'Philosophy can only be an effort to transcend the human condition'
The kind of philosophy that interests me has always involved thinking beyond traditional parameters and transgressing essentialist definitions. My recent research is focused on the performative dimension of philosophy – philosophy being that which one does, that which one names ‘philosophy’. It is a ‘bottom up’, extensional characterisation, one that is empirically based on the actuality of experiences that only nominate themselves ‘philosophical’ a posteriori. I call myself a ‘European Philosopher’ only in as much as the tradition of European philosophy over the last one hundred years has never had a fixed definition of what it is, but rather takes pleasure in endlessly forming hybrid interdisciplines with literature, visual art, linguistics, physics, mathematics, biology, anthropology, and so on. Its tradition is anti-tradition. My own work on diagrams and film exemplifies the idea that the sites for philosophical thought (or what comes to be named philosophical thought) are increasingly disparate and multiple.
Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (Palgrave 2009)
Why is film becoming increasingly important to philosophers? Is it because it can be a helpful tool in teaching philosophy, in illustrating it? Or is it because film can also think for itself, because it can create its own philosophy? In fact, a popular claim amongst film-philosophers is that film is no mere handmaiden to philosophy, that it does more than simply illustrate philosophical texts: rather, film itself can philosophise in direct audio-visual terms. Approaches that purport to grant to film the possibility of being more than illustrative can be found in the subtractive ontology of Alain Badiou, the Wittgensteinian analyses of Stanley Cavell, and the materialist semiotics of Gilles Deleuze. In each case there is a claim that film can think in its own way. Too often, however, when philosophers claim to find indigenous philosophical value in film, it is only on account of refracting it through their own thought: film philosophises because it accords with a favoured kind of extant philosophy. Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image is the first book to examine all the central issues surrounding the vexed relationship between the film-image and philosophy. In it, I tackle the work of particular philosophers and theorists (Zizek, Deleuze, Cavell, Bordwell, Badiou, Branigan, Rancière, Frampton, and many others) as well as general philosophical positions (Analytical and Continental, Cognitivist and Culturalist, Psychoanalytic and Phenomenological). Moreover, the book also offers an analysis and explanation of several prominent forms of film theorising, providing a meta- logical account of their mutual advantages and deficiencies that will prove immensely useful to anyone interested in the details of particular theories of film presently circulating, as well as correcting, revising, and re- visioning the field of film theory as a whole.
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Refractions of Reality:
Philosophy and the Moving Image
Palgrave 2009
Reviews:
'This book, in some sense, brings to an end a certain phase of film theorizing and instead looks toward something quite new: how theories have been written and how they may be written, how they fall into types, how these types are filling out not a logical grid but a grid of the anxieties we feel, and the defenses we erect toward the everyday. A wonderful, ground-breaking book.' - Edward Branigan (University of California, Santa Barbara), author of Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory and Narrative Comprehension and Film
'Highly original both in its concern for avoiding the illustrative approach generally favoured by philosophers, and in the speculative ambition that looms behind the critical edge of its readings of contemporary film- philosophers. The very question "when does the film itself happen?" is a fundamental one, which is rarely addressed. Mullarkey is opening the door to a brand new type of philosophical engagement with films.' - Elie During (Université de Paris X-Nanterre), author of Matrix: Machine philosophique
