1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910149579903321

Autore

Campbell Timothy C.

Titolo

The Techne of Giving : Cinema and the Generous Form of Life / / Timothy C. Campbell

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : Fordham University Press, , [2017]

©2017

ISBN

0-8232-7328-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (237 pages)

Collana

Commonalities

Disciplina

791.430945

Soggetti

Motion pictures - Italy - History

Motion pictures - Moral and ethical aspects

Motion pictures - Philosophy

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE: UNCOMMON GRIPS -- 1. FORMS OF LIFE IN A MILIEU OF BIOPOWER -- 2. FREEING THE APPARATUS -- 3. “DEAD WEIGHT”: VISCONTI AND FORMS OF LIFE -- 4. PLAYFUL FALLS IN A MILIEU OF CONTAGION -- 5. THE TENDER LIVES OF VITTI/VITTORIA -- CONCLUSION: ATTENTION, NOT AUTOPSY -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- NOTES -- INDEX

Sommario/riassunto

Over the last five years, corporations and individuals have given more money, more often, to charitable organizations than ever before. What could possibly be the downside to inhabiting a golden age of gift-giving? That question lies at the heart of Timothy Campbell’s account of contemporary giving and its social forms. In a milieu where gift-giving dominates, nearly everything given and received becomes the subject of a calculus—gifts from God, from benefactors, from those who have. Is there another way to conceive of generosity? What would giving and receiving without gifts look like?A lucid and imaginative intervention in both European philosophy and film theory, The Techne of Giving investigates how we hold the objects of daily life—indeed, how we hold ourselves—in relation to neoliberal forms of gift-giving. Even as instrumentalism permeates giving, Campbell articulates a resistant techne locatable in forms of generosity that fail to coincide



with biopower’s assertion that the only gifts that count are those given and received. Moving between visual studies, Winnicottian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian biopower, and apparatus theory, Campbell makes a case for how to give and receive without giving gifts. In the conversation between political philosophy and classic Italian films by Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni, the potential emerges of a generous form of life that can cross between the visible and invisible, the fated and the free.