Meiji Gakuin Film Workshop with Takushi Odagiri - July 11

[ryan.cook at yale.edu]

Please join us for the next Meiji Gakuin Japanese Film Workshop on Monday July
11, from 7pm to 9pm.

The workshop will take place at the Shirokane Campus of Meiji Gakuin University.
The venue is *room 7418* on the 4th floor of Hepburn hall (the tall building
next to the main building). Directions from stations and the campus map are
linked to below. The workshop is open to all, and welcomes participants from
any discipline. After the presentation and discussion, we will move to a
nearby izakaya to continue the conversation. We look forward to seeing you
there!


Presentation Abstract:
Dialectics and Exteriority: Action, Montage and Cinema
Takushi Odagiri
Stanford University

This presentation examines the logic of exteriority and the concept of the
historical world in the philosophy of Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), with special
reference to the potential of his thought in relation to contemporary debates
concerning cinema. There are certain ideas about cinema that structurally
resemble Nishida's late thought. In particular, Nishida increasingly regarded
historical reality as a collision or a discordance of distinct realities, an
idea inherent to some film theories, especially that of Sergei Eisenstein. By
examining Eisenstein's and other theories of film, I define and clarify the
notion of exteriority that decisively characterizes Nishida's philosophy around
and after the 1930s.

Even though the periods in which these two thinkers/critics were active
coincide, namely the 1920s and 30s, I do not necessarily argue that there is
any direct influence between them. Rather, the fact that they are (perhaps
independently) concerned with similar issues proves the significance of their
shared ideas, whether from a historical or a conceptual perspective.

I will investigate theories of the image and the cinema by Christian Metz, Henri
Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Eisenstein, in explicating notions from Nishida's
late texts. In doing so, I will examine three possible definitions of cinema:
surface (Metz), movement (Bergson), and exteriority (Deleuze and Eisenstein). I
discuss how each of these three definitions has an important similarity with
Nishida's thought on temporality, will, and history. Bergson's criticism of the
cinematograph as false perception, and Eisenstein's idea of filmic images as
fundamentally dialectical, non-linear constructs (montage) are discussed in
this correlation. The investigation of the idea of montage leads us to examine
Bergson's notion of "the Open," or what Deleuze calls the "time-image," as well
as Nishida's "dialectics" and "action-intuition." Ultimately, I argue that
Nishida's overall philosophical endeavors concern methods to investigate what I
call $B!H(Bhistory as such,$B!I(B historical reality viewed from the first-person
perspective of a practical agent within it.

In general, historical reality is "open" in at least two senses: in the sense
that it is dialectical, and in that our knowledge of it is fallible. I will
discuss both of these issues, which present serious challenges in Nishida's
philosophy, and will argue that cinema is a mode of thinking that reveals the
"openness" of historical reality, which variously concerns these film critics
from different periods.


Takushi Odagiri is a scholar of modern Japanese philosophy and Japanese critical
thought. He holds M.D. (University of Tokyo) and M.S. (University of London)
degrees, and recently received a Ph.D. from Stanford University for his
dissertation entitled "Indeterminacy and Immanent Dialectics" (2010). He has
published on Japanese philosophy and history of ideas, both in English and
Japanese. With his medical degree and postgraduate research in neuroscience in
Japan and Europe, he also works on problems in biomedical ethics.



A map of the campus can be found here:
http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/campus/shirokane/index_en.html


For more information, please contact: ryan.cook at yale.edu


Ryan Cook
PhD Candidate, Yale University
Visiting Researcher, Waseda University