Adam Lipszyc
(Polish Academy of Sciences)
Abstract:
With the film titled Deathproof at the latest it became clear that the very medium of the cinema and the ways it shapes our modes of seeing is one of the principal topics or simply the key topic of Quentin Tarantino’s art. More particularly, he seems to be concerned most of all with the images of violence and the spectator’s very expectations in this respect, one of his bold gestures being the way he accuses the spectator of the sadist and voyeuristic urge. As Tarantino implictly suggests, we are becoming what may be called ‘ex-spectators’, who are increasingly interested in watching the expected than watching as such, the expected being more and more the violent. Thus, the affective life of our eye is chanelled and formatted along the most primitive and ruthless lines and so we are plugged to the monstrous machine which produces both the violent images and our very craving for them. By means of a very complex, dialectical play with our ex-spectatorship, Tarantino is trying to bring the workings of the machine to the fore and possibly subvert it, unchain our affects and release the moment of pity and affection for the human. Focusing mostly on Deathproof, Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and relying on elements of Freudian theory, I shall try to reconstruct the implict logic of Tarantino’s project.
Adam Lipszyc works at the Insitute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, and also teaches in Collegium Civitas in Warsaw and at the Franz Kafka University of Muri. He has published seven books in Polish and a number of papers in Polish and English. His most recent publication is a philosophical analysis of Freudian thought (Freud: Logic of Experience 2018). He co-edited (together with Agata Bielik-Robson) a volume of essays Judaism in Contemporary Thought (2014). He edited and co-translated into Polish two volumes of essays, one by Gershom Scholem and one by Walter Benjamin.