Corpus, Body, and Sense in Nancy, Deleuze and Charles H. Long

This article investigates the role of the body in Jean-Luc Nancy＇s powerful essay Corpus, and critiques it from the standpoint of Agamben＇s biopolitics. For Nancy, the body becomes the privileged site of both existence and sense in a way that threatens to obscure the logic of exceptional decision that Agamben takes from Carl Schmitt. As an alternative to Nancy＇s understanding of the body, we can see in Deleuze a series of bodies that works in parallel to a series of sense or language, where sense and body do not get collapsed into each other. At the same time, contemporary continental philosophy resists the idealistic separation of thinking and embodiment. Deleuze calls this relation between sense and body a cut, but we could also consider a parallax, following Slavoj Zizek. Finally, African-American historian of religion Charles H. Long＇s work complements some of Deleuze＇s insights in a more explicitly postcolonial context.

The Dialogue Between Cinema and Philosophy： Hannah Arendt by Margarethe Von Trotta

Hannah Arendt, the new film by the German director Margarethe Von Trotta, does not seem just like another trying to represent philosophy through the classic cinematic storytelling. It builds instead a perfect dialogue between these two practices that never encroach each other： There is not any doctrine that prevents cinema＇s freedom to create images and any philosophy claim that forces cinema to find in images an alternative way of expression. Von Trotta leaves any biopic form and stages a harmonic building where cinema fulfills philosophy and philosophy fulfills cinema. In this way she gets an outright practical exhibition of a theory, the ＂banality of evil＂. We want to comprehend the reasons of this perfect building analyzing this film, its characters with their acts, all the images their montage, and editing, everything that supports the Arendt＇s philosophical notion. We work on the film with the philosophical categories created by Gilles Deleuze to study the history of cinema in two essays, Image-mouvement and Image-time. In this way we can unfold how Margarethe Von Trotta represents a theory through images, without any word as intermediary

Becoming-Music in 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds

In accordance to Langerian aesthetic theory, Mark Campbell （1992） concludes that Cage＇s 4 33＂ （1952） is by no means aesthetic music. I argue the antithesis： Cage＇s 433＂ satisfies Langerian aesthetic theory, and is indeed ＂aesthetic＂ music. Cage does something more： he satisfies Langerian aesthetic theory, yet he is not limited by it. He does not simply create music, nor does he offer listeners a musical space. He creates what Gilles Deleuze and Fe1ix Guattari （1987） call a line of becoming that passes between music making and a musical space. In 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, Cage presents a sense of emptiness and numbness felt simultaneously with fullness and explosion. In what appears to be stillness, the listener experiences the flux of movement; what appears to be devoid of depth, is filled with complexities. 433＂ embraces chance, uncertainty, and the unknown; it is an experimental process; it is becoming-music in 4 minutes and 33 seconds.