Becoming Visionary

How is one to think the significance of the art of film for philosophy? What would it mean to introduce film as a question into the heart of the philosophical enterprise? How would this transform our understanding of film, on the one hand, and of philosophy and the philosophical tradition, on the other? These are the questions that guide this project on the hitherto critically neglected but seminal film director Brian De Palma.Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Sensesis located at the intersection of philosophy and film studies, and makes each of these disciplines productive and useful for each other in a new way. It is a concrete examination of the logic governing the work of a major American artist that is, at the same time, a general philosophical examination of the logic of meaning governing all the major filmic categories and is thus a comprehensive theory of film.Becoming Visionarydevelops a new matrix for thinking the relations between philosophy and film and, by extension, between philosophy and the arts

Eyal Peretz is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power, a Reading of Moby-Dick (Stanford, 2003).