All are welcome to the workshop.

Please email Jessie Alperin (alperinj@uchicago.edu) if you have any questions or require accommodations to participate.

Winter Quarter 2025

All workshops will meet in Campus North 154 at 5:15 PM on the Thursdays listed below.

The entrance to the building is to the right of Fairgrounds Coffee Shop.

The workshop is a peanut-free event to accommodate a serious allergy. Please do not bring any products containing peanuts to the workshop.

March 6

“Towards a Poetics of Passivity: Stanley Cavell’s Philosophy of Film”

Sam Lee

PhD Candidate, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

Respondent: Daniel Morgan

Director of Graduate Studies; Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College

In this paper, I argue that there are two kinds of passivity at work in Cavell’s thought. On the one hand, there is passivity as an avoidance of responsibility, where the skeptic’s wish for a world in and to which he is not responsible is manifested in his fantasy of being outside the world as a whole. The experience of cinematic spectatorship fulfills this fantasy by default. On the other hand, there is passivity as an ideal to be attained, a refusal of the temptation to act, which I will call Cavell’s attitude of resolute passivity. An examination of two panning shots in the films of Hong Sang-Soo will demonstrate what is at stake in resolute passivity.

Read Paper