The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Christine Reeh-Peters

The next Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar (2024-2025) will be led by Christine Reeh-Peters (Protestant University of Applied Sciences/Bochum) who will talk about “Film Specters — Towards an Ethics of Film and Death”. The session is hybrid and will be held on September 18, 2024, at 3 PM (Lisbon time) at Colégio Almada Negreiros (room SE1) and online, via Zoom. To receive information about joining the meeting online, it’s mandatory to register in advance here.

Abstract

My talk argues for a further perspective on the relationship between film and ethics, and the crucial role that death plays in this. From a film-philosophical perspective, I propose the development of a machine ethics of film that draws on critical posthumanism. Namely Karen Barad’s “ethics of mattering” (Brad 2007) is approached: Barad explicitly refers to Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of the Other, a philosophy of alterity in which the possible death of the Other calls for responsibility. In my approach, special attention is given to the nexuses of film and death as well as to the idea of film’s spectrality (drawing on, e.g., Derrida, Barthes, and Leutrat), a context that is discussed with Barad’s diffractive view on quantum entanglement. Following from my earlier approaches to Barad’s agential realism in the context of film-philosophy (Reeh-Peters 2023) and on some Heidegger-based arguments set out in the book Being and Film (Reeh-Peters 2021), the figure of the so called “machinic spectre of film” is introduced. This diffractive spectre is both a metaphor and the designation of the techno-ontological condition of film’s spectral self-reflexivity, which manifests itself in the permanent presence of the absent. A short analysis of the documentary “The Empty Grave” (Lisa Wegner / Cece Mlay 2024) adds a socio-political dimension of specters and the haunted way how “entanglements are… irreducible relations of responsibility” (Barad, 2007).

Bio

Christine Reeh-Peters is a German filmmaker and philosopher holding a PhD from the Lisbon University. Since fall 2023, she is full professor for “Film and Digital Arts” at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences in Bochum. Before she was junior professor for “Theory and Praxis of Artistic Research in Digital Media” at Filmuniversity Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF in Potsdam 2019-2023. Reeh-Peters is editor of several anthologies and one monograph on film-philosophy. She is co-founder, producer and filmmaker at C.R.I.M. in Lisbon since 2003. Her research interests include film-philosophy, artistic research in film and digital arts.