Cinema, Democracy and Perfectionism: Joshua Foa Dienstag in Dialogue

Cinema, democracy and perfectionism CRITICAL POWERS Series Editors: Bert van den Brink (University of Utrecht), Antony Simon Laden (University of Illinois, Chicago), Peter Niesen (University of Hamburg) and David Owen (University of Southampton). Critical Powers is dedicated to constructing dialogues around innova- tive and original work in social and political theory. The ambition of the series is to be pluralist in welcoming work from different philosophical traditions and theoretical orientations, ranging from abstract concep- tual argument to concrete policy-relevant engagements, and encourag- ing dialogue across the diverse approaches that populate the field of social and political theory. All the volumes in the series are structured as dialogues in which a lead essay is greeted with a series of responses before a reply by the lead essayist. Such dialogues spark debate, fos- ter understanding, encourage innovation and perform the drama of thought in a way that engages a wide audience of scholars and students. Published by Bloomsbury On Global Citizenship, James Tully Justice, Democracy and the Right to Justification, Rainer Forst Forthcoming from Manchester University Press Rogue Theodicy – Politics and power in the shadow of justice, Glen Newey Democratic Inclusion, Rainer Baubock Law and Violence, Christoph Menke Autonomy Gaps, Joel Anderson Toleration, Liberty and the Right to Justification, Rainer Forst Cinema, democracy and perfectionism Joshua Foa Dienstag in dialogue Edited by Joshua Foa Dienstag Manchester University Press Copyright © Manchester University Press 2016 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 1 784 99401 3 hardback ISBN 978 1 784 99402 0 paperback ISBN 978 1 784 99735 9 open access First published 2016 An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Out of House Publishing Contents List of contributors page vii Series editors’ foreword x Acknowledgments xiii Part I Lead essay 1 1 The tragedy of remarriage: letter to M. Cavell about cinema (a remake) 3 Joshua Foa Dienstag Part II Responses 83 2 Emancipated perfectionism – or, In praise of dreaming 85 Clare Woodford 3 The phenomenology of the political: a reply from Saturday Night to Mr. Dienstag 110 Tracy B. Strong 4 The tragedy of remarriage in the Golden Age of television 131 Margaret Kohn 5 “That dangerous contention”: a cinematic response to pessimism 147 Davide Panagia 6 Letter to Mr. Dienstag 167 Thomas Dumm vi Contents Part III Reply 179 7 A reply to my critics 181 Joshua Foa Dienstag Bibliography 206 Index 212 Contributors Joshua Foa Dienstag is Professor of Political Science and Law at UCLA. His writing is broadly concerned with the roles of time and narrative in political theory and he has published essays on Nietzsche, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, Cervantes and the American Founders, among others. He is the author of two books: Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Theory (Stanford University Press, 1997) and Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton University Press, 2006), which won the Best Book award in Philosophy from the American Association of Publishers. His current projects include a collection of essays on film and political representation, and a book on the boundary of the human. Thomas Dumm is the William H. Hastie ‘25 Professor of Political Ethics at Amherst College. He served as a founding editor of the journal Theory & Event, and is the author of six books, including most recently Loneliness as a Way of Life (Harvard University Press, 2008) and My Father’s House: On Will Barnet’s Paintings (Duke University Press, 2014). He is currently completing a book-length study on the fate of home in the twenty-first century. Margaret (Peggy) Kohn is Professor of Politics at the University of Toronto. Her main research interests are urbanism, critical theory, the history of political thought, and colonialism. She is the author of three books and over a dozen scholarly articles in journals such as Political Theory, Journal of Politics, Theory & Event, Polity, Constellations and Dissent. Her current book project is entitled The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). It advances a novel theory of social rights and examines displacement in cities (including gentrification, slum clearance, privatization of public space) from a critical and normative perspective. viii List of contributors Davide Panagia is Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA. He is a political theorist with multidisciplinary interests across the humanities and social sciences including democratic theory, the history of political thought, interpretive methodologies, cultural theory, media studies, aesthetics, literary studies and visual culture. His work specializes in the relationship between aesthetics and politics, with an ongoing curiosity about the diverse ways in which the sensation of value is generated and assembled in political societies. He has published three books: The Poetics of Political Thinking (Duke University Press, 2006), The Political Life of Sensation (Duke University Press, 2009) and Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). Tracy B. Strong is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the University of Southampton and UCSD Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He has broad interests in political theory and in related fields in political science, aesthetics, literature and other areas. He is the author of several books including, most recently, Politics Without Vision: Thinking Without a Banister in the Twentieth Century (Chicago University Press, 2012), Winner of the David Easton Prize, 2013. He is currently working on a book on music, language and politics in the period that extends from Rousseau to Nietzsche. He has been the recip- ient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation, has been Visiting Professor at the Juan March Instituto in Spain and Warwick University in England, and was a Fellow at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University (2002–3). From 1990 until 2000 he was the editor of Political Theory. Clare Woodford is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the School of Humanities, University of Brighton. Her research interests include poststructuralism, theories of democracy, ethics, queer theory, psychoanalysis, democratic activism and aesthetics. She is the author of articles and chapters on the work of Cavell, Rancière, Honig, Rawls, Butler, Laclau and Foucault with respect to topics including political List of contributors ix extremism, cosmopolitanism, democratic activism and the ethics of friendship. Her book Dis-orienting Democracy (Routledge, 2016) puts Rancière’s work in conversation with Menke, Cavell, Derrida and Butler to expand the impact of his thought on democratic theory and practice today. Series editors’ foreword Joshua Foa Dienstag’s engagement with Stanley Cavell’s work on cinema is both homage and critique. Deliberately echoing the form of Rousseau’s 1758 essay Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles (Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre), it revisits and updates the ques- tion of the relation of aesthetic culture to morality raised by the Rousseau–d’Alembert exchange in terms of a meditation on the relation of cinema and democracy. Rousseau’s essay addresses his friend Jean d’Alembert’s article “Genève” (Geneva) in the Encyclopédie proposing the establishment of a theater in Rousseau’s home city. After making clear his respect for d’Alembert, Rousseau proceeds to express skepticism concerning the moral and political effects of the content of theatrical productions, especially comedies such as those of Molière; to express concern about the likely effects of the establishment of a theater (and the presence of actors) on the existing culture of Geneva; and to propose that open-air festivals offer an alternative that is more attuned to sustaining the patri- otic unity of Geneva’s political culture. Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles is an acute and highly influential expression of the philosophical pessimism that Rousseau opposes to the philosophical optimism of the Enlightenment – and it is no coincidence that Dienstag’s prior work, especially his award-winning 2006 book Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, offers both a cogent reconstruction of the tradition of philosophical pessimism and a forceful advocacy of this orienta- tion. Notably, philosophers who exemplify the pessimist tradition, on Dienstag’s account, such as Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and Camus are without exception philosophers of culture, centrally concerned with the relations of culture

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