D. N. Rodowick
D. N. Rodowick is the author of numerous essays as well as nine books: An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities (2021), What Philosophy Wants from Images (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (Harvard University Press, 2015); Elegy for Theory (Harvard University Press, 2014); The Virtual Life of Film (Harvard University Press, 2007); Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Duke University Press, 2001); Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (Duke University Press, 1997);The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory (Routledge, 1991; reprinted 2013); and The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (University of Illinois Press, 1989; 2nd edition, University of California Press, 1994). His edited collection, Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy, was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2009. Rodowick's essay, "An Elegy for Theory," received the Katherine Singer Kovacs Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2009, and his book, Elegy for Theory received the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2015.
Having taught at Yale University until 1991, Rodowick began the film studies program there. After studying cinema and comparative literature at the University of Texas, Austin, and Université de Paris III, he obtained a PhD. at the University of Iowa in 1983. Rodowick subsequently taught at the University of Rochester and at King's College, University of London, where he founded the Department of Film Studies and the Film Study Centre. Before coming to the University of Chicago, he was William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, where he also helped create a new PhD. program in Film and Visual Studies. Special research interests include aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the history of film theory, philosophical approaches to contemporary art and culture, and the impact of new technologies on contemporary society. Among other honors, he has been a Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Cornell University, a Senior Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, Germany, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Film Studies, Free University of Berlin. In 2002, he was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Rodowick is also a curator, and an award-winning experimental filmmaker and video artist. With Victor Burgin, he was awarded in 2016 a Mellon Collaborative Fellowship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, University of Chicago, to produce new video work. He is also a member of the International Association of Art Critics and the Arts Club of Chicago. His creative work can be viewed at: https://bauleute.org.
Having taught at Yale University until 1991, Rodowick began the film studies program there. After studying cinema and comparative literature at the University of Texas, Austin, and Université de Paris III, he obtained a PhD. at the University of Iowa in 1983. Rodowick subsequently taught at the University of Rochester and at King's College, University of London, where he founded the Department of Film Studies and the Film Study Centre. Before coming to the University of Chicago, he was William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, where he also helped create a new PhD. program in Film and Visual Studies. Special research interests include aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the history of film theory, philosophical approaches to contemporary art and culture, and the impact of new technologies on contemporary society. Among other honors, he has been a Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Cornell University, a Senior Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, Germany, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Film Studies, Free University of Berlin. In 2002, he was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Rodowick is also a curator, and an award-winning experimental filmmaker and video artist. With Victor Burgin, he was awarded in 2016 a Mellon Collaborative Fellowship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, University of Chicago, to produce new video work. He is also a member of the International Association of Art Critics and the Arts Club of Chicago. His creative work can be viewed at: https://bauleute.org.
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tion of the Department of Comparative Literature. The text that follows is
an edited transcript of the second of two seminars on Shoah organized by
David Rodowick.
J. Hoberman, James Quandt, D. N. Rodowick, and Jonathan Rosenbaum
special-topic issue, also used for our panel at the 2000 MLA
convention, is meant to raise more questions than it resolves.
The nature of our mobility as citizens (economic, geographic, cultural) is
no less complex and variegate than the media environments we now oc-
cupy, as Caren Kaplan explains in her contribution. Moreover, even if the
concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer transnational corpo-
rations is resulting in a multinational entertainment state, as the Nation
suggested some years back, this does not mean that media use and audi-
ence identity are becoming more homogeneous. Global media are less
unified, and unifying, than they appear at first glance; media consumers
are more heterogeneous and their responses more complex than e
The defining question of modern art was how to release the image from representation. The problem for contemporary art is how to find new ap- proaches, materials, techniques, and technologies for remapping this question in ways responsive to our current history and media environ- ment. What has the image become under new conditions of technological production and reproduction, amplified flows of communication through social and mass media, and the global expansion of neoliberalism, both politically and economically? In this chapter, Rodowick appeals to Theodor Adorno’s late writings on aesthetics to evaluate contemporary art’s critical responses to its current technological and social condition in works by Phillipe Parreno, Sturtevant, Pierre Huyghe, Michel Majerus, Cory Arcangel, and other international artists.
art raises a perilous question for cinema studies. The twentie
century was unquestionably the century of cinema, but is cinema's
over? And if so, what is to become of its barely matured field of scholship, cinema studies?
tion of the Department of Comparative Literature. The text that follows is
an edited transcript of the second of two seminars on Shoah organized by
David Rodowick.
J. Hoberman, James Quandt, D. N. Rodowick, and Jonathan Rosenbaum
special-topic issue, also used for our panel at the 2000 MLA
convention, is meant to raise more questions than it resolves.
The nature of our mobility as citizens (economic, geographic, cultural) is
no less complex and variegate than the media environments we now oc-
cupy, as Caren Kaplan explains in her contribution. Moreover, even if the
concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer transnational corpo-
rations is resulting in a multinational entertainment state, as the Nation
suggested some years back, this does not mean that media use and audi-
ence identity are becoming more homogeneous. Global media are less
unified, and unifying, than they appear at first glance; media consumers
are more heterogeneous and their responses more complex than e
The defining question of modern art was how to release the image from representation. The problem for contemporary art is how to find new ap- proaches, materials, techniques, and technologies for remapping this question in ways responsive to our current history and media environ- ment. What has the image become under new conditions of technological production and reproduction, amplified flows of communication through social and mass media, and the global expansion of neoliberalism, both politically and economically? In this chapter, Rodowick appeals to Theodor Adorno’s late writings on aesthetics to evaluate contemporary art’s critical responses to its current technological and social condition in works by Phillipe Parreno, Sturtevant, Pierre Huyghe, Michel Majerus, Cory Arcangel, and other international artists.
art raises a perilous question for cinema studies. The twentie
century was unquestionably the century of cinema, but is cinema's
over? And if so, what is to become of its barely matured field of scholship, cinema studies?
Available here: https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/16251
Foreword by WJT Mitchell. Contributions by Samuel Weber, Ina Blom, Mary Ann Doane, Eivind Roossak, Susanne Ostby Saether, Liv Hausken, Arild Fetveit, D.N. Rodowick, Dieter Daniels and Sandra Naumann
This is an observational study, not a sociological one. It is without story, without interpretation, without judgment. Images are silent, reticent. What can one know of or from an image, or even from the data gleaned from a long series of images?
The Mecca was purchased quietly in 1938 for the planned expansion of what would become the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1940. Throughout this decade, the IIT sought to expel what had become nearly 2000 tenants by refusing to put money into maintenance and repairs, and then resorting to eviction proceedings. In 1950, the remaining tenants responded with mass protests. Nevertheless, The Mecca was demolished in 1952 to make way for Mies van der Rohe’s masterwork, S. R. Crown Hall, which now sits precisely on its footprint. This site and its Bronzeville environs thus evoke many fascinating themes of displaced architectures, competing visions of modernism and utopia, and conflicts in popular and cultural memory.
The core form of Returning is structured as a sequence of 26 “passages” organized as languid cross-fades from negative to positive images—at the midpoints of these transitions each passage appears as a strangely embossed bas-relief. Here Shahn’s photographs are literally reanimated. The implied movement is less a reversal than a passage through variable densities that vacillate between abstraction and figuration, which in turn suggest the ambiguity and intractability of historical documents with respect to the reanimation of the disappeared. There is no dialectic here but rather only a series of variable intensities and intervals.
Cavell joined the seminar for two two-hour sessions on December 4 and 11. The first session was devoted to a general discussion Cavell’s writings; the second to in depth discussion of two then recent films, indeed two of the most popular films of summer 2007,
Ratatouille and Knocked Up. Many other films and texts were addressed along the way, and fuller information can be found in the bibliography and filmography that accompany this text.
Rodowick 2
judgment without imagination. In fact, aesthetic judgments would not arise if not inspired by imaginative responses to art works and novel situations. Nor, of course, is creation possible without imagination.
The originality of Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, which have occasioned as much criticism as admiration, resides in her conviction that the elements of an original political philosophy inhabit Kant’s third Critique, as if a restless sleeper anxious to be awakened. And just as judgment is reconsidered here in relation to politics, Arendt also suggests that in many senses, politics and aesthetics are inextricably linked. In my book on Arendt and the humanities, I read the Lectures to draw out and define what I call the operations of judgment as activities fundamental to teaching and research in the arts and humanities. In my contribution here, I want to reorient my reading toward the activities of imagination. Just as Arendt’s Lectures redirect our understanding of judgment in quite original directions, I believe that there are also important lessons about imagination waiting to be brought into clearer focus.
Imagine an opera without the trappings of obviously operatic (and sometimes melodramatic) staging. Gone are the period costumes or glittering fashion statements, the impressive architectural settings, the elaborate lighting effects, sweeping gestures and movements. Staging and choreography are reduced to a minimum. In the French language, a live performance is a “representation.” But this work is not opera in the usual sense. In Grandrieux’s words, it is “opera undone” (“opéra défait”). The question posed by Grandrieux is “How to achieve the silent depth of the body? To tear opera from opera, dance from dance, live performance from live performance, so that one is faced with what one does not know, with what cannot be said, willed, but which imposes itself on one in the silence of the body, in its obscurity.”1 Not an opera and not a representation.
This text was first presented as a Humanities Day lecture at the University of Chicago on 18 October 2014. Video documentation can be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlJhuRMxXJg