Cinematic Hyperspace

Did you know that the father of psychoanalysis believed in ghosts, or that Frederick Engels attended seances? Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History is the first collection of theoretical essays to evaluate these facts and consider the importance of the metaphor of haunting as it has appeared in literature, culture, and philosophy. Haunting is considered as both a literal and figurative term that encapsulates social anxieties and concerns. The collection includes discussions of nineteenth-century spiritualism, gothic and postcolonial ghost stories, and popular film, with essays on important theoretical writers including Freud, Derrida, Adorno, and Walter Benjamin.

At a time when "sexy" can be an adjective for anything, when sexual awareness is declared to be advancing faster in months than in the past half century, and when pundits warn of sexual overload, the actual representation of sex is still deemed confrontational, aggressive, "in your face." While critics accuse the academy of an obsession with sexuality, they also complain that nothing that appears to refer to sex really does. In readings ranging across film, drama, opera, fine art, and critical theory, Mandy Merck considers these phenomena as well as the role of the dog in anti-porn propaganda, the unacknowledged significance of the lesbian hand, and the early retirement of the phallus. Other topics include the relationship of women's tennis and prostitution, the gendering of the wild and the tame in the age of AIDS, and the sexlessness of postmodern criticism. In Your Face ends with the face and its alleged desecration by fellatio. Germaine Greer's condemnation of Bill Clinton for "fucking the faces of little girls" is examined in the light of one of Monica Lewinsky's endearments for the President--"fuckface." In a country whose last great Presidential scandal revolved around a key witness known only as "Deep Throat" and whose current Chief Executive works in the "Oral Office," giving head is going down in history. Analyzing the strange relationship of Linda Lovelace, Camille Paglia, and Paul de Man, In Your Face concludes by considering desire and disgust in high and low places.

Challenging audiences and critics alike, the films of Oliver Stone have compelled many viewers to re-examine some of their most revered beliefs about America's past. Stone has generated enormous controversy and debate among those who take issue with his dramatic use of history. This book brings Stone face to face with some of his most thoughtful critics and supporters and allows him room to respond to their views. Writers including David Halberstam, Stephen Ambrose, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Walter LaFeber and Robert Rosenstone critique Stone's most contested films to show how they may distort, amplify or transcend the historical realities they appear to depict.

A ground-breaking anthology that places dispositifs (“apparatuses”) at the center of contemporary thought. Dispositif is one of the most prevalent yet elusive terms in contemporary thought. This comprehensive anthology brings together formative, seminal, and contemporary texts and visual applications to illuminate how central dispositifs are to contemporary theory. Greg Bird and Giovanbattista Tusa’s selection and placement of critical texts invite readers to explore common themes and genealogies, different interpretations and readings, and their diverse deployments across multiple disciplines and genres by such figures as Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Judith Butler, Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Jasbir Puar, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Tiqqun, Claire Fontaine, and many others. Dispositif: A Cartography is a true toolbox for the development of technological ecology thinking that accounts for situated knowledge. This collection provides coordinates for reorienting oneself in a permanently changing world, offering possible roadmaps for navigating these profoundly uncertain times. More than just a compilation of interventions on the dispositif, this volume acts as a guide for understanding the complex interaction between technology, philosophy, and the languages of the arts and media.

One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including the now-classic essay "The Cyborg Manifesto," she received the J.D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science. Thyrza Nicholas Goodeve is a professor of Art History at the School of Visual Arts.

This publication engages with a futuristic progressive vision on the condition of cinema. By questioning and analyzing cinema's past and present industry with respect to various forms of staging from the perspective of artistic practice and research, a new space beyond is formulated. The author takes on a journey to reveal an imaginary—astronomical—political trope on and through what can be called the cinema of the present.

Hyperreality is an Alice-in-Wonderland dimension where copies have no originals, simulation is more real than reality, and living dreams undermine the barriers between imagination and objective experience. The most prominent philosopher of the hyperreal, Jean Baudrillard, formulated his concept of hyperreality throughout the 1980s, but it was not until the 1990s that the end of the Cold War, along with the proliferation of new reality-bending technologies, made hyperreality seem to come true. In the “lost decade” between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, the nature of reality itself became a source of uncertainty, a psychic condition that has been recognizably recorded by that seismograph of American consciousness, Hollywood cinema. The auteur cinema of the 1970s aimed for gritty realism, and the most prominent feature of Reagan-era cinema was its fantastic unrealism. Clinton-era cinema, however, is characterized by a prevailing mood of hyperrealism, communicated in various ways by such benchmark films as JFK, Pulp Fiction, and The Matrix. The hyperreal cinema of the 1990s conceives of the movie screen as neither a window on a preexisting social reality (realism), nor as a wormhole into a fantastic dream-dimension (escapism), but as an arena in which images and reality exchange masks, blend into one another, and challenge the philosophical premises which differentiate them from one another. Cinema of Simulation: Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s provides a guided tour through the anxieties and fantasies, reciprocally social and cinematic, which characterize the surreal territory of the hyperreal.