Joanna Hodge

Context: Since the beginnings of the last century, Henry Bergson’s analyses of matter and movement, and the technical transformations, in the various cinematographic arts, have prompted a shift to privileging notions of movement over conceptions of stasis, in accounts of matter, and, in accounts of art, bringing to the fore a notion of kinaesthetics. Shifts from mechanical to various motorised models of movement have in turn given way to the stochastical sciences of perturbation and cloud formation, as models for the basic composition of matter. Models in terms of continuous forces and energies give way to those in terms of quantum indivisibilities and particle twinning.

Proposal: The paper will read Michel Serres, to develop his long drawn out meditations, converting transformational theories of matter, and the birth of physics into theories of materiality without matter, and of logic of chance. His images of the measurement of pyramids, and the planning of gardens will acquire a twentyfirst century update in reflection on transitions detectable within and beyond the great nationalist meditative film- making of Andre Tarkovsky, and of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Anton Rublev, and Sacrifice, Once upon a time in Anatolia, and Uzak (Distant)). The analysis will note their focus on transnational registers of dispossession and migration, of dissolution and transitionality (Stalker,Winter’s Sleep). His notion of mingled bodies will provide a key and clue to thinking transversally across any divide between documentary and feature film, between scifi and arthouse.

Nations on the verge of disintegration are here viewed through the inventions of a medium which reveal how stable identities and nations were always only mythologically held in place, in terms of always outdated theories of matter and meaning.

Joanna Hodge (MA, D. Phil.) is Professor of Philosophy, specialism Contemporary European Philosophy. She has two well-received monographs, »Heidegger and Ethics« (1995) and »Derrida on Time« (2007), and a third contracted, »The Return of the Thing: Reading Jean-Luc Nancy«.

A founder member of the Society for European Philosophy (1997), with most recent conferences, Utrecht (2014) and Dundee (2015), and of the editorial board of »Derrida Today« (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), she is in two major UK research networks: Europe and Modernity: AHRC Network, Centre for Studies in Literature, Portsmouth University, and the Northern Theory Group, most recently on the Return of Religion in Philosophy, (May 2015, University of Nottingham).

At MMU, there are two main projects, the proposed Network on the History of Co-operativism, led by Professor John Schostak, ESRI, and with further colleagues in MIRIAD, and with Professor Felicity Colman, MIRIAD, on Film-Philosophy: New Materialisms, with a first symposium, and showing at HOME, July 2015.