Cinema and the Meaning of "Life"

Abstract

If one were to ask about the role that the cinema has played in contemporary thought, one would discover it entangled in the complex struggle over the concept of Cinema and the motion-picture technologies associated with it were invented and cultivated in a society whose moral, legal, economic, and semantic values organized themselves around In modern times, biological life, understood as both pure survival and the potential labor power it implies, has become a human right, while questions of the quality of have become sites of intense contestation. Transvaluation of life has been crucial to the emergence of contemporary social forms, as recent scholarship on the concept's genealogies has begun to show.1 Like other reproductive technologies such as photography and gramophony, cinematography suggested to its first public the possibility of preserving a living image of the dead, appearing as an event in the history of the concepts of life and death. In what follows I will look at early journalistic accounts of cinematograph screenings in Europe and passages about cinema by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze in order to sketch the extent to which cinema has been involved in the transvaluation of life. These texts invoke and death in original ways as they attempt to respond to the experience of cinema in writing. My readings will only be indications of the mutations in the genealogy of life, occasioned by writing about the cinema, in order to establish a particular field of genealogical investigation. I will follow uses of words

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