New Books in Critical Theory7 Feb 2025

Seung-hoon Jeong, "Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema" (Oxford UP, 2023)

If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, Seung-hoon Jeong’s global frame highlights two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the ‘soft-ethical’ inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their ‘hard-ethical’ symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror.

Reflecting both and suggesting their alternatives, global cinema draws attention to new changes in subjectivity and community that Jeong investigates in terms of biopolitical ‘abjection’ and ethical ‘agency.’ In this frame, Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema (Oxford UP, 2023) explores a vast net of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. Ultimately, the book renews critical discourses on global issues––including multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia––through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies.

Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach. He is the author of Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media, co-translator of the Korean edition of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature, and co-editor of The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema and Thomas Elsaesser’s The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology.

Steve Choe is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University who researches and teaches in film and media theory. He is the author of Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (2014), Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium (2016) and ReFocus: The Films of William Friedkin (2023). He is the co-editor of Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (2019) and editor of the Handbook for Violence in Film and Media (2022).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(600)

Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Revitalization in Post-Fukushima Japan with Maxime Polleri (NYU Press, 2026)

The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into th...

24 Okt 54min

No! The Art and Activism of Complaining

To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In No! The Art and Activism of Complaining, her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Sara Ahmed attunes her “fe...

22 Okt 52min

In Praise of Agnes Heller (1929-2019)

Agnes Heller loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camaraderie, its virtues a...

22 Okt 13min

Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space with Amanda Batarseh (Syracuse UP, 2026)

A Conversation with the author Amanda Batarseh about Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space (Syracuse UP, 2026).Present in the heart of modern Palestinian literature is a pervasive...

21 Okt 36min

First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism with Teresa M. Bejan (Harvard UP, 2026)

Today, political theorists and philosophers treat as axiomatic the claim that all persons are equal. Dig deeper, however, and what we mean by equality—and what it demands from us, politically and othe...

20 Okt 55min

Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block with Talitha LeFlouria (Beacon Press, 2022)

In Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block (Beacon Press, 2022), historian Talitha L. LeFlouria centers Black women at the core ...

20 Okt 50min

In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology with Thomas Fuchs (Oxford UP, 2021)

At a time when artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and digital technologies increasingly shape our understanding of what it means to be human, Fuchs argues that we need to recover a richer concepti...

18 Okt 44min

Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First Philosophy with Roger T. Ames (SUNY Press, 2025)

Contrasts classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with Confucian "zoetology" ("the art of living"). In Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2025), ...

16 Okt 1h 3min