Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image CultureIn these innovative essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today's image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we've all "had our eyes done"; why we are "moved" by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of "making sense" requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses. |
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aesthetic Aimee Mullins Alphonso Lingis ambiguous become bodily body-subject camera carnal catachresis characters cinematic concrete consciousness constitutes context cultural cyborg death Decalogue describe documentary Elaine Scarry electronic embodied emerges engagement essay ethical event existence existential eyes feel fiction film figural film experience film's filmmaker flesh footage foreground function gaze ground historical human immanence insofar intentional irreal Kieslowski Krzysztof Krzysztof Kieslowski literally lived body logical look lost Martin Heidegger material Maurice Merleau-Ponty meaning merely metaphor metonymy Million Man March move narrative Nonetheless objective one’s onscreen particular passion perceived perception phenomenological photographic physical present prosthetic leg rabbit radical relation representation response reversible rience Roland Barthes Roquentin Sartre screen sense sensual significant social spatial specific Street of Crocodiles structure surgery synecdoche tells temporal things tion touch trans transcendent transformation transparent uncanny University Press viewer visible vision visual Walter Benjamin woman writing