Self-deception

There is a reflexive paradox (or set of paradoxes) associated with self-deception, and a variety of theories have been proposed in response, to explain self-deception. The study of reflexive paradoxes has been fruitful in the history of philosophy. Such a paradox may appear to be no more than a minor puzzle, which we will easily be able to mop up after having formulated solutions to more major problems. Sometimes the minor puzzle turns out to be surprisingly resistant to our "mopping up" operations; it may force us to re-think our major theories. For example the "truth-teller" paradox and other paradoxes of self-reference have been viewed initially as minor puzzles, while later on they have provoked major theories, e.g. theories of truth; in mathematics, Godel's theorem

FANTASIES OF THE MECHANICAL BODY IN MODERNIST AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

PhDThis study will look at fantasies of the mechanical body in a series of close readings of key modernist and contemporary texts. It will argue that these texts are sites of resistance or repression, in which unconscious and / or cultural narratives about the death drive have left their traces. Part One, Chapters 1-3, explores the links between war and fantasy, and between fantasy and gender. Chapter One looks at the art and writings of the Italian Futurists and English Vorticists, with the focus on Marinetti and Lewis, to consider how the rationalized bodies of the soldier and worker might be seen as the covert problems underpinning the fantasy, returning to it in the form of the repressed. Chapter Two concerns the writings of Ernst Jünger, where war, modern labour, the incursion of danger into everyday life, and photography are seen to provide signs of the emergence of the Typus, an organic construction, who has learnt to see himself as devoid of feeling, turning the death drive into the will to power in acts of aggression, and for whom the function of the eye is the same as that of the weapon. Chapter Three investigates the problem of war-shock and the shocks of cinema in First World War film footage of shellshocked soldiers, Lang's Metropolis, and Chaplin's Modern Times. It shows how discourses of hysteria, feminization and commodity relations form the common ground between the cultural reception of both shelishock and cinema, and how film-makers and critics responded to both sets of debates. Part Two, Chapters 4-5, explores the links between the machine, the maternal body and the death drive in the Terminator and Alien films, and considers the question of affect, mourning, and identification in Cronenberg's Crash

Cinema into the Real.

Cinema into the Real is the practice of creating an affect based encounter between film and the lived world where their thresholds shift. It is an inquiry into the possibility for navigating what Gilles Deleuze calls the 'not-yet-thoughf brought into existence by an irrational form of cinema comprised of crystalline time-images. How does the schema of normative cinema fiction and documentary stand in for the lived world, and how might the statements, maps and spaces of this cinema be made fluid to form a more radical moving image, one that is further implicated in, and may open up insightful gaps for, our experience There are three facets to this inquiry: first, the emergent and imaginative situation of filmmaking itself, where the very intention to make moving images produces a new frame through which to practise everyday life, a cinema of action and alteration secondly, the invention of my conceptual persona as filmmaker, an uncommon self that I have cultivated in order to approach filmmaking as in part alien to its methods of production thirdly, the exploration of a limit in thought (which is the state of affect, commonly experienced as panic) by way of a mental gap brought into being by aberrant moving images. Twelve films (and cinema interventions) were made, and these are thinking spaces in themselves. Between the theoretical text written, and the films produced, I have extended the flight line projected in Deleuze's two cinema books, in an attempt to do film as an art practice of experimental philosophy, and to navigate a space between cinema and the lived world. This minor cinema of which I speak, and which I practise, is acquired by destratification and drifting, courts affect, and can, I will argue, enable new aspects of (non-habitual) thought