Jeroen Gerrits: "Reanimating the Human in 'Love, Death + Robots'"
For the closing session of its 2023-24 Seminar, Demoseries is delighted to welcome Jeroen Gerrits, whose presentation is entitled Reanimating the Human in Love Death + Robots
Monday, June 17, 2024, 5:00PM to 7:00PM
Campus Lourcine, Espace Gisèle Halimi
Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
1 Rue de la Glacière, 75013 Paris
To attend in person, please register in advance by email at: events.demoseries@univ-paris1.fr
To follow the presentations on Zoom, please register at: https://pantheonsorbonne.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYvcOmrpjwrHNXdubECOrD35rUq8gKiVqGf
Abstract: In The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell famously conceives the world on film as “a world past” and film itself as “a moving image of skepticism.” Retrospectively we can see that such qualifications are premised on film as an analog medium, and also on the exclusion of cartoons from the medium. In this seminar I discuss how recent digital animations (and what I call re-animations) may challenge Cavell’s conceptions, categories, and “ontological reflections” on the medium of film. Based on a 17-minute TV-episode from Tim Miller and David Fincher’s anthology Love, Death & Robots—Alberto Mielgo’s “Jibaro” (2022)—I will argue that a shift is occurring in film’s intrinsic relation to skepticism. In the process, I will conduct a philosophical investigation into the concept of projection in The World Viewed so as to project the idea of a world past into our future.
Jeroen Gerrits is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University (SUNY), where he teaches courses at the intersection of philosophy, literature, and media. He published a monograph Cinematic Skepticism: Across Digital and Global Turns with SUNY Press (2019). A monograph on TV-series entitled Series of Time: An Uncanny Ordinary in New TV is under contract with Exeter Press for its 'TV-Philosophy' series. Publications further include numerous articles and book chapters on Cavell’s philosophy in the context of film and TV, as well as articles on specific shows, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, The Handmaid’s Tale, Twin Peaks, and Ozark.