Cotutelle / La présente thèse propose de traverser l’ensemble de l’œuvre cinématographique de Johan van der Keuken (1938-2001) en suivant le fil de la collection. Partant d’une reconnaissance de curieuses configurations d’objets et de corps rappelant les chambres de merveilles de la Renaissance et les entresorts du 19ème siècle, elle élabore un cadre théorique original fondé sur des travaux de Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze et Siegfried Kracauer, afin d’analyser ce qui dans ce cinéma réfléchit le devenir filmique d’objets et d’êtres vivants saisis à même la vie ordinaire. Cette analyse s’enracine dans la pratique d’une forme d’ekphrasis qui veut épouser les rythmes, mouvements et inflexions de ce cinéma et de ses personnages, dont l’écriture répète les collections musicales. La thèse expose ainsi les responsabilités du cinéaste aux prises avec diverses formes de difformités, de marginalité et d’exclusion dues au colonialisme et à la logique réifiante du monde capitaliste, et montre comment les images qu’il réalise par les moyens propres au médium cinématographique manifestent un regard qui à la fois assume la violence inhérente à ce médium et parvient à en faire un instrument d’émerveillement. Ce regard collectionneur et merveillant affronte résolument l’exhibition, le voyeurisme, la stigmatisation, le sensationnalisme, l’accumulation, l’abstraction, la dispersion, la réification, pour en dégager une ligne de fuite au lieu d’en reconduire la violence. Tout en les heurtant, il suscite dans notre regard et notre écoute un amour du monde tel qu’il est. Van der Keuken met ainsi en œuvre, jusque dans le dernier film qu’il réalise alors qu’il est mis devant l’inévitabilité de sa propre mort, une éthique du cinéma dans l’oscillation entre merveille monstrueuse et merveille merveilleuse. / This dissertation offers a path through the complete œuvre of filmmaker Johan van der Keuken (1938-2001), guided by the notion of collecting. Highlighting the curious configurations of objects and bodies that call to mind Renaissance-era Wunderkammern and nineteenth century freak shows, this dissertation formulates an original theoretical framework based on the works of Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze and Siegfried Kracauer. This framework enables the dissertation to analyze how van der Keuken’s cinema thinks through the filmic becoming of objects and living beings plucked out of ordinary life. This analysis is rooted in an ekphrastic practice that seeks to mold itself to the rhythms, movements, and inflections of this filmic universe and its characters, whose composition repeats musical collections. The dissertation thus demonstrates the filmmaker’s responsibilities as he grapples with diverse forms of deformity, marginalization and exclusion due to colonialism and the objectifying logic of a capitalistic world, and shows how the images he creates through the means unique to the medium of cinema manifest a gaze that both acknowledges the inherent violence of the medium and manages to turn it into an instrument of wonder. This collecting and wondering gaze resolutely confronts the risks of exhibition, voyeurism, stigmatization, sensationalism, accumulation, abstraction, dispersion, and objectification, in order to open a line of flight rather than reproducing violence. Even while shocking our eyes and ears, van der Keuken elicits in our gaze and in our listening a love of the world just as it exists. He thus experiments, up through his final film, directed as he faces his inevitable death, a film ethics that oscillates between monstruous wonder and wonderous wonder.

No description available.

The aim of this Master’s thesis is to achieve philosophical clarity on an interpretative problem I have been struggle with in Euripides’ Medea: That Medea murders her own children, while claimingto love them. Situated within the philosophical and literary tradition of ordinary language philosophy and ordinary language criticism, the thesis draws on ideas, theoretical discussions, and concepts from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toril Moi, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and Niklas Forsberg – but also Søren Kierkegaard. The analysis is divided in two parts. The first is anarticulation of the grammar of my problem through Cora Diamond’s conception of the phenomenon “a difficulty of reality”, and an emulation of a hermeneutical strategy to deal with such problems, which I identify in Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. I reach the conclusion that the co-existence of Medea’s murder och love is a paradox, which cannot be thought. The second part of the analysis is an attempt to step out of this paradox. Here, I compare Medea to Stanley Cavell’s readings on the Shakespearean tragedies Othello and King Lear, and Cavell’s ideas on “lived scepticism”, “avoidance of love” and “best case of acknowledgment”. By doing this, I am able to form the hypothesis that Medea’s understanding of “love” has been severely damagedafter Jason’s betrayal, and that she actually fails to sensically mean that she loves her children. In its use of my own confusion as a starting point and in employing Toril Moi’s views on reading, this thesis continuously stresses the individual reader’s responsibility in literary interpretation, as well as the importance of daring to voice or personal struggles, questions, and interests – even (or especially) when reading great classics.

Cette recherche part d’un double intérêt. Pour la spiritualité, dont on entend beaucoup parler dans un 21e siècle inquiet et en quête de nouveaux repères. Et pour le cinéma, ou 7e art, phénomène culturel phare des temps modernes, qui reflète abondamment les problématiques et questionnements du monde. À une époque où on observe une tendance à l’homogénéisation culturelle, résultat de la mondialisation économique, cette thèse traite du « cinéma transnational ». Elles aussi, les œuvres de ce cinéma traversent l’espace planétaire, mais tout en conservant un solide ancrage local et une singularité artistique. Ce sont en bonne partie les films que l’on retrouve dans les festivals internationaux, tels Cannes, Venise et Berlin. Le cinéma traduisant toutes les interrogations possibles du présent, plusieurs films apparaissent donc porteurs d’un questionnement à portée spirituelle. Et ce, avec des moyens non discursifs, propres à l’art cinématographique. Ils invitent aussi à la rencontre de l’autre. L’objectif de la thèse consiste à décrire comment, par l’analyse d’une douzaine de films transnationaux, on peut dégager de nouveaux concepts sur la façon avec laquelle se vit la spiritualité à notre époque, en relation avec l’autre, et pourquoi cette spiritualité s’accompagne nécessairement de considérations éthiques. Pour accomplir cette tâche, la thèse s’appuie sur les travaux de deux philosophes, Gilles Deleuze (France) et Stanley Cavell (États-Unis), qui ont marqué les études cinématographiques au cours des dernières décennies, par des approches jugées complémentaires pour cette recherche. Le premier a développé sa pensée à partir de ce qui distingue le cinéma des autres arts, et le second, à partir de l’importance du cinéma pour les spectateurs et les spectatrices. Enfin, la thèse se veut une théologie, ou pensée théologico-philosophique, indépendante d’une tradition religieuse et au diapason des réalités du 21e siècle. / This research is based upon two fields of interest. For spirituality, a concept very much to the fore in this troubled 21st century in search of fresh yardsticks. And for cinema, aka the 7th Art, a beacon on the cultural scene, with its insights in today’s issues and questionings. In this era of cultural homogenization, itself the result of economic globalization, this thesis probes “transnational cinema” for fresh answers. Transnational films cross the global space while keeping their local roots and own artistic identity. Very often one will find these works featured in the big film festivals, such as Cannes, Berlin or Venice. Focusing on today’s questionings and issues, many of these movies appear to be bearing a spiritual imprint, with non-discursive methods. They promote openness to others. The goal of this thesis is to describe, through an analysis of a dozen transnational films, how new concepts defining ways to live a spiritual life today can be found. Further the thesis will underline why this spirituality is linked with ethics. To reach that goal, the thesis relies strongly on the works of philosophers Gilles Deleuze (France) and Stanley Cavell (USA). Both have been judged to have complementary approaches for this research, and have made a strong mark on cinematographic studies in the last decades. Deleuze has developed his philosophy on what distinguishes cinema from the other arts. Cavell has focused his thoughts on the importance of cinema for its viewers. Finally, this thesis is in the form of a theology, or theologic-philosophic thought, not linked to a religious tradition and in synchronicity with its times.

This thesis explores Herman Melville’s relationship to sceptical philosophy. By reading Melville’s fictions of the 1840s and 1850s alongside the writings of Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, I seek to show that they manifest by turns expression, rebuttal, and mitigated acceptance of philosophical doubt. Melville was an attentive reader of philosophical texts, and he refers specifically to concepts such as Berkeleyan immaterialism and the Kantian “noumenon”. But Melville does not simply dramatise pre-existing theories; rather, in works such as Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre he enacts sceptical and anti-sceptical ideas through his literary strategies, demonstrating their relevance in particular regions of human experience. In so doing he makes a substantive contribution to a philosophical discourse that has often been criticised – by commentators including Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift – for its tendency to abstraction. Melville’s interest in scepticism might be read as part of a wider cultural response to a period of unprecedented social and political change in antebellum America, and with this in mind I compare and contrast his work with that of Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, and Thoreau. But in many respects Melville’s distinctive and original treatment of scepticism sets him apart from his contemporaries, and in order to fully make sense of it one must range more widely through the canons of philosophy and literature. His exploration of the ethical consequences of doubt in The Piazza Tales, for example, can be seen to anticipate with remarkable precision the theories of twentieth-century thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Stanley Cavell. I work chronologically though selected prose from the period 1849-1857, paying close attention to the textual effects and philosophical allusions in each work. In so doing I hope to offer fresh ways of looking at Melville’s handling of literary form and the wider shape of his career. I conclude with reflections on how Melville’s normative emphasis on the acknowledgement of epistemological limitation might inform the practice of literary criticism.

Concept éminemment polysémique, le sens commun a été déprécié par un vaste pan de la philosophie occidentale, qui y a vu au mieux l’expression de croyances infondées, au pire la manifestation de croyances erronées et naïves. Là où bon nombre de commentateurs ont repéré dans les pensées mêmes d’Henri Bergson, Stanley Cavell et Gilles Deleuze, trois grandes figures de la philosophie du cinéma, des critiques adressées au sens commun, nous nous efforçons ici de tirer au clair la conception positive qu’ils développent de cette notion, en dépit des soupçons occasionnels qu’ils font peser sur elle. Plus précisément, nous tâchons d’expliquer jusqu’à quel point certaines acceptions du sens commun permettent de satisfaire l’ambition de connaître le réel lui-même. En premier lieu, nous passons en revue l’argumentation élaborée par certains réalistes spéculatifs (en particulier Quentin Meillassoux et Graham Harman) afin de clarifier d’une part des réflexions qui feront l’objet de discussions et de répliques dans les chapitres subséquents et, d’autre part, de montrer que la dépréciation philosophique du sens commun se prolonge jusque dans les débats les plus actuels sur l’objectivité. Nous faisons ressortir par la suite les angles sous lesquels le sens commun est susceptible de nous rapprocher du réel d’après Bergson, Cavell et Deleuze. En second lieu, nous entrons de plain-pied dans le domaine du cinéma et examinons en quoi différentes œuvres du renouveau du cinéma québécois (Denis Côté, Stéphane Lafleur, Sébastien Pilote, Rafaël Ouellet, Xavier Dolan, Anne Émond, Rodrigue Jean, le collectif Épopée, Mathieu Denis et Simon Lavoie) viennent à leur manière compléter, radicaliser ou critiquer les réflexions développées dans la première partie autour du sens commun et du réel. À l’encontre de ceux qui qualifient ces œuvres de « mimétiques », « peu songées » et « esthétisantes », nous mettons donc en évidence la façon dont ces films, attentifs à la profondeur de l’expérience ordinaire et à l’exigence de trouver un certain équilibre entre le devenir incessant et la stabilité constante, parviennent à nuancer et à raffiner la philosophie. / The eminently polysemic concept of common sense was depreciated by a vast segment of Western philosophy, which saw at best in it the expression of unwarranted beliefs, at worst the manifestation of erroneous and naïve beliefs. Where many commentators have pinpointed critiques of common sense in the thoughts of Henri Bergson, Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, three prominent figures of the philosophy of cinema, we strive here to bring out the positive conception they develop of that concept, notwithstanding the occasional suspicion they may cast on it. To put it in more precise terms, we seek to explain to what extent certain meanings of common sense are apt to satisfy the ambition of knowing reality itself. In the first place, we review the argument elaborated by certain speculative realists (specifically Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman) in order to clarify, on the one hand, reflections which will be the object of discussions and replies in the subsequent chapters, and, on the other hand, to show that the philosophical depreciation of common sense goes on even in the most contemporary debates on objectivity. We then bring out the angles under which, according to Bergson, Cavell and Deleuze, common sense is apt to bring us closer to reality itself. In the second place, we enter fully into the field of cinema and examine in what way different works associated with the revival of Quebec cinema (Denis Côté, Stéphane Lafleur, Sébastien Pilote, Rafaël Ouellet, Xavier Dolan, Anne Émond, Rodrigue Jean, the collective Épopée, Mathieu Denis and Simon Lavoie) end up completing, radicalizing or criticizing in their way the reflections developed in the first part around common sense and the real. In opposition to those who characterize those works as « mimetic », « thoughtless » and « aestheticizing », we thus bring to the fore the way in which those films, paying attention to the depth of ordinary experience and to the requirement of finding a certain balance between incessant becoming and constant stability, do succeed in nuancing and refining philosophy.

This dissertation is the application of counterfactual criticism to Shakespearean tragedy—supposing we are to ask, for example, “what if” Hamlet had done the deed, or, “what if” we could somehow disinherit our knowledge of Lear’s madness before reading King Lear. Such readings, mirroring critical practices in history, will loosely be called “counterfactual” readings. The key question to ask is not why tragedies are no longer being written (by writers), but why tragedies are no longer being felt (by readers). Tragedy entails a certain urgency in wanting to imagine an outcome different from the one we are given. Since we cannot change events as they stand, we feel a critical helplessness in dealing with feelings of tragic loss; the critical imperative that follows usually accounts for how the tragedy unfolded. Fleshing out a cause is one way to deal with the trauma of tragedy. But such explanation, in a sense, merely explains tragedy away. The fact that everything turns out so poorly in tragedy suggests that the tragic protagonist was somehow doomed, that he (in the case of Shakespearean tragedy) was the victim of some “tragic flaw,” as though tragedy and necessity go hand in hand. Only by allowing ourselves to imagine other possibilities can we regain the tragic effect, which is to remind ourselves that other outcomes are indeed possible. Tragedy, then, is more readily understood, or felt, as the playing out of contingency. It takes some effort to convince others, even ourselves, that the tragic effect resonates best when accompanied by an understanding that the characters on the page are free individuals. No amount of foreknowledge, on our part or theirs, can save us (or them) from tragedy’s horror.

No description available.

This dissertation is the application of counterfactual criticism to Shakespearean tragedy—supposing we are to ask, for example, “what if” Hamlet had done the deed, or, “what if” we could somehow disinherit our knowledge of Lear’s madness before reading King Lear. Such readings, mirroring critical practices in history, will loosely be called “counterfactual” readings. The key question to ask is not why tragedies are no longer being written (by writers), but why tragedies are no longer being felt (by readers). Tragedy entails a certain urgency in wanting to imagine an outcome different from the one we are given. Since we cannot change events as they stand, we feel a critical helplessness in dealing with feelings of tragic loss; the critical imperative that follows usually accounts for how the tragedy unfolded. Fleshing out a cause is one way to deal with the trauma of tragedy. But such explanation, in a sense, merely explains tragedy away. The fact that everything turns out so poorly in tragedy suggests that the tragic protagonist was somehow doomed, that he (in the case of Shakespearean tragedy) was the victim of some “tragic flaw,” as though tragedy and necessity go hand in hand. Only by allowing ourselves to imagine other possibilities can we regain the tragic effect, which is to remind ourselves that other outcomes are indeed possible. Tragedy, then, is more readily understood, or felt, as the playing out of contingency. It takes some effort to convince others, even ourselves, that the tragic effect resonates best when accompanied by an understanding that the characters on the page are free individuals. No amount of foreknowledge, on our part or theirs, can save us (or them) from tragedy’s horror.

Pour respecter les droits d’auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse a été dépouillée de certains documents visuels et audio‐visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse a été déposée à la Division de la gestion des documents et des archives. / Notre travail concernant Disney s’inscrit dans le champ de la musique de film, et même si le studio a fait l’objet de nombreuses recherches tant sur des questions esthétiques que culturelles, il reste intéressant à étudier, car il peut ainsi devenir l’objet de recherche, non sur l’originalité d’un corpus, mais sur un déplacement de la méthode, nous permettant d’interroger l’idéologie à l’œuvre. Notre thèse concentre son attention sur La Petite Sirène (1989), La Belle et la Bête (1991) et Aladdin (1992) où il nous semble que, en recourant à la recomposition de la musique de certaines séquences des films, nous puissions faire jouer à la part de virtualité du texte filmique un rôle dans cette entreprise critique : retrouver la voix des héroïnes Ariel, Belle et Jasmine. Nous pensons que les lectures préexistantes ont fait le choix de prioriser le récit et que le déplacement proposé par Stanley Cavell dans sa lecture de King Lear, prêtant la cohérence au personnage, nous invite, sur le même modèle, à faire une lecture similaire concernant les films de Disney. Si un geste de recomposition musicale peut nous aider à penser ce rapport au personnage, c’est parce que nous pensons que la musique peut faire entendre la virtualité d’un film (et plus précisément de ses personnages), et devenir par cela un geste d’analyse critique de son idéologie, et ici particulièrement des rapports de pouvoir. Recomposer certaines séquences importantes du film, c’est le rééclairer en reprenant les matériaux musicaux mêmes du compositeur du film (Alan Menken), pour en redistribuer les emphases — notion à laquelle nous ne donnons pas qu’une valeur musicale, mais une valeur philosophique, reprenant à Stanley Cavell cette idée qu’une différence d’accent peut faire toute la différence du monde. La recomposition musicale met en acte les allers-retours indispensables à la compréhension des séquences que nous travaillerons : elle redonne corps aux espaces de résonance du film et compose les affleurements d’une promesse initiale proposée par le film vis-à-vis de son héroïne. Elle aide à réfléchir au film et à ses interactions tout en faisant monter à la surface ladite promesse dont le film cherchait à bloquer l’actualisation. Ces allers-retours nous permettent de retrouver l’importance des numéros musicaux à l’intérieur des films dans lesquelles s’expriment les héroïnes. En prolongeant notre analyse par le prisme de l’intermédialité, nous réfléchissons à la porosité avec la scène de Broadway (ou plus précisément ici avec le off-Broadway) qui permettent des doubles lectures issues des numéros musicaux. L’ensemble de la musique, dans son lien au complexe audio-visuel, nous permet ainsi de réfléchir aux rapports de pouvoir inscrits dans le film. / From aesthetics to cultural studies, Disney has been the subject of many studies. Thanks to this prolific research, it is possible de study it by another methodological angle to understand the ideology of and within the movies. Within the academic field of film music, our thesis will draw its attention on The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992). It seems that, thanks to an alternative version of the original score that we would compose, we may bring the potentiality inscribed in the movie to be a part of our critical study: find the heroines’ voice Ariel, Belle and Jasmine. We think that the previous studies of these films made the choice of prioritising a narrative analysis where ours is to take into account of the character’s consistency, as does Stanley Cavell in his reading of King Lear. The main idea is to see this new composition as an alternative version the composer could have come up with, and to measure how we can go from the recomposition to the original sequence and end up with another angle for the analysis of the movie. We think that this method will enable us to take account of the character’s consistency for the music can be a way to hear the potentiality of a movie (and specifically here, the characters), so it will be an opportunity to discuss Disney ideology. The musical recomposition of specifics sequences will help us to point out that the film makes a choice thanks to musical emphasis — notion that is not only musical but also philosophic, as Stanley Cavell points out that a difference of emphasis is able to make all the difference in the world. The musical recomposition enact the back and forth inside the different moments of the movie to help us understand what is at stake: it enlightens the resonances between the sequences and compose the surfacing promise initially build-up by the movie towards the heroine. It also helps us thinking about the movie’s interactions while getting to the surface the aforementioned promise the movie was trying to stop from actualising. Going back and forth into the movie thanks to the musical recomposition brings to light the importance of the musical numbers where the heroines have a space and moment to express themselves. By extending our analysis through the prism of intermediality, we consider the porosity of theses musical numbers with the Broadway stage (and more accurately the off-Broadway) whose enable us to do dual readings of the movie. All the music in its connexion to the rest of the audio-visual complex enable us to think about the power relations which occurs in the movie.