité devrait nous donner matière à réflexion. Intuitivement, les deux ne devraient coexister : ils apparaissent s’exclure l’une l’autre. Pourtant, leur coexistence est en mesure de renouveler plutôt que d’exclure une pensée du cinéma. C’est guidé par ces deux termes que Jean-Luc Nancy produit sa propre pensée du cinéma. Pour montrer comment le cinéma est à même de capturer l’excès et l’ambiguïté essentiels du monde, nous proposons une lecture du film libanais Je Veux Voir, et montrons comment il offre un exemple puissant de la simultanéité de l’exactitude et de la partialité dans le cinéma
The work of Patrick Keiller, from his early shorts to the four featurelength films produced so fa... more The work of Patrick Keiller, from his early shorts to the four featurelength films produced so far, sit somewhat uncomfortably between documentary and fiction, embedding at once the argumentative quality of the essay, the erudite precision of the travelogue and the lyrical suspension of the poem. If it is true, as Adorno says, that 'the essay's innermost formal law is heresy ' (1991: 23), then Keiller's films could be said to fit within the essay film tradition. However whilst the influence of Chris Marker on Keiller is evident, such classification might be too reductive, if not misleading. As Rascaroli explains the 'temptation of assigning the label of essay film to all that is noncommercial or experimental or unclassifiable must, however, be resisted, or else the term will cease being epistemologically useful ' (2008: 25). The films are indeed difficult to classify and one should perhaps resist the urge to categorise them. However they do display recurring formal strategies: in the shorts the camera frames the world from a (sometimes) mobile subjective point of view and the first person voiceover reveals the inner meditations of a main character. In the featurelength films the camera is static, gazing at the world from what appears to be an objective point of view, whilst the voiceover, delivered by a narrator on behalf of a character (Robinson) whose voice the audience never hears, takes the filmed spaces as starting points for personal, aesthetic, sociohistorical and critical observations.
This article identifies and elaborates on two models of resistance evident in JiaZhangke’s film c... more This article identifies and elaborates on two models of resistance evident in JiaZhangke’s film corpus. The deployment of different cinematic strategies produces an experimental calling into question of the value of truth and of truth as value. In the films here analysed Jia moves from resistance through organic observation to a model of resistance structured around a series of fabulations. If the first regime addresses the truth of ideology, then the target of the second is the ideology of truth. It is in this passage that Jia enters political cinema, collapsing the distinction between factual and fictional and opening up a space that belongs to no collectivity
Despite considerable differences, Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Nancy share the demand for a renewa... more Despite considerable differences, Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Nancy share the demand for a renewal of thinking produced through and with the concept of the world. Their articulation of the legacy bequeathed by Heidegger and Wittgenstein begins with an understanding of the world in excess of knowledge and insists on this impossible mastery as the most productive incentive for thinking. Inasmuch as philosophy has understood itself as producer of worldviews, systems and principle, philosophy has constantly suppressed the thinking of the world, for any worldview absorbs and dissolves the world in its vision. For both Cavell and Nancy an insistence on this suppression leads to an emphasis on film. Two gestures can be said to intertwine in their thinking of film: to recapture our relation to the world as one that is not based on knowing as certainty, but on the reception of the singular; to recapture thinking as that which is attracted and called for by the insurgence of the singular, by the seam(s) in experience. Nancy and Cavell reverse the idea of cinema as completing the regime of representation stressing how cinema produces a step away from thinking as representation in view of what the article names thinking as patience. The article concludes by asking: what does it mean for philosophy to understand itself as patience?
Elio Petri’s Todo Modo (1976) – based on Sciascia’s novel – features Marcello Mastroianni as a pr... more Elio Petri’s Todo Modo (1976) – based on Sciascia’s novel – features Marcello Mastroianni as a priest in charge of a group of politicians from the ruling party of the Christian Democracy on a spiritual retreat in a hotel. Here they begin to die one by one in unexplained circumstances. Petri’s declared aim was to damage the party as much as possible. The intention – which also motivates the distance from Sciascia – was to delimit a specific reality so to embed its distortions into the fabric of the film. However, the film was received mainly as an allegorical representation. This article argues that Todo Modo is both an effective example of European political cinema from the 1970s, because of the specificity of its analysis, and a lesson for political cinema in general. The film shows the need for political cinema’s pedagogical efforts to embrace reality’s distortions, rather than attempting to elucidate them.
According to Jean-Luc Nancy the essential condition for the existence of sense is the 'otherness'... more According to Jean-Luc Nancy the essential condition for the existence of sense is the 'otherness' of our being-together. For John Cassavetes being-together makes sense only there where it escapes sense.
It will be shown that in fact that both propositions derive from a qualitative distance at the heart of our being-together. This qualitative distance triggers the circulation of sense and leaves sense always open. It is in this way that being-together responds of sense absolutely by foreclosing any absolute sense, maintaining itself as it were as the moving horizon of sense.
Book Chapters by Daniele Rugo
Papers by Daniele Rugo
Journal of the British Academy, 2021
This supplementary issue looks at how informal, often unrecognised, memory practices are used to ... more This supplementary issue looks at how informal, often unrecognised, memory practices are used to deal with the legacy of violent conflict as a way to heal trauma, demand justice, and build sustainable peace. By drawing on case studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, India, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Syria, and Vietnam, the articles examine informal practices of memorialisation that challenge amnesia and hegemonic discourses of conflict by creating spaces for dialogue and exchange.
GCRF Cluster Performing Violence, Engendering Change Blog, 2020
Requiem for a nation, 2016
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Books by Daniele Rugo
Philosophy and the Patience of Film presents the first comparative study of the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Stanley Cavell. It discusses the effect of their philosophical engagement with film, and proposes that the interaction between philosophy and film produces a power of patience capable of turning our negation of the world into a relation with it.
Through detailed readings of cinematic works ranging from Hollywood classics to contemporary Iranian cinema, this book describes the interaction between film and philosophy as a productive friction from which the concept of patience emerges as a demand for thinking.
Nancy and Cavell’s relationship with film demands the surrendering of philosophical mastery, and it is precisely this act in view of the world that brings Cavell and Nancy to the study of film. While clarifying the nature of their engagement with film this book suggests that film does not represent the world, but ‘realizes’ it. This realization provides a scene of instruction for philosophy.
With intellectual agility and command of cinema, literature and visual art, Daniele Rugo insists on the critical significance of Nancy's project for any future philosophy attempting to define itself beyond foundational acts, and according to the continuous crossings at the heart of existence. By discussing Nancy alongside Heidegger and Levinas, Rugo underlines the essential indecision between philosophy-as-literature and philosophy as the re-appropriation of the question of Being. Rugo offers unexpected associations which return thinking to the play of specificity, rather than restricting it to the passage of abstract formulations.
Papers / Chapters by Daniele Rugo
Bien qu’il soit possible, comme Vivian Sobchack et d’autres l’ont démontré, d’illuminer le cinéma à partir de la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty, il est beaucoup plus difficile de trouver dans l’oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty une réflexion cohérente et systématique sur le cinéma. Cette absence est rarement interrogée pour elle-même. Cet article considère ce que cette absence peut révéler en analysant les raisons pour lesquelles Merleau-Ponty ne s’est pas engagé dans une réflexion explicite sur le cinéma. En nous appuyant sur ces analyses, nous montrons que ce que Merleau-Ponty trouvait de plus problématique dans le cinéma est peut-être sa ressource la plus précieuse. Pour Merleau-Ponty, le cinéma est pris entre une exactitude abrutissante et une partialité décevante, et c’est pour cette raison que Merleau-Ponty le met sur la touche. Cependant, le jumelage de l’exactitude et de la partialité devrait nous donner matière à réflexion. Intuitivement, les deux ne devraient coexister : ils apparaissent s’exclure l’une l’autre. Pourtant, leur coexistence est en mesure de renouveler plutôt que d’exclure une pensée du cinéma. C’est guidé par ces deux termes que Jean-Luc Nancy produit sa propre pensée du cinéma. Pour montrer comment le cinéma est à même de capturer l’excès et l’ambiguïté essentiels du monde, nous proposons une lecture du film libanais Je Veux Voir, et montrons comment il offre un exemple puissant de la simultanéité de l’exactitude et de la partialité dans le cinéma
It will be shown that in fact that both propositions derive from a qualitative distance at the heart of our being-together. This qualitative distance triggers the circulation of sense and leaves sense always open. It is in this way that being-together responds of sense absolutely by foreclosing any absolute sense, maintaining itself as it were as the moving horizon of sense.
Book Chapters by Daniele Rugo
Papers by Daniele Rugo
Philosophy and the Patience of Film presents the first comparative study of the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Stanley Cavell. It discusses the effect of their philosophical engagement with film, and proposes that the interaction between philosophy and film produces a power of patience capable of turning our negation of the world into a relation with it.
Through detailed readings of cinematic works ranging from Hollywood classics to contemporary Iranian cinema, this book describes the interaction between film and philosophy as a productive friction from which the concept of patience emerges as a demand for thinking.
Nancy and Cavell’s relationship with film demands the surrendering of philosophical mastery, and it is precisely this act in view of the world that brings Cavell and Nancy to the study of film. While clarifying the nature of their engagement with film this book suggests that film does not represent the world, but ‘realizes’ it. This realization provides a scene of instruction for philosophy.
With intellectual agility and command of cinema, literature and visual art, Daniele Rugo insists on the critical significance of Nancy's project for any future philosophy attempting to define itself beyond foundational acts, and according to the continuous crossings at the heart of existence. By discussing Nancy alongside Heidegger and Levinas, Rugo underlines the essential indecision between philosophy-as-literature and philosophy as the re-appropriation of the question of Being. Rugo offers unexpected associations which return thinking to the play of specificity, rather than restricting it to the passage of abstract formulations.
Bien qu’il soit possible, comme Vivian Sobchack et d’autres l’ont démontré, d’illuminer le cinéma à partir de la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty, il est beaucoup plus difficile de trouver dans l’oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty une réflexion cohérente et systématique sur le cinéma. Cette absence est rarement interrogée pour elle-même. Cet article considère ce que cette absence peut révéler en analysant les raisons pour lesquelles Merleau-Ponty ne s’est pas engagé dans une réflexion explicite sur le cinéma. En nous appuyant sur ces analyses, nous montrons que ce que Merleau-Ponty trouvait de plus problématique dans le cinéma est peut-être sa ressource la plus précieuse. Pour Merleau-Ponty, le cinéma est pris entre une exactitude abrutissante et une partialité décevante, et c’est pour cette raison que Merleau-Ponty le met sur la touche. Cependant, le jumelage de l’exactitude et de la partialité devrait nous donner matière à réflexion. Intuitivement, les deux ne devraient coexister : ils apparaissent s’exclure l’une l’autre. Pourtant, leur coexistence est en mesure de renouveler plutôt que d’exclure une pensée du cinéma. C’est guidé par ces deux termes que Jean-Luc Nancy produit sa propre pensée du cinéma. Pour montrer comment le cinéma est à même de capturer l’excès et l’ambiguïté essentiels du monde, nous proposons une lecture du film libanais Je Veux Voir, et montrons comment il offre un exemple puissant de la simultanéité de l’exactitude et de la partialité dans le cinéma
It will be shown that in fact that both propositions derive from a qualitative distance at the heart of our being-together. This qualitative distance triggers the circulation of sense and leaves sense always open. It is in this way that being-together responds of sense absolutely by foreclosing any absolute sense, maintaining itself as it were as the moving horizon of sense.