Abstract
Abstract Critical theory with emancipatory aims today to find a source of regeneration in ordinary cultures, and in particular, in TV series. Certain series can play a role in reinventing critical theories, drawing on the tradition of the Frankfurt School but shifting some of that School’s formulations through contact with current forms of interpretive sociology and pragmatic sociology. This requires a cross-border dialogue between the “language game” of TV series and the “knowledge game” of political theory, to use concepts inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In this article, I will focus on four series: seasons 1 of American Crime (2015) and The Sinner (2017); Sharp Objects (2018); and Unorthodox (2020). The resources provided by these cultural works can help us formulate a critical decoding of important aspects of the current ideological context, in particular, the intersecting identitarian and ultra-conservative tendencies we find in France, Europe, the United States, and Brazil. These critical resources bear affinities to a political philosophy of the opening of being inspired by the ethical reflections of Emmanuel Levinas.
Highlights
Our timeThe philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose work lies at the intersection of twentieth-century phenomenology and the Jewish tradition, provides us with tools we can use on the emancipatory path out of identitarian enclosures.17
Critical theory with emancipatory aims today to find a source of regeneration in ordinary cultures, and in particular, in TV series
TV series, because of how they resonate with people today, how they circulate within ordinary forms of sociability, and their capacity to take on the problems of the present,1 can be at the forefront of this renewal
Summary
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose work lies at the intersection of twentieth-century phenomenology and the Jewish tradition, provides us with tools we can use on the emancipatory path out of identitarian enclosures.17 It is not a question here of proposing a systematic reading of Levinas’s work, but of drawing from it a problematic of the openness of being constituting a support in the face of identitarianism. In a text published after the Second World War, Levinas explores the figure of the caress, which may be associated with a socio-historically prevalent Western understanding of a dominated “feminine” erotic that stands in contrast to the erotic of “grasping” and “possessing,” which can be connected to a socio-historically prevalent representation of a “masculine” erotic He writes: The seeking of the caress constitutes its essence by the fact that the caress does not know what it seeks. Four works rooted in the language game of TV series can help us refine, complete, and shift these Levinassian openings by drawing on lines of inquiry that come to us from the knowledge game of presentday critical political theory, expanding our political and theoretical imaginary
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