Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / By the 20th century the Confessions had become a “classic” of western civilization, yet it seems to elude any easy explanation and categorization. While scholars of Late Antiquity puzzled over the nature, structure, and meaning of the work, a parallel reception was occurring by some of the most original thinkers across both traditions of Contemporary philosophy, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Jaspers, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean Louis Chrétien and Stanley Cavell. This study will focus on four of these thinkers, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Ricoeur and Marion, and the ways that the Confessions has influenced their attempts to address fundamental questions on subjects ranging from time and memory to history and hermeneutics, evil and the will, the self and personal identity, language and narrative, conversion, skepticism and materialism, God and onto- theology, and ultimately the very practice of philosophy itself, its autobiographical and especially its confessional character. In turn, this study also asks whether the engagements of these highly original contemporary philosophers can uncover new dimensions of this highly original work that has been read and interpreted throughout a centuries-long history of reception. The hermeneutic wager is that the past illumines the present philosophical terrain, but also that present insights allow us to read a classic text of the past with new understanding. This study will benefit from the interconnected nature of the problems that these writers confront, in their “family resemblance” of shared affinities and marked differences. Chapter One, “Scholarly Engagements: A Problematic Classic,” introduces some of the key interpretive problems which arose in the course of a century of scholarly engagements, including occasion, veracity, composition, and sources of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Chapter Two “The Early Wittgenstein: Tractatus, Testimony and Confession” discusses the confessional philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the deep affinities he shared with Saint Augustine in his life and his first major work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), despite its reception and use as a foundational for Logical Empiricism and its spirited offspring. Chapter Three: “The Later Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations as Philosophical Confession” discusses the influence of Saint Augustine on Wittgenstein’s second major work, the Philosophical Investigations (1953), which uses a quotation from the Confessions as a point of departure for his own philosophical confession of errors and temptations. Chapter Four “Saint Augustine and Gadamer: Hermeneutic Anticipations and Affinities” discusses the hermeneutical insights of Saint Augustine, through the ways he encountered or struggled with texts in the Confessions, as well as through his idea of the “inner word” which would be for Gadamer the foundation of a philosophical hermeneutics. Chapter Five, “Ricoeur: Sin, Time, Memory, and Narrative” discusses Ricoeur’s engagement with Saint Augustine on the question of evil as well as his appropriation of the Augustinian aporia of time from the Confessions as pivotal for his narrative turn. Chapter Six, “Jean-Luc Marion’s Confessions” lays out Marion’s phenomenological unfolding of the Confessions beyond and before metaphysics, offering his reading of six dimensions of the inaccessibility of the self explored by Saint Augustine in the Confessions. This study will conclude by highlighting the themes that have suggested themselves across the many readings of this classic text. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

This thesis theorises an approach to cinematic suspense derived from a set of films that challenge the teleological and redemptive principles of traditional narrative. It is argued that such a challenge is drawn from the need to account for conditions of violence and suffering without recourse to the traditional grounds of redemption. They set out to question the symbols that underpin a faith in its possibilities. Such films counter these grounds with a form of perpetuated suspense that continually withholds resolution, stressing and destabilising both the terms of redemption and the affect of its aesthetic representations. Significantly, this thesis examines films from the years following 1989 that confront this central theme within conditions of historical hiatus and the disintegration of ideological certainties occurring in the wake of European communism. These films, by Kira Muratova, Béla Tarr, Artur Aristakisyan, Alexander Sokurov, Bruno Dumont, Roy Andersson, Ulrich Seidl and Gus Van Sant, present a world in which human beings are always already turned against themselves, placing them in the context of contemporary philosophical aporias that identify the human condition as enigmatic and resisting of itself. They suspend the symbolic structures associated with redemption in order to reconfigure contemporary film as a „realist‟ cinema at the threshold of the interpretative and reconciliatory economies implicit in the soteriological mythology of Western thought. Tracing Paul Ricoeur‟s schematic account of the symbols and myths of a „fallen‟ world, the thesis turns on Jean-Luc Nancy‟s subsequent critique of the insufficiency of myths to properly account for existence. In place of an hermeneutic recovery of the real and its meaning, Nancy‟s „realist‟ philosophy of „sense‟ and its application to the cinema offer an account that speaks less of conflicting narratives of redemption than a radical stripping away of its terms, suggesting that it is redemption from the normative terms of redemption that ultimately constitutes the proper question at the heart of these films.

Head Chop is a practice-led research project exploring the thinking of community found within the works of Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maurice Blanchot. Using the central exchange between Nancy and Blanchot, as found in the triple intersection of texts composed of Nancy's Inoperative Community, Blanchot's The Unavowable Community, and finally Nancy's recent The Disavowed Community, Head Chop draws upon the interfaces of these three works to develop a reading of community. Utilising the concept of fictioning, an imaging of possible worlds, as its primary methodology, Head Chop develops a narrativised analysis of community. The story of Acéphale, Bataille's secret society, provides the structuring fiction of the work. This story is developed from a synthesis of fragmentary accounts of the Acéphale group's sacrificial ambition, and the illustrations of the Acéphale journal. The result is a tale of a human sacrifice from which the being Acéphale subsequently arises. In tracing the relation of the work of Nancy and Blanchot to the work of Bataille, Head Chop draws attention to the role of the figure of Acéphale for Bataille, and its subsequent insinuation in the work of Nancy and Blanchot. The figure of Acéphale operates as an editorial device that structures and informs the readings of these works as a common grounding and central problematic. This situates the readings of Bataille, Nancy and Blanchot in a contested frame of reference by attempting to accommodate an alternate version of the sacrificial event. Head Chop finds a basis for its methodological investigation in Deleuze and Guattari's work What is Philosophy? Excising and developing a series of figures and conceptual tools from the works of Nancy, Blanchot and Bataille, Head Chop develops a crossing of these figures and concepts as characters within the broader narrative of Acéphale. Following this methodological approach, Head Chop traces series of connected concepts in the works of Nancy and Blanchot. In developing these connections in relation to the Acéphale narrative, conceptual structures engaged in the thinking of community are drawn out into the broader contexts of Nancy and Blanchot's work. These connections are traced in Nancy through addressing such notions as the deconstruction of the subject, the question of authenticity in Heidegger, a re-reading of Heideggeran ontology that privileges Mitsein, and the singular plural. In Blanchot conceptual connections are similarly traced, beginning from the foundational role of the other, the challenging passion of lovers, through to death, unworking, and the question of testimony. In developing a narrativised analysis of the figure of Acéphale, Head Chop aims to open new channels of inquiry into the concept of community as it arises between the works of Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy. Research questions: How does a re-imaging of the Acéphale story, in which Acéphale is begotten, engage with Bataille, Nancy and Blanchot's readings of community? What is to be gained from the use of a re-imagined Acéphale story in a thinking of community?

In this thesis, I use a close reading of the silent films of Charlie Chaplin to examine a question of listening posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable” (Nancy 2007:1)? Drawing on the work of Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, I consider a claim that philosophy has failed to address the topic of listening because a logocentric tradition claims speech as primary. In response to Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism, Nancy complicates the problem of listening by distinguishing between <em>l’e´coute</em> and <em>l’entente</em>. <em>L’e´coute </em>is an attending to and answering the demand of the other and <em>l’entente</em> is an understanding directed inward toward a subject. Nancy could deconstruct an undervalued position of <em>l’e´coute</em>, making listening essential to speech. I argue, Nancy rather asks what kind of listening philosophy is capable of. To examine this question, I focus on the peculiarly dialogical figure derived from Chaplin that communicates meaning without using speech. This discussion illustrates how Chaplin, in the role of a silent figure, listens to himself (<em>il s’e´coute</em>) as other. Chaplin’s listening is Nancean resonance, a movement in which a subject refers back to itself as another subject, in constant motion of spatial and temporal non-presence. For Nancy, listening is a self’s relationship to itself, but without immediate self-presence. Moving in resonance, Chaplin makes the subject as other as he refers back to himself as other. I argue that Chaplin, through silent dialogue with himself by way of the other, makes his listening listened to. Chaplin refused to make his character speak because he believed speech would change the way in which his work would be listened to. In this way, Chaplin makes people laugh by making himself understood (<em>se fait entendre</em>) as he makes himself listened to (<em>se fait e´couter</em>). In answer to Nancy’s question, I conclude philosophy is capable of meeting the demand of listening as both <em>l’entente</em> and <em>l’e´coute</em> when it listens as Chaplin listens.

La présente thèse se propose de faire une lecture esthétique du politique dans le cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard de 1969 à 2014, en essayant de démontrer que l'esthétique du politique dans son cinéma s'exprime par un renouveau de la pensée dialectique de l'image.Cette conception de la dialectique godardienne de l'image est influencée par la philosophie althussérienne des « Appareils idéologiques d'Etat » et constitue un profond renouvellement des concepts hégéliens et marxistes de la dialectique, au sens où la dialectique godardienne de l'image est une dialectique sans synthèse, qui se caractérise par une pensée du troisième plan développé à partir du rapprochement inédit de deux images, qui entretiennent un rapport à la fois « lointain et juste » sur le mode de la métaphore surréaliste et du collage.La période du Groupe Dziga Vertov représente chez Godard un foyer de réflexions esthétiques et politiques, ainsi que d'expérimentation, où il met en place véritablement cette pensée politique et dialectique de l'image, qu'il va ensuite approfondir dans les autres périodes : initiation de la dialectique entre image et son dans la période du Groupe Dziga Vertov ; dialectique entre image et langage influencée par les systèmes de la télévision et de la publicité, dialectique de la technique vidéo et du cinéma dans la période Sonimage, images dialectisées dans l'esthétique de la relève et la pensée du contre-champ et du hors-champ dans les Histoire(s) du cinéma, esthétique dialectique de la mise en ruine dans l'exposition Voyage(s) en Utopie, esthétique dialectique du désastre dans Adieu au langage et Trois désastres..Ces différentes esthétiques dialectiques de l'image se retrouvent d'une période à l'autre, si bien que ces périodes entretiennent des rapports d'interaction différentielle sur le mode de la dialectique godardienne.Du reste la pensée dialectique godardienne nous conduit à dépasser l'approche traditionnelle que les études universitaires ont des rapports entre les différentes périodes de l'œuvre de Jean-Luc Godard – période du Groupe Dziga Vertov (1969-1972), période du Groupe Sonimage (1972-1979), période des Histoire(s) du cinéma, période Péripheria, période de la collaboration avec Fabrice Aragno et Nicole Brenez… –, conçus en termes soit de rupture, soit de continuité. En réalité, de 1969 à 2014, tout se passe comme si la filmographie de Jean-Luc Godard progressait de façon dialectique et hélicoïdale à la manière de la philosophie de l'histoire de Giambattista Vico, fondée sur des moments de ruptures et de continuités, et faisant de l'esthétique du politique, une esthétique de la complexité, qui repose sur une série d'« images-pensées » et une pensée dialectique et rhizômatique ouverte.La pensée esthétique et politique de Godard est comprise dans cette tension dialectique entre un mouvement vers l'avant et un regard rétrospectif ouvrant le champ des possibles d’un véritable socialisme cinématographique / The present thesis proposes to make an aesthetic reading of politics in Jean-Luc Godard's cinema from 1969 to 2014, by trying to demonstrate that the aesthetics of politics in his cinema is expressed by a renewal of the dialectical thought of the image. This conception of the Godardian dialectic of the image is influenced by the Althusserian philosophy of the "ideological apparatuses of state" and constitutes a profound renewal of the Hegelian and Marxist concepts of dialectics applied to the cinematographic paradigm, in the sense that the godardian dialectic of the image is a dialectic without synthesis, which is characterized by a thought of the third shot developed from the unusual rapprochement of two images that maintains a relationship both « far and right » in the mode of surrealist aesthetics of metaphor and collage.The period of the Dziga Vertov Group represents in Godard’s filmography a space of aesthetic and political reflections, as well as of experimentation, where it really sets up this political and dialectical thought of the image, which it will then deepen in the other periods: initiation of the dialectic between image and sound in the period of the Dziga Vertov Group; dialectic between image and language influenced by the television and advertising systems, dialectic of video technique and cinema in the Sonimage period, images dialectised and political thought of the reverse shot and off-screen in the History (s) of cinema, dialectical aesthetics of ruining in the exhibition Voyage (s) in Utopia, dialectical aesthetics of disaster in Farewell to language and Three disasters …These different dialectical aesthetics of the image are found from one period to another, so that these periods maintain relations of differential interaction on the mode of Godardian dialectic. Moreover, Godard's dialectical thought leads us to question the traditional approach that the university studies have to the relations between the different periods of the work of Jean-Luc Godard (period of the Dziga Vertov Group (1969-1972), period of the Sonimage group (1972-1979), period of the History (s) of the cinema, period Peripheria, period of the collaboration with Fabrice Aragno and Nicole Brenez ...), conceived either in terms of rupture or continuity.In reality, from 1969 to 2014, everything happens as if the filmography of Jean-Luc Godard progressed dialectically and helically in the manner of the philosophy of history of Giambattista Vico, defined by moments of rupture and continuity and making the aesthetics of politics an aesthetics of complexity, based on a series of "thought-images" and an open dialectical and rhizomatic thought.Godard's aesthetic and political thought is included in this dialectical tension between a forward movement and a retrospective gaze opening the field of possibilities of a true cinematographic socialism.

La pensée politique se heurte aujourd'hui à l’impossibilité de définir la communauté politique une fois les catégories traditionnelles (Nation, Peuple, Classe) mises en déroute. À l'heure de la critique de toutes les catégories totalisantes, de toutes les essences, la tâche de penser le commun paraît ardue. Pourtant, trois auteurs de philosophie politique, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy et Jacques Rancière, ont tenté, dans leurs œuvres respectives, de relever le défi. Ce mémoire passe en revue leurs propositions pour une communauté désubstantialisée, ne s'assemblant plus autour d'une particularité exclusive mais ne sombrant pas non plus dans l'universalisme abstrait. Il présente les prémisses principales sur lesquelles s'appuie cette vision de la communauté : une politique sans archè, la fin de toute téléologie et l'appropriation de l'impropriété. La dernière partie du mémoire présente la proposition de recherche qui stipule que c'est en réactivant le thème de l'exigence communiste que ces trois auteurs peuvent énoncer la communauté politique comme un partage extatique, évitant le piège du libéralisme mais aussi du communautarisme. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : communauté, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, extatique, anarchie, Bataille, désœuvrement, singularité, impropriété, commun, exigence communiste.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 179 p. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: Eugene Holland, Dept. of French and Italian. Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-179).

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This thesis brings the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy, Slavoj Zizek and Bruno Latour into conversation around the cynosure of ecological rhetoric. It argues for a renewed contemplation of political ecology, one that relinquishes the concept of Nature in favour of the overtly politicized notion of a world in common. By tracing, for the first time, the intersections between these three thinkers’ respective philosophies of nature, this thesis strives to articulate a philosophical framework that can live up to the ecological challenges of the contemporary Anthropocene. / Graduate / 0422 / 0401 / 0298

Texte remanié de: Thèse 3# cycle--Lettres--Paris X, 1969. / Thèse soutenue sous le titre : "Cinéma moderne et société de consommation.