Overview

Philosophy and the Patience of Film presents a 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. Daniele Rugo explains how Nancy and Cavell's relationship with film demands the surrendering of philosophical mastery, and that 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. Thisrealization provides a scene of instruction for philosophy.

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Reviews

In this dense study Rugo (communication and media studies, Brunel Univ., UK) examines aspects of the film writings of Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Nancy in parallel. ... This is a book for specialists. (C. D. Kay, Choice, Vol. 54 (5), January, 2017)

Referee's Report - Timothy Gould, Metropolitan State University of Denver 1. I have direct knowledge of a widening and intensifying interest in Cavell in the last twenty or twenty five years. I have somewhat less direct knowledge of a substantial (not merely French) interest in Nancy. This ms. would appeal to a significant segment of the intersection of those audiences. 2. Specifically, a book that would illuminate a substantial connection between these writers and moreover do so through a challenging topic of interest like film would be intellectually welcome and stand a good chance of attracting a serious readership. I will sketch in a series of points about this project, and though they are mostly positive, it seems to me that some further elaboration of these points would be useful. In one instance, that of examples, it is necessary to securing the central ground of the project. a. The idea of the 'space between' seems valuable-and a good alternative to a more mechanical-or academic-juxtaposition of their projects. But a 'space between' still presupposes a proximity, or analogy of the two writers. Otherwise, the space between remains empty and inactive-or filled only by the artificial energies of the author. b. It also seems like an adept critical move to juxtapose 'acknowledgement' and 'adoration'. But something needs to be said about the relatively minor role of acknowledgment in The World Viewed (compared with The Claim of Reason and 'Knowing and Acknowledging'). For example reality in film is said to be 'projected' and not acknowledged as reality is acknowledged at the end of 'Knowing and Acknowledging'. (Also, one might compare 'adoration' with the idea of falling in love with the world, in the Claim of Reason, as an alternative (and unstable) way of avoiding skepticism. c. Cavell does not always object to philosophy as a legitimizing and authoritative discourse. Sometimes its claims its sense of legitimacy is precisely what makes it worth contending with. Sometimes its authority is exactly what Cavell wants to claim for his own writing (cf. A Pitch of Philosophy, chapter 1)-albeit in a different voice (or as the author suggests a different 'tonality'.) d. The issue of absence works for both writers and could be pursued further. e. Apart from these primary virtues it should be noted that there is evidently a cinematic intelligence at work that promises to reward attention. However there is a significant gap in the otherwise carefully worked out view of philosophy and film. Confident that the writer can address this problem..-perhaps already has, - - I have chosen to focus on it in these remarks. It is important that he addresses the issue of Cavell and examples more thoroughly than appears in this proposal. The work treats cinema as a thinking force rather than a repository of examples by exposing philosophy's attempts to collaborate with the cinematic object without absorbing or reducing it. Whilst film is approached from a particular philosophical position its pressure produces a loosening of philosophical categories. As a consequence, film influences and interrupts the development of a conceptual gesture instead of merely illustrating its outline. This paragraph contains the elements of a philosophical approach to philosophy and film. It is this approach that makes possible the exchanges of philosophy between such apparently diverse figures. Hence the re-conception of philosophy as in collaboration with the film is crucial. There is a danger here in the apparent idea of Cavell's mode of philosophizing as a foregoing of a 'repository of examples'. In Cavell's work it would at least seem to be through the elaborately detailed encounter with examples that the collaboration with the movies first comes to light. (For instance, in the Preface to The World Viewed.) It is hard to see this collaboration otherwise, especially in the second and third books on film.-Anyone who, like Cavell, uses the scene of the makeshift 'screen' in It Happened One Night to elucidate both the movie screen and Kant's transcendental barrier to the noumenal is working hard to exploit the possibilities of examples. (This fits with Cavell's idea of examples in Wittgenstein.-see also Wittgenstein's idea of philosophy as a 'collection of reminders for a particular purpose.) My emphasis on the idea that Cavell is denying any role to philosophy as a repository of examples may seem exaggerated. Exaggerated or not, it records my sense that It is crucial to Cavell's progress in philosophy to work out the idea of the exemplariness of a stretch of ordinary speech or of a work of art or literature or film. Without this working out there is mostly just a hodgepodge of insight and concept, with little connection more than juxtaposition. I don't imagine that the author would deny this, but if he has an alternative way to make it clear how Cavell works in this territory, then this should be given more prominence. (Perhaps it is in the complete manuscript.) It also seems that the relation of philosophy and authority is related to this idea of example. So perhaps Cavell and the author agree in rejecting a somewhat static notion of example as a certain arbitrary sampling of a kind of empirical evidence. This idea of example was borrowed from its use in Anglo American philosophy-an odd moment of borrowing, if it is indeed one source of this rigid idea of philosophical authority. It is important to reject this-as the author does-but at the same time important to acknowledge the impulse to lean on such ideas of the exemplary. Again, while rejecting false ideas of philosophical authority, it is important to bear in mind Cavell's constant search for an acceptable kind of philosophical authority. We cannot simply dismiss the idea of analytic authority that he is haunted by. Cavell contests but does not entirely give up the idea of a 'We' that might find its arrogant yet irreplaceable voice. (Again, see chapter one of A Pitch of Philosophy.) It would help if there were an account of examples that Cavell would reject and an account of examples that he welcomes and employs. We still want to know for instance how examples of worldhood can come to stand for the world? (Not, as the author perspicuously notes, by representing the world). His idea of 'detailed readings' of Hollywood and Iranian film suggests precisely that he is not afraid of the exemplary, nor of the worldhood certain examples bring with them - but merely of a forced picture of examples. This should be made clearer. His work on Iranian is likely to be part of the book's originality in any case, and can certainly bear some further weight of philosophical interrogation of the exemplary. There is evidently a wish in this manuscript to render Cavell more 'literary'-or less under the sway of the 'legitimizing' and the 'authoritative . It is an important wish. But It is one thing to pull him out of the orbit of Anglo-American philosophy, and another to pull him out of the orbit of traditional philosophy altogether-something he repeatedly says is still represented in Analytic philosophy. Good work has been done under this apprehension. But I think the book would be better if it could allow Cavell's origins in analytic philosophy to show through. I see no reason why so capable a writer could not manage to do this. Author response to Timothy Gould report 1- Space between The introduction and first chapter set up the 'coordinates' for this space. This idea is motivated by the attempt to animate both what they share and what is irreducible between the two. It is not then a matter of bringing the two together, but of measuring the distance between them and of both from the point at which or through which a turning can be elicited. This parallelism implies a further possibility since it offers the opportunity to show that despite its tectonic rift, philosophy still thinks of itself (at times) as responding to a single demand. This does not mean that one can bring everything together, but that the rift is more productively thought not between continents but between voices, not as a gap between schools, but the opening produced by a singular gesture that is at once an invitation to sharing and a resistance irreducible to geography and traditions. 2- Relatively minor role of acknowledgment I agree that the question of acknowledgment in The World Viewed is developed less explicitly. However I do think that it does play a very important role and Cavell's insistence on the question of acknowledgment to explain the outsideness of the camera to the world it films in the second part of the volume (in particular in the last 5 chapters) reopens the entirety of the The World Viewed (Chapter 4 of the MS attempts to show this). In addition the footnote from p.110 where Cavell briefly reconstructs his argument from 'Knowing and Acknowledging' convinces me that the notion is still a crucial element for The World Viewed. 3- Cavell's origins in analytic philosophy I completely agree that Cavell's early texts in particular have to be read as a strong response to philosophical attitudes prevalent in the Analytic tradition and that overall this conversation has never stopped motivating Cavell's arguments and style. The second chapter of my MS discusses this in relation to: Cavell's alternative reading of Wittgenstein (in The Claim of Reason, in his response to Pole in Must We Mean... and in 'The investigations everyday aesthetics of itself'), his defence of ordinary language philosophy (in particular in 'Austin at Criticism' and 'Must We Mean What We Say') and his understanding of philosophy 'not as a set of problems but as a set of texts' (CR, 3). In relation to the latter point the MS emphasises that the intention is not simply that of aligning philosophy with literature as opposed to science - even if this concern is never completely absent in Cavell. The use of word 'texts' shouldn't for instance mislead one in thinking that Cavell is responding simply to philosophy's necessity of going over its own texts, since the emphasis here is not on a specific set of texts. At the opposite, which texts count as philosophy and which provide philosophical instruction or provocation is a question philosophy is constantly attempting to answer. Some illumination over this matter comes in a commentary (discussed in the second and last chapter of the MS) on Emerson and Thoreau's alignment with continental philosophy. Here Cavell discusses a rigor foreign to philosophy understood as a set of problems. This foreign rigor is based on the idea of argumentation as the assumption of responsibility for one's own discourse. This responsibility represents a conceptual accuracy that shapes an alternative philosophical way. This alternative, represented in this particular text by Emerson and Thoreau, rests on a devotion to reading. However it is precisely the nature of this reading and the type of texts we are invited to that matters. Cavell writes that what Emerson and Thoreau recommend to read is not essentially philosophical books and perhaps not books at all. Nature is rather their text of choice as in the sentence 'There are the stars and they who can may read them' (Walden 3.4). But then nature itself is understood as 'whatever is before you' (IQO, 18). Therefore the idea of philosophy as a set of texts implies not the acquisition of the knowledge a philosophy curriculum could provide, but of something perhaps less teachable (therefore less appealing to philosophy as a technical discipline). Philosophy is a kind of reading, but not the reading of texts, not necessarily and not only of texts. What could provoke reading is whatever is in front of you, therefore reading cannot be limited to philosophical texts, in fact it cannot be determined beforehand, before, that is, the provocation has been received, the interest has been elicited, the reader has been read. Philosophy as a set of text implies a certain willingness for presenting oneself to the provocation, a capacity, a talent for being interested by something, moved by something. The problem with problems may be said to rest instead on their givenness. This implies philosophical assertion, a desire to speak first. This concern with philosophical arrogation of voice is something I understand to be crucial for Cavell's understanding of what philosophy can do. This definition of philosophy as reading and reading as being read is articulated in more detail in a number of other texts and linked even more explicitly with ideas of silence, sitting still and withdrawal. Emerson and Thoreau are again taken as figures whose willingness for philosophy is satisfied by a withholding of assertion. Emerson expresses his withdrawal as a form of redemption, making 'his going off an indictment of his fellow countrymen' (TOS 50). Thoreau on the other hand writes in order to remain silent or as a consequence of having been silent and still and this silence and stillness offer both his route to philosophy, his access (back) to the world and his act of civil disobedience. These two withdrawals present themselves to Cavell as political and epistemological rebukes. The question of Cavell's positioning face the two traditions is given further articulation in passages such as this: 'This is not reason enough to turn Cavell into a 'Continental', not simply because much of his philosophy is devoted responding to the Analytic tradition (in reaction also to what is taken to be and therefore what is taken not to be 'American Philosophy'), but also because of his attempts to position himself somewhere in between the two, or as he writes 'within the tear in the Western philosophical mind' (PP: 4). 4- The idea of the exemplariness I do agree that the notion of 'example' is central for Cavell. In the MS on the one hand I reject the example as what the referee calls 'a certain arbitrary sampling of a kind of empirical evidence' and on the other I qualify Cavell's understanding of the power of exemplification as linked to the unexceptional and responsibility as receptiveness. The question of exemplariness is discussed in Chapter 1 in relation to Cavell treatment of Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' and 'Fate' and in Chapter 4 in relation to Austin's 'we'. With regard to the first I comment on Cavell's passage 'The power he claims for his (Emerson's) words is precisely that they are not his; it is the power of powerlessness in being unexceptional, or say exemplary... ' (ET 202). This passage provides a link to Cavell's choice of films. This idea of exemplariness is here linked to Cavell's understanding that you cannot know what constitutes something available to the medium of film prior to having traced that something in a particular instance. The power of exemplification is on the one hand completely open (available to all instances) and provides not a sampling, but something nearer to 'disclosure'. In relation to the second point I discuss Cavell's defence of Austin as resting precisely on the possibility of exemplarity of that which lacks authority (is ordinary). Cavell writes that when a philosopher like Austin uses 'we' he is stressing that we imagine and act together and that something of his 'we' will touch our lives. It is therefore not the accumulation of empirical data that affords Austin the right to say 'we'. In fact nothing does, and this is exactly the point. Nothing grants him that right apart from the fact that Austin is (as we all are) speaking about and to the world. The 'we' has authority precisely because it does not depend nor realize any particular authority. One can speak of 'we' when one is speaking of 'those necessities we cannot, being human, fail to know' (MWMWWS 96). The problem is not then that the claim to voice what we say implies a discounting of our subjectivity, but that this has to be included in as exemplary a fashion as possible. A text is exemplary not because it aims to convince the reader, but because it attempts 'to get him to prove something, test something, against himself' (MWMWWS 95). 5- Relation of philosophy and authority This is a very important point for the volume in particular since, as the referee points out, Cavell is looking for 'an acceptable kind of philosophical authority'. The topic is discussed at various stages (also in relation to the Cavellian emphasis on 'voice'), but perhaps best illustrated by the analysis dedicated tothe possibility of claiming responsibility for each word of one's argument. In a text on Emerson's Fate Cavell writes that Emerson gives us his writing as exemplary of the co-appearance in language of dependence and autonomy. In other words: our ordinary experience is weaved to the plural singularity the world offers more than we think and less than we want. For Cavell this constitutes a radicalization of Kant's philosophical revolution so that 'not just twelve categories of the understanding are to be deduced, but every word in the language' (IQO: 38). In the MS I claim that whilst Cavell rejects more static, traditional notions of philosophical authority he does formulate a strong claim for a different kind of authority, one that does not deny the possibility of 'we', but submits this possibility to the acceptance of a responsibility for our own words. Proposal review - Peter Gratton, Memorial University, US This proposal suggests a book operating, as it were, along four axes: Cavell and Nancy, philosophy and film, all wrapped up in a thinking of the world. The proposal is clear and understandable, which, along with the author's previous work, bodes well for the finished manuscript. My first comment would be that Nancy and Cavell's thinking of the world should be earlier in the manuscript, rather than as later chapters: it seems to me the author is wanting to set up a certain thinking of the world that necessitates a rethinking of film, which then would seem to warrant not waiting long before getting to that topic in the MS. I regard this book as certainly publishable. However, it does take quite a bit on: a) how do the late Heidegger and Wittgenstein coalesce around a non-representational view of the world? I think the proposal and introduction overstate the cross-over, though I'm open to the author persuading me on this. b) How does this thinking of the world lead, by way of a certain lineage to Nancy and Cavell, respectively, to their considerations of the world? This obviously needs to be teased out quite a bit more than the introduction could provide and more would have to be said, to be more convincing, that they are both not just non-representational but that there is more to the connection between them than that, since obviously there are many thinkers who take up the notion of the world as non-representable. c) how does this thinking lead both to similar considerations of the 'evidence of film'? Here the transition in the introduction was the weakest, not least since it wasn't clear why film was chosen and not the arts in general (even as for both thinkers, there is no 'art' in general). Finally more would need to be said about how film specifically brings out something uncommunicable in philosophy and in the philosophy of these authors, which admittedly is a difficult trick to pull off in what is a philosophical comparison of the two thinkers. And I think more would definitely need to be said about how 'patience' could be a 'power,' and why this title was chosen as an approach to the world and film This leads me to the 'why does it matter' question: I think at times the proposal can sound like, hey I've found this connection between Cavell and Nancy, so I'd like to do that. But I also like film, so I'll do that. While I think all philosophy begins in certain contingent choices, the rhetoric of the argument could be more forceful that these two thinkers, against all others providing a thinking of the world, are particularly crucial, and when juxtaposed, supplement each other in important ways that allows the author to put forward something different that either of these thinkers on their own. And I think the book's introduction would then need to be forceful that there is something about film that clarifies this thinking, or even that perhaps there is no thinking of the world without film, or it has to be done in and as film, if that makes sense. (Of course then the author would need to speak to whether non-film arts and discourses could do so.) But again, this is a strong proposal and this is certainly a book I would look forward to reading and assigning when completed. Response to Report Gratton's report 1- My first comment would be that Nancy and Cavell's thinking of the world should be earlier in the manuscript The first three chapters are entirely dedicated to an analysis of the philosophers' thinking of the world. The first chapter outlines this relation in terms of their shared attempt to resist the violence of thought on the world. Chapters 2 and 3 detail the philosophical gestures through which the two reach their conclusions by undertaking very close analyses and comparative readings of Cavell and Nancy's work on the world. 2- How does this thinking of the world lead, by way of a certain lineage to Nancy and Cavell, respectively, to their considerations of the world? In The Claim of Reason Cavell summarizes the dilemma the traditional epistemologist works himself into when trying to prove the existence of the world as following essentially from two gestures: the epistemologist fixes the world and invents the senses. It is in this double error that one can trace the trajectory of modern skepticism inaugurated by the Cartesian hyperbolical doubt. The skeptic sees in his conclusion - what Cavell calls 'the truth of skepticism' -the collapse of knowledge and therefore the unconditional disappearance of our relation with the world. However once the various steps leading to this conclusion are analyzed in detail the conclusion itself looks productive rather than stifling and what Cavell addresses is the fact that the conditions under which this conclusion appears are contradictory. On the other hand for Nancy the world fastens and abandons us at the same time, in one stroke, in one look. Following this thought means understanding how the world today exists not in terms of a relation to the past, but in terms of the absence of relation this past has produced. The sovereignty of reason in which the rationalists rejoiced fulfilled itself by installing an organizing principle in the world and satisfied itself with the ability to explain, discern, distinguish. However the idea of Reason as an organizing principle, recreating a cosmos out of the disorder of the world, was itself in relation to a past (Nancy calls this past 'Monotheism') it was trying to overcome and negate, whilst ultimately extending it. Whilst Monotheism declared its loyalty to a world beyond the world, to the opening of an otherworldly dimension that would rescue this world here, the rationalists insisted on appealing to a world behind this world here. This world here is but a semblance of what really is, it is but an image, a view, a representation of the real world, which hides and withdraws and ultimately tricks the intellect. Descartes is perhaps the proper name for this, wavering as he does between a natural doubt and an attempt to engineer the world in such fashion that it could respond to that doubt. What Cavell and Nancy in their different registers ask us to think is this: the world does not speak to us unless we are already drawn to interest, ready for a response. It is not a natural disposition of man to be capable of being so drawn, at least no more natural than man's ability to be drawn away from the world, to silence its call from within. The task is not that of hoping for the world to reveal itself, but to put ourselves in a position wherea response to this revelation is possible. It is not absolute passivity we are looking for, but the ability to be struck and therefore respond, finding the most appropriate response we can think of. To speak of the world in terms of response beyond knowledge (or certainty) is not to speak of a mode of thinking that invokes a vague spirituality over the rational. It is to open reason to what commands it and to what makes it work. Cavell hears it in the traditional epistemologist claim that we cannot know with absolute certainty that the world is real. For Nancy it runs through the entire spine of the conceptual West. It is reason itself that demands its own overcoming, that thinks the something that cannot be thought. What if the nothing the epistemologist has discovered is actually the answer? The world is nothing, not something reason can enclose, but the very unconditioned that drives reason to enclose itself, to give an account of everything. Thus the gesture called for by Cavell and Nancy is a way of accepting the excess of determined significations the world is. To say it otherwise: human experience, the singular existence and its constant exposure to other singularities, is not something that can be reduced, for it is itself the excess that makes us want to speak, listen, and move. What if then the fortuity of the world's existence (which includes our contingency) could become the very resource of reason, rather than its curse? This gesture does not move beyond reason, neither does it try to lower the bar as to what reason can do. Quite the opposite, confronting the strangeness of the world, reason opens itself up to it. 2- How do the late Heidegger and Wittgenstein coalesce around a non-representational view of the world? Whilst I do agree with the referee that the coalescence is by no means an unproblematic one, there is now an abundance of literature on the subject (Braver 2014; Mulhall 1990, 2001; Glendinning 1998, Granel 2009 to mention a few) discussed in the earlier parts of the manuscript (unavailable to referee), and setting up the discussion for the sample chapter. The MS insists in particular is to the work of Gerard Granel, who has dedicated a large part of his work to this issue. My attempts to link the two rest on two points: - Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein's reelaborate the idea of the human relation to the world as a way to overcome the impasse of scepticism, in particular in relation to Descartes. The conclusion they reach can be said to indicate that the world is in excess of the knowledge of a fact; the relation to the world has been obfuscated by a philosophical attitude, which should be overcome. - The cross-over is of crucial importance to both Cavell and Nancy's projects and there is evidence in their texts (discussed in the MS) that it is precisely this cross-over (even when implicit) that determines not just the content, but the tone of their philosophical contribution. 4- How film specifically brings out something uncommunicable in philosophy and in the philosophy of these authors The point raised here is answered throughout the work and more directly in the first chapter and in the two final chapters. In the first chapter I write that the conditions for the encounter between film and philosophy are expressed as follows: 1- the conditions for the encounter are to be determined anew, meaning that the encounter is at first non-philosophical, natural, and therefore its conditions themselves appear non- philosophical. Philosophy has to establish its right to speak about film; 2- the right of film to be handled by and through concepts also remains to be determined. Film has to be granted the right to be spoken about in philosophical terms. This question returns often in different forms, but one can identify a shared preoccupation: how is it that something providing so much pleasure to so many people (philosophers included) can bear the (sometimes unpleasant) weight of philosophical questioning? What hinders the encounter between film and philosophy is a system of parallel resistances, between the two and within them. Film neither provides nor helps the construction of formal arguments and is therefore excluded from philosophy, understood as responding to the claims of reason. Philosophy structures its discourse on the abstract and general, whilst film addresses the concrete and particular. Both reasons seem to depend on a narrow understanding of philosophy's dealing with conceptual matters, an understanding that privileges what one could provisionally call the 'systemic' and the 'analytic'. What seems to be omitted in these pictures of philosophy is philosophy's self-questioning, the shifting sense of its significance. Resistances coming from film tend to stress how a philosophical approach bypasses medium-specific questions. In other words, the criticism would imply that film cannot be read philosophically because this means stripping film of what is truly cinematic, its devices and modes of expression, its production processes and systems of distribution. This second option seems to restrict not only philosophy, but also film itself. It also seems to anticipate a knowledge as to what counts as the cinematic, which runs the risk of confining cinema to a set of conventions and their application. The result is that this criticism commits itself precisely to the same generalized and abstract reading it accuses philosophy of. As Cavell points out a view as to what constitutes the cinematic must be validated against specific instances, specific manifestations of conventions and their subversions in singular cases. It is impossible to decipher what exactly the cinematic is apart from its occurrence in specific films. These may appropriate cinematic modes that are until then not recognized as part of the established canon of cinematic conventions. Specifying the sufficient and necessary features of the medium requires a critical commitment to matters that are likely to lead the analysis to a territory that cannot be merely cinematic, whatever the rubric contains. As to how film 'transforms' philosophy, I insist in Chapter 3 and 4 that a certain reluctance to accepting film (the passivity it is said to impose) as having an intrinsic force of philosophical instruction resonates with a specific aversion internal to the work of philosophy. There is in philosophical practice an inclination to view thinking as grasping, making and clutching. The intolerance for film manifests philosophy's intolerance for reception and seduction, as if philosophical thinking could not be interested, could not account for its beginning otherwise than as a movement of self-generation. For Cavell and Nancy an embracing of film would also show to philosophy its own repressions, illuminate within philosophy the denial of reception, a tendency to violence and resentfulness. So to take attentiveness and patience as the very founding of philosophy means somehow to open reason to what seems at first its very reversal. Film's ability to tell us 'how different different things are' is an invitation to patience, at once reception of the singular and salute of the incommensurable value of the world. 5- I think more would definitely need to be said about how 'patience' could be a 'power,' and why this title was chosen as an approach to the world and film The first and the last chapter motivate the decision. Nancy and Cavell affirm an ambition for philosophy that implies the prominence of 'reception'. I call this a power of patience wanting to hear in this expression the possibility of keeping alive the tension towards what comes, making it inexhaustible, and through this assuring that what comes cannot be exhausted, grasped, manipulated, made secure. Thinking does not begin with doubt, but with patience, a tension that is not the prudency of wisdom, but the conduct of the one who joyfully lets oneself be carried into the world again and again. Patience is wanting more of what has first summo

The book is an excellent overview of the mutual concerns of Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Nancy ... . The Patience of Film will be most useful to philosophers and film scholars looking for new connections between continental and analytic or postanalytic traditions, since the book's primary contribution is the way that it brings Nancy and Cavell together through detailed readings of their work. (Chelsea Birks, Symposium, c-scp.org, August, 2018) In this dense study Rugo (communication and media studies, Brunel Univ., UK) examines aspects of the film writings of Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Nancy in parallel. ... This is a book for specialists. (C. D. Kay, Choice, Vol. 54 (5), January, 2017)

Author Information

Daniele Rugo is Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences, Media & Communications at Brunel University, London. He is the author of Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness (2013). His articles have appeared in Angelaki, Continental Philosophy Review, Film-Philosophy and Studies in European Cinema.

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