Tragedies of Remarriage: Stanley Cavell’s Film Philosophy in Focus

Catalog description

Will use Stanley Cavell’s film philosophy and his invention of a new genre – “comedies of remarriage” – as occasions to think deeply about the raced, gendered and imperial politics of marriage, specifically in connection with an iteration of Cavell’s new genre: tragedies of remarriage. We will follow Cavell to look into the film/politics of citizenship through themes of marriage and seriality, asking how race, gender, sexuality, seriality and automation conspire together to build a citizenship that is both nationalist (nation-centered) and exclusionary (re-centered by masculinity and race). Will ask if remarriage, whether comic or tragic, figures amendment and ask: what are the politics of the pun between Constitutional amendment and the moral/political practice of making amends? How might the temporalities of seriality and/or freedom presuppose sequence/interruption and rely on - or contest -- political practices of reparation and forgiveness?