David Rodowick

Last updated

David Norman Rodowick (born August 27, 1952) is an American philosopher, artist, and curator. He is best known for his contributions to cinema and media studies, visual cultural studies, critical theory, and aesthetics and the philosophy of art. [1] He became a French citizen in 2002 though retains dual citizenship with the United States.

Contents

Background and education

Rodowick was born in Youngstown, Ohio and grew up in Houston, Texas.  Rodowick never planned to attend university and from his teenage years pursued a career as a musician and singer-songwriter.  For a brief period he was a protégé of the legendary country rock innovator, Gram Parsons, before Parsons’s untimely death in September 1973. [2]

Rodowick took occasional classes at the University of Houston and the University of St. Thomas.  In 1974, he began his studies in earnest at the University of Texas at Austin, where he combined coursework in comparative literature, Romance languages, world dramatic literature, and film studies.  From 1977 to 1978, he studied at the Centre Américain d’études critiques in Paris and the Université de Paris III (Nouvelle Sorbonne), working primarily with Raymond Bellour. Rodowick completed his Ph.D. in cinema and critical theory at the University of Iowa in 1983 under the supervision of Dudley Andrew, while studying experimental film and video making with Franklin Miller. [3]

Career

Rodowick has taught at Yale University, the University of Rochester, King’s College, University of London, and Harvard University, where he was named William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. At Harvard, he also served as chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (now Art, Film, and Visual Studies) and director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. [4]  He is currently Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago where he has also served as academic director for the University of Chicago Center in Paris. Rodowick has been a visiting professor at the Institut für Geschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria  and at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris 3, Paris, France. He is currently an International Associate of the Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe Cinepoetics at the Freie Universität Berlin. [5] He has also held fellowships at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities and the Internationale Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus-Universität, Germany.

Rodowick was among the first scholars to write critical accounts in English of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, especially in the context of international film theory and philosophies of the image. [6] He is also known for his critique of political modernism in post-1968 film and literary theory as well as his genealogical investigations of the history of theory in general as a vexed concept in art and aesthetics. [7] Rodowick is perhaps best known for his work on the aesthetic consequences of the global replacement of analogue technologies and representations by digital means and media. Expanding on Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the figural as an aesthetic order where the ontological distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down, he has written extensively on contemporary art and the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Since 2014, in several books Rodowick has been developing a philosophy of the humanities inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, Georg Henrik von Wright, Charles Taylor, and Hannah Arendt. [8]

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Félix Guattari</span> Psychoanalyst and philosopher (1930–1992)

Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, and is best known for his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gilles Deleuze</span> French philosopher (1925–1995)

Gilles Louis René Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Taylor (philosopher)</span> Canadian philosopher (born 1931)

Charles Margrave Taylor is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec, and professor emeritus at McGill University best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy, and intellectual history. His work has earned him the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manuel DeLanda</span> Mexican-American writer, artist, and philosopher

Manuel DeLanda is a Mexican-American writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is a lecturer in architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where he teaches courses on the philosophy of urban history and the dynamics of cities as historical actors with an emphasis on the importance of self-organization and material culture in the understanding of a city. DeLanda also teaches architectural theory as an adjunct professor of architecture and urban design at the Pratt Institute and serves as the Gilles Deleuze Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School. He holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (1979) and a PhD in media and communication from the European Graduate School (2010).

Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military. Virilio was a prolific creator of neologisms, most notably his concept of "Dromology", the all-around, pervasive inscription of speed in every aspect of life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stanley Cavell</span> American philosopher

Stanley Louis Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.

<i>A Thousand Plateaus</i> 1980 book by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1980 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While the first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), was a critique of contemporary uses of psychoanalysis and Marxism, A Thousand Plateaus was developed as an experimental work of philosophy covering a far wider range of topics, serving as a "positive exercise" in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhizomatic thought.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Haecceity</span>

Haecceity is a term from medieval scholastic philosophy, first coined by followers of Duns Scotus to denote a concept that he seems to have originated: the irreducible determination of a thing that makes it this particular thing. Haecceity is a person's or object's thisness, the individualising difference between the concept "a man" and the concept "Socrates". In modern philosophy of physics, it is sometimes referred to as primitive thisness.

Rodolphe Gasché holds the Eugenio Donato Chair of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

<i>Cinema 1: The Movement Image</i> 1983 book by Gilles Deleuze

Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1983) is the first of two books on cinema by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the second being Cinema 2: The Time Image (1985). Together Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 have become known as the Cinema books, the two volumes both complementary and interdependent. In these books the author combines philosophy and cinema, explaining in the preface to the French edition of Cinema 1 that "[t]his study is not a history of cinema. It is a taxonomy, an attempt at the classifications of images and signs"; and that the "first volume has to content itself with […] only one part of the classification". To make this division between the movement-image and the time-image Deleuze draws upon the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson's theory of matter (movement) and mind (time).

Peter Szendy is a French philosopher and musicologist. He is the David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

<i>What Is Philosophy?</i> (Deleuze and Guattari book) Book by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

What is Philosophy? is a 1991 book by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. The two had met shortly after May 1968 when they were in their forties and collaborated most notably on Capitalism & Schizophrenia and Kafka: Towards a Minority Literature (1975). In this, the last book they co-signed, philosophy, science, and art are treated as three modes of thought.

Tom Clark Conley is an American philologist. He is Lowell Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University where he studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. He and his wife Verena are Faculty Deans of Kirkland House.

Colin Gardner is a British film and media studies theorist living in Santa Barbara, California.

Claire Colebrook, is an Australian cultural theorist, currently appointed Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She has published numerous works on Gilles Deleuze, visual art, poetry, queer theory, film studies, contemporary literature, theory, cultural studies and visual culture. She is the editor of the Critical Climate Change Book Series at Open Humanities Press.

Gregg Lambert is an American philosopher and literary theorist, who writes on Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, critical theory and film, the contemporary university, and especially on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Between 2008 and 2014, he was the founding director of Syracuse University Humanities Center, where he currently holds the distinguished research appointment as Dean's Professor of Humanities, and was Principal Investigator and Founding Director of the Central New York Humanities Corridor between 2008-2019.CNY Corridor

<i>Cinema 2: The Time-Image</i> 1985 book by Gilles Deleuze

Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985) is the second volume of Gilles Deleuze's work on cinema, the first being Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983). Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 have become to be known as the Cinema books, and are complementary and interdependent texts.

Caroline A. Jones, is an American art historian, author, curator, and critic. She teaches and serves within the History Theory Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture at MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel W. Smith (philosopher)</span> American philosopher

Daniel W. Smith is an American philosopher, academic, researcher, and translator. He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, where his work is focused on 19th and 20th century continental philosophy.

William Rothman is an American film theorist and critic. Since receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1974, he has authored numerous books, including Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1982), The “I” of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History and Aesthetic (1988), and Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy (2019). He was "part of a modern wave of thinkers to apply questions of philosophy to the medium of movies" during the 1980s, and his work contributed to the emergence of the sub-discipline that has come to be known as “film-philosophy.” Rothman has also written on aspects of film theory and on the writings of Stanley Cavell, an American philosopher who made film a major focus of his work. He is currently Professor of Cinematic Arts in the School of Communication at the University of Miami.

References

  1. "D.N. Rodowick | Cinema and Media Studies". cms.uchicago.edu.
  2. Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music. New York: Random House, 2008.
  3. "Edinburgh Film Podcast: EFP 17: D. N. Rodowick in Conversation on Apple Podcasts". Apple Podcasts.
  4. Irel, Corydon; Writer, Harvard Staff (August 31, 2012). "At 50, a building still dares".
  5. "D. N. Rodowick". www.cinepoetics.fu-berlin.de. September 22, 2016.
  6. Pursley, Darlene (January 3, 2000). "Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (review)". SubStance. 29 (1): 159–166. doi:10.1353/sub.2000.0010. S2CID   170514484 via Project MUSE.
  7. "Los Angeles Review of Books". Los Angeles Review of Books. January 16, 2014.
  8. Price, Brian (31 January 2022). "The Sinuous Line of World and Screen: On D.N. Rodowick's Elegy for Theory and Philosophy's Artful Conversations – Senses of Cinema".