Panel 2d: Politics, Literature, and Film -- Friday, 17 October 2003, 3:15-5:15 p.m.
Chair: Elizabeth Markovits, Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Discussants: Samuel A. Chambers, Government, University of Redlands
Simona Goi, Political Science, Calvin College
Abstracts:
Beverly A. Gaddy & Andrew Franz, “Don Quixote, Dreams, and a Politics of the Impossible”
A
deconstruction of Don Quixote reveals a politics of the impossible. Only through
an absurd process of dreaming pursued (generally) with an overarching literary
passion not lending itself to systematization, and not through classic modes of
Humean representational imagination, market driven by a sublimating rationality
of genre, a politics of the impossible emerges. Fixing our sights on the horizon
of the possible and impossible, where the thin line between them meets,
individuals may inventively bring the impossible into the realm of possibility.
The history of mans’ achievements is a history of the possible arising out of
the impossible. Such achievements, however, to be considered real inventions
within the classic terminology of invention, cannot occur through imagination
(historically conflated with dreaming), which is to posit a thing based on and
subservient to an already institutionalized rationality. Imagination in the
hands of those seeking rationalism, scientific method and certainty has become a
Spirit sickened sort of wishful thinking; a diseased and addictive method of
philosophizing. Ironically, the concept of imagination, in service of a
representational economy, has, in the flow of historical thought, seen its value
rise, while the literary-poetic concept of the dream (as opposed to the
Freudian-psychologistic form of dreaming), has seen itself devalued to the point
it is considered antithetical to serious philosophical and social science
considerations. Necessarily, however, imagining sacrifices the very thing
imagined, making it impossible in the very sense it is deemed possible. It is
the literary quality of dreaming that requires individual passion, pain, an open
welcoming of the wholly other, the gift of the absurd and the compulsive
capability to move against the grain of all institutions. Only the dream bears
the possibility of “invention,” which can bring the impossible into the
possible.
Peter Petrakis, “All Too Visible:
Politics and Art in Albert Camus and Ralph Ellison”
Albert Camus and Ralph Ellison were novelists that self-consciously engaged
politics, culture, and philosophy in their lives and writings. As an
African-American and French-Algerian, often they went against orthodoxy; they
presented the perspective of the outsider in both their fictional and
nonfictional works. Neither artist was naive; they realized that dealing with
controversial issues invited intense political scrutiny. Yet it is hard to
imagine that either man realized the degree, the intensity, of the political
environs in which they would be propelled. There is considerable evidence that
the pressures severally affected both their confidence and their careers.
Essentially, this essay revisits the tension between politics and art most
famously related in Plato's banishment of the poets. Yet, what is intriguing
about this twentieth-century case is who is behind the attempted purges. The
most severe pressure Camus and Ellison faced came not from the establishment but
rather from their former compatriots, the left. This transposition is important
because it limited the responses of Camus and Ellison. Not only were such wounds
more hurtful, the two artists remained committed to the goals if not the means
of the left. Neither artist was in cohorts with traditional purveyors of
authority.
The lessons learned from such an examination are many, not least of which is the
degree to which contemporary life has been politicized. Power and authority is
wielded not just by traditional political elites and institutions. Indeed, in
the case of Camus and Ellison the point is that governmental efforts to pressure
or purge them would have been largely ineffectual. In some political contexts,
such as liberal democracies, artists are more susceptible to non-governmental
power brokers. What are the implications of this new context? How is the
tension, the balance, between politics and art affected?
John S. Nelson, “Honor, Revenge, and Virtue: Ridley Scott's Revival of Republican Politics”
In three striking films released in less than two years, Ridley Scott has returned the politics of republics to center stage for Americans. Winning the Academy Award for best picture in 2000, Gladiator begins this extraordinary run. It provides a republican response to popular cynicism about politics and politicians by reviving the swords-and-sandals epic for audiences in the twenty-first century. Then Black Hawk Down uses the war genre to show us a current version of the military culture and code of personal honor so important to the politics of republics. Finally, Hannibal blends noir and horror to indict the corruption of public space and institutions suffered by the U.S. in particular and western civilization in general. Together these films constitute a sophisticated reconsideration of the modern proclivity for masculinist politics of hardball, first defended theoretically by Niccolò Machiavelli and now in need of rethinking.
The essay uses these Scott films to probe republican dynamics of honor, vengeance, and virtue as they move from classical conditions to electronic times. It features mythic aspects of republican politics that seldom emerge in more historical and philosophical treatments by such theorists as Pettit, Pocock, Rahe, Skinner, and Terchek. It augments the republican-rhetorical tradition evident in Arendt, Berry, Brin, Ende, Martin, and others.