Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema

Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema examines world cinema through critical theory, highlighting the ethical facets of globalization. It explores a vast net of post-1990 films, focusing on the narrative of double death, the abject as symbolically dead struggle for lost subjectivity or new agency until physically dying. The book renews critical discourses on global issues through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 344 pages
Publication date: 18 August 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema offers a fresh perspective on world cinema by employing critical theory. While the term "world cinema" typically encompasses non-American films considered artistic or marginal, Seung-hoon Jong delves into its mapping frames: the territorial national frame, the deterritorializing transnational frame, and the global frame. If traditional studies of world cinema have primarily focused on national cinemas and their transnational transformations, Jong's global frame sheds light on two contrasting ethical dimensions of globalization: the soft-ethical inclusion of differences within multicultural, neoliberal systems, alongside their hard-ethical manifestations of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. By engaging with both perspectives and proposing alternatives, global cinema draws attention to the novel shifts in subjectivity and community that Jeong explores through the lens of biopolitical abjection and ethical agency. Within this framework, the book explores a vast array of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. Jeong skillfully navigates these films, highlighting less essentialist particularities while emphasizing compatible localities that perform universal aspects of biopolitical ethics and its alternatives by centering the narrative of double death: the abject's symbolic struggle for lost subjectivity or newfound agency until their physical demise. This narrative permeates global cinema across Hollywood blockbusters, European art films, Middle Eastern dramas, and Asian genre films. Ultimately, the book revitalizes 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.

Dimension: 235 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780190093792