Drafts by Sebastian Averill
This is a first draft of a forthcoming chapter for 'Materialism and Materiality: Essays in Žizek ... more This is a first draft of a forthcoming chapter for 'Materialism and Materiality: Essays in Žizek Studies'.
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The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote in the 1938 essay World as Picture that 'Every... more The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote in the 1938 essay World as Picture that 'Everyday opinion sees in the shadow only the lack of light, if not light's complete denial.' 'In truth', he countered, 'the shadow is a manifest, though impenetrable, testimony to the concealed emitting of light.' Bear this in mind for a minute and consider a scene from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Batman battles the masked-terrorist Bane in Gotham City's sewers. 'Shadows betrays you', Bane sneers, 'because they belong to me!' I argue that this is Christopher Nolan's philosophy of film-making itself. I argue that, even though he disavows any political message in his Batman trilogy, a powerfully Conservative statement resonates throughout. By looking at Nolan's filmic-inheritance of anxiety about the urban space from specific Twentieth-Century film (Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Gillo Pontecorvo's La Battaglia di Algeri, David Lynch's Doctor Zhivago, Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner), we can discern the same anxiety operating in the Batman trilogy. Doing what Foucault would call an 'archaeology' (excavating the lineage of the present and looking at past discourses 'as such') is not, however, enough; we need to develop a methodology for examining film that breaks out of Deconstructionism. Hegelian phenomenology allows us to 'own' our ideas, to not be afraid of living them and operationalizing them politically. Deconstructionism traps us in a prison of anxiety about what to say and what we mean when we do say anything. The final part of my dissertation maps out how politically-Hegelian film theory can be done, applying it specifically to the content of Nolan's Batman trilogy. To return to the theme of light, the success of the Left depends on historians being able to turn our anger at the obscuring of light into effective ways to ensure that this does not happen in future.
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Thesis Chapters by Sebastian Averill
This was originally planned to be the introductory chapter to my PhD thesis, but it ended up seem... more This was originally planned to be the introductory chapter to my PhD thesis, but it ended up seeming much too literary for that purpose, and so I've left it now to stand on its own as an example of the kind of experimental writing I enjoy doing.
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Conference Presentations by Sebastian Averill
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Book Reviews by Sebastian Averill
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Papers by Sebastian Averill
Mikhail Bakunin at the margins of Slavoj Žižek
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Drafts by Sebastian Averill
Thesis Chapters by Sebastian Averill
Conference Presentations by Sebastian Averill
Book Reviews by Sebastian Averill
Papers by Sebastian Averill