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Davide Panagia

University of California, Los Angeles, Political Science, Faculty Member

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Davide Panagia,
B.A. Hons. (Manitoba), M.Litt. (Oxon, Rhodes Scholar), Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins).

Davide Panagia is Professor of Political Science at UCLA.

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Ian Alexander Moore

Loyola Marymount University

The New School University

Sjoerd van Tuinen

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Isabell Schrickel

Leuphana University

Fitchburg State University

Adrian Johnston

University of New Mexico

Charles University, Prague

Alberto Simonetti

University of Perugia

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Papers by Davide Panagia

Sentimental Empiricist Criticism

Philosophy, Politics and Critique, 2024

In what follows I introduce a critical dispositif I call sentimental empiricist criticism that wa... more In what follows I introduce a critical dispositif I call sentimental empiricist criticism that was experimented by a variety of young philosophers in post-war France who would subsequently be most notably associated with what today we call French Theory.1 Unlike more familiar forms of criticism that give priority to methods for the unveiling or understanding of the meaning of works, sentimental empiricist criticism doesn’t treat meaning and understanding as primary in its approach to criticism. Moreover, there is in this tradition an absolute refusal to consider dialectics (and specifically, the operation of critique as negation) as inherent to criticism. The major ontological move of sentimental empiricist criticism is to affirm that there is no inherent relation in critical thinking, including the relation between critique and contradiction and the relation between criticism and understanding. In short, sentimental empiricist criticism is not beholden to an Eleatic conceit that the task of critical thinking is understanding and that dialectics is the only means in and through which understanding is possible.

Late Modern Political Theory Course

This lecture course, designed for juniors/seniors, offers a critical analysis of some major theme... more This lecture course, designed for juniors/seniors, offers a critical analysis of some major themes in the study of political theory, technology, and aesthetics. The focus of this course is less on specific writers than on the emergence of four influential media events in the late modern period - authorship, photography, data, and algorithms - and how each of these technical objects articulate new relationships of perceptibility, attention, judgment, and critique. In doing so, we will critically analyze and formulate the new modes of power and new forms of political subjectivity generated by the emergence of each medium. The intention of the course is to help students articulate their own political theories of criticism vis-à-vis the relationship between politics, media, and aesthetics.

The Algorithm Dispositif (Notes Towards an Investigation)

This article on the technical ontology of algorithms is available here: https://aipulse.org/the-... more

Introduction: Rancière's Sentiments

In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it ... more In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Rancière’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Rancière’s literary voice, and how Rancière juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Rancière’s work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be.

#datapolitik: An Interview with Davide Panagia

by Davide Panagia and Çağlar Köseoğlu

The use of Facebook advertising and fake Twitter accounts by Russian hackers to influence the US ... more The use of Facebook advertising and fake Twitter accounts by Russian hackers to influence the US election and infiltrate activist groups like Black Lives Matter are the most recent and perhaps most dramatic demonstrations that algorithms, bots, and big data are now at the foundation of our political milieu. These technologies help shape the field of possible political organization and action, for better and worse. The cultural and political theorist, Davide Panagia explores this situation through his concept of #datapolitik. Panagia coined this term because he believes that we lack an adequate critical vocabulary and theoretical tools to articulate the shifting nature of politics today. For Panagia, the horizon of possible forms of political organization and collective action has been transformed by the ubiquity of algorithms and the reduction of political subjects to data points amenable to behavioral analysis and control. In this interview with Contrivers' Review editor Çağlar Köseoğlu, Panagia discusses both how the " ever-growing governmental infrastructure of non-human agents " constrains our politics and how this same milieu of #datapolitik holds the possibility of " emergent forms of political organization and action, solidarity and emancipation. "

The improper event: on Jacques Rancière's mannerism

Citizenship Studies - CITIZENSH STUD, 2009

In this essay I examine certain conceptual resources available in the work of Jacques Rancière fo... more In this essay I examine certain conceptual resources available in the work of Jacques Rancière for those interested in attending to the aesthetic and political complexities of democratic citizenship. I argue that the best way to broach these resources is to consider Rancière's manner of impropriety regarding the forces of unity and disunity that comprise democracy's insurgence, as well as his account of the phenomenality of democratic life and the conditions that make political subjects visible, audible and perceptual. This involves a sustained critique of the proper and the sensible as criteria for political inclusion. Democracy is thus not an institutional form of government but an event of appearance that arises out of the dissonant blur of the everyday. Rancière's insights into the insensibility of democracy's emergence, I conclude, complicate the constitutionalist solution to citizenship by raising the question of equality and emancipation as a question of h...

Affect Theory Grad Seminar, Winter 2016, UCLA

A Theory of Aspects: Media Participation in Political Theory

My aim in this essay is to elaborate a mode of political theorizing that is not beholden to the “... more My aim in this essay is to elaborate a mode of political theorizing that is not beholden to the “how do you know?” question. Rather than focusing on epistemic arguments, I propose that people interested in studying political theory address the partiality of aspects that emerge when engaging works, and the participation of media in the creation of political concepts. Central to my elaborations is the aesthetic notion that there is no overarching rule that will determine how objects, peoples, and events relate to one another and stand out as relevant to political theory, and that there are no necessary qualifications for participation in political theorizing. The essay is comprised of three sections. The first engages three thinkers of the interpretive turn in political theory: Charles Taylor, Quentin Skinner, and James Tully. The second section assembles three images of thought drawn from three different expressions of three diverse thinkers: Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Derrida. In the third section I depart from the theoretical experimentation and interpretive work of the previous sections and redirect attention to the participation of media in political theorizing. I conclude the essay by suggesting that political theory is process of mediation between and amongst a diversity of elements that have no common measure.

PLEASE NOTE: This essay is forthcoming in New Literary History. These are the page proofs.

Theory & Event Supplement, 17.3

by Davide Panagia, Steven Johnston, and Dora Apel

This is the open-access issue on the events of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Politics, Theory, and Film Course Syllabus (upper level, UG)

This course explores the relationship between politics, theory, and film. Central to this class i... more This course explores the relationship between politics, theory, and film. Central to this class is an inquiry into the value of film to political theory, and to democratic life in general. Film is a recent addition in the canon of political thinking, though many scholars agree that cinema is integral to the age of modern democracies. Consider the many ways in which films speak to our political sensibilities, and how they inform our ideas about political life in general and ask yourselves: do films simply have an entertainment value, or are they significant resources for studying the political culture, and cultural politics, of a society? Do films teach us anything about politics? And, if so, what is the nature of this learning? What experiences do films provoke and procure, and can we call these political experiences? These and many other questions will help us explore diverse issues that engage the politics-theoryfilm nexus.

Aesthetics and Politics

Winter 2015 UCLA Grad Seminar (PS 218) 'Aesthetics & Politics'

This as-of-yet-to-be-written essay will examine the phenomenon I call "datapolitik" as an importa... more

Rancière’s Style

Intermedial Relations: A Critique of Reification Theory

The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balan... more The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiment (I.i.1.3) Miriam Bratu Hansen arrived in the United States in the 1980s and quickly developed a rich program for the study of film. 2 This might, at first glance, seem like a break or departure from her stature as a second generation Frankfurt School critical theorist, a school of thought typically not optimistic about the vital role of cinema for life. Yet Hansen sought with perspicuity and rigor an inquiry into the history of modern spectatorship, as well as the experiences of psycho-perceptual transformation and the cultures of publicness complicit with modern practices of medial life. In short, Hansen saw technical media, peoples, and theory as crucially entangled the one with the other in such a way as to generate sites and sources of experience for emerging publics, or what she calls "intermedial relations." 3 1 The essay was occasioned by an invitation from Dilip Gaonkar and Scott Durham to participate at a conference at Northwestern University, organized at the Center for Global Culture and Communication, in honor of the publication of Miriam Bratu Hansen's Cinema and Experience. I am grateful to the organizers and all the participants for their insights and conviviality. 2 For a brief biography of her intellectual life, see Tom Gunning's tribute here: http://www.cmstudies.org/news/58161/Tribute-to-Miriam-Hansen.htm 3 Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodore Adorno (hereafter cited as CE, followed by a page number, directly in the text), 38.

Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity

Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity, Aug 2013

In Davide Panagia’s Impressions of Hume we discover an entirely new Hume, a philosopher dramatica... more In Davide Panagia’s Impressions of Hume we discover an entirely new Hume, a philosopher dramatically different from the modern thinker whose greatest contribution to the arts and sciences has been a far too humble recognition of what counts as knowledge and knowing. Panagia’s Hume is a luminary of the visual world that surrounds us and penetrates our everyday lives, a cinematic thinker who offers us an uncanny grasp of what the modern world has come to understand as the image. A century before the birth of film, Panagia shows, Hume developed a deep understanding of human experience as essentially cinematic in nature, so that the most important dimension of what should now be called the cinematics of human experience is revealed to include possibilities for human creativity that only our most radical democratic visionaries have proposed. In presenting these under-appreciated aspects of Hume’s thinking, Panagia extends his contribution to the development of modern political thought, philosophy, and the social sciences.

Theory & Event TOC Booklet

This is a booklet printed in August, 2013 of all the Tables of Content from each issue of Theory ... more

Why Film Matters to Political Theory

ATTACHED IS THE COMPLETED PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION OF THE ESSAY. FOR A COPY OF THE PUBLISHED VERSI... more ATTACHED IS THE COMPLETED PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION OF THE ESSAY. FOR A COPY OF THE PUBLISHED VERSION , PLEASE GO TO THE LINK BELOW OR CONTACT ME AT MY TRENT UNIVERSITY INSTITUTIONAL ADDRESS.

ABSTRACT: In this essay I claim that film matters to political theory not because of the stories films recount, but because the medium of film offers political theorists an image of political thinking that emphasizes the stochastic serialization of actions. I thus argue that the stochastic serialization of moving images that films project make available for democratic theory an experience of resistance and change as a felt discontinuity of succession, rather than as an inversion of hierarchical power. In my treatment of these issues I rely on Hume’s ontology of “broken appearances” and “interrupted perceptions”, as well as Stanley Cavell’s ontology of film as treated in The World Viewed, and elaborate the following four aspects of the relation between film and political theory: 1. The Action-Image; 2. Discontinuity and the Fact of Series; 3. Actors, Artificial Persons, and Human Somethings; 4. Political Resistance and an Aesthetics of Politics. The manner in which I proceed is to show the aspectual overlay between film and political thinking. Such a method of exposition suggests a further, methodological, site of mattering of film to political theory: namely, that the stochastic serialization of moving images in film provides political theory with a genre for elaborating ideas that is not reducible to the analytics of causal argument.

Blankets, Screens, and Projections: Or, The Claim of Film

The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, 2014

In this paper I argue that Stanley Cavell's moral writings on intersubjective ethics and justice ... more In this paper I argue that Stanley Cavell's moral writings on intersubjective ethics and justice cannot be divorced from his writings on the ontology of film. In this latter set of thoughts, Cavell articulates a conception of ethics that relies on the liminal experience of transgressing borders; specifically, the border posed by the projection of other bodies on a screen. Central to this experience is the bearing that Cavell gives to the advenience of an appearance. In this regard, the paper is interested in establishing the central methodological concerns for an aesthetics of politics. By exploring Cavell's articulation of the ontological relationship between beholder and projected image and the microcultural practices of interface that emerge in the dynamics of beholding we approach the possibility of an ethics of appearances for contemporary democratic life.

Film Blanc: Luminosity and Perspicuity in the Films of Michael Mann

One of the consistent themes in the films of Michael Mann regards what humans are capable of doin... more One of the consistent themes in the films of Michael Mann regards what humans are capable of doing during moments of hard times. Through such explorations of extreme conflict as in Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995), Collateral (2004), and Miami Vice (2006), Mann offers his viewers a view of life as composed of moments of intense engagement and equally intense reprieve. Crucial to such representations is his filming of light. This paper is a study of the place of luminosity in the films of Michael Mann and the way in which luminosity is not a tool of illumination but an iridescence that makes available what Ludwig Wittgenstein refers to as the “perspicuous representations” of things in the world. In my analysis of his films I will argue that Mann’s commitment to filming luminosity presents a problem to the dominant approaches for the analysis of aesthetics and politics that offer a moral theory of the image. Whether endorsing the subversive power of cultural objects or condemning their participation in the culture industry, such approaches to the political analysis of films begin with the idea that cultural objects belong to an order of knowledge. I refer to this as political and cultural theory’s betrayal of aesthetics. In contrast, Michael Mann’s films offer an alternative to the moral theory of the image: an ethics of appearances rooted in the experience of advenience.

Chiarismo; Or Luminosity in Dark Times

"the meeting of line and light in Padova’s Chiarismo works irradiates the territoriality of line,... more "the meeting of line and light in Padova’s Chiarismo works irradiates the territoriality of line, clearing the way for things, people, and events to appear. Irradiancy and clearing (both terms which adequately capture the linguistic sense of “Chiarismo”) become the instruments through which appearances emerge; and it is through the appearance of things, people, and events that we encounter the world in all its immediate finitude."

Sentimental Empiricist Criticism

Philosophy, Politics and Critique, 2024

In what follows I introduce a critical dispositif I call sentimental empiricist criticism that wa... more In what follows I introduce a critical dispositif I call sentimental empiricist criticism that was experimented by a variety of young philosophers in post-war France who would subsequently be most notably associated with what today we call French Theory.1 Unlike more familiar forms of criticism that give priority to methods for the unveiling or understanding of the meaning of works, sentimental empiricist criticism doesn’t treat meaning and understanding as primary in its approach to criticism. Moreover, there is in this tradition an absolute refusal to consider dialectics (and specifically, the operation of critique as negation) as inherent to criticism. The major ontological move of sentimental empiricist criticism is to affirm that there is no inherent relation in critical thinking, including the relation between critique and contradiction and the relation between criticism and understanding. In short, sentimental empiricist criticism is not beholden to an Eleatic conceit that the task of critical thinking is understanding and that dialectics is the only means in and through which understanding is possible.

Late Modern Political Theory Course

This lecture course, designed for juniors/seniors, offers a critical analysis of some major theme... more This lecture course, designed for juniors/seniors, offers a critical analysis of some major themes in the study of political theory, technology, and aesthetics. The focus of this course is less on specific writers than on the emergence of four influential media events in the late modern period - authorship, photography, data, and algorithms - and how each of these technical objects articulate new relationships of perceptibility, attention, judgment, and critique. In doing so, we will critically analyze and formulate the new modes of power and new forms of political subjectivity generated by the emergence of each medium. The intention of the course is to help students articulate their own political theories of criticism vis-à-vis the relationship between politics, media, and aesthetics.

The Algorithm Dispositif (Notes Towards an Investigation)

This article on the technical ontology of algorithms is available here: https://aipulse.org/the-... more

Introduction: Rancière's Sentiments

In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it ... more In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Rancière’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Rancière’s literary voice, and how Rancière juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Rancière’s work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be.

#datapolitik: An Interview with Davide Panagia

by Davide Panagia and Çağlar Köseoğlu

The use of Facebook advertising and fake Twitter accounts by Russian hackers to influence the US ... more The use of Facebook advertising and fake Twitter accounts by Russian hackers to influence the US election and infiltrate activist groups like Black Lives Matter are the most recent and perhaps most dramatic demonstrations that algorithms, bots, and big data are now at the foundation of our political milieu. These technologies help shape the field of possible political organization and action, for better and worse. The cultural and political theorist, Davide Panagia explores this situation through his concept of #datapolitik. Panagia coined this term because he believes that we lack an adequate critical vocabulary and theoretical tools to articulate the shifting nature of politics today. For Panagia, the horizon of possible forms of political organization and collective action has been transformed by the ubiquity of algorithms and the reduction of political subjects to data points amenable to behavioral analysis and control. In this interview with Contrivers' Review editor Çağlar Köseoğlu, Panagia discusses both how the " ever-growing governmental infrastructure of non-human agents " constrains our politics and how this same milieu of #datapolitik holds the possibility of " emergent forms of political organization and action, solidarity and emancipation. "

The improper event: on Jacques Rancière's mannerism

Citizenship Studies - CITIZENSH STUD, 2009

In this essay I examine certain conceptual resources available in the work of Jacques Rancière fo... more In this essay I examine certain conceptual resources available in the work of Jacques Rancière for those interested in attending to the aesthetic and political complexities of democratic citizenship. I argue that the best way to broach these resources is to consider Rancière's manner of impropriety regarding the forces of unity and disunity that comprise democracy's insurgence, as well as his account of the phenomenality of democratic life and the conditions that make political subjects visible, audible and perceptual. This involves a sustained critique of the proper and the sensible as criteria for political inclusion. Democracy is thus not an institutional form of government but an event of appearance that arises out of the dissonant blur of the everyday. Rancière's insights into the insensibility of democracy's emergence, I conclude, complicate the constitutionalist solution to citizenship by raising the question of equality and emancipation as a question of h...

Affect Theory Grad Seminar, Winter 2016, UCLA

A Theory of Aspects: Media Participation in Political Theory

My aim in this essay is to elaborate a mode of political theorizing that is not beholden to the “... more My aim in this essay is to elaborate a mode of political theorizing that is not beholden to the “how do you know?” question. Rather than focusing on epistemic arguments, I propose that people interested in studying political theory address the partiality of aspects that emerge when engaging works, and the participation of media in the creation of political concepts. Central to my elaborations is the aesthetic notion that there is no overarching rule that will determine how objects, peoples, and events relate to one another and stand out as relevant to political theory, and that there are no necessary qualifications for participation in political theorizing. The essay is comprised of three sections. The first engages three thinkers of the interpretive turn in political theory: Charles Taylor, Quentin Skinner, and James Tully. The second section assembles three images of thought drawn from three different expressions of three diverse thinkers: Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Derrida. In the third section I depart from the theoretical experimentation and interpretive work of the previous sections and redirect attention to the participation of media in political theorizing. I conclude the essay by suggesting that political theory is process of mediation between and amongst a diversity of elements that have no common measure.

PLEASE NOTE: This essay is forthcoming in New Literary History. These are the page proofs.

Theory & Event Supplement, 17.3

by Davide Panagia, Steven Johnston, and Dora Apel

This is the open-access issue on the events of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Politics, Theory, and Film Course Syllabus (upper level, UG)

This course explores the relationship between politics, theory, and film. Central to this class i... more This course explores the relationship between politics, theory, and film. Central to this class is an inquiry into the value of film to political theory, and to democratic life in general. Film is a recent addition in the canon of political thinking, though many scholars agree that cinema is integral to the age of modern democracies. Consider the many ways in which films speak to our political sensibilities, and how they inform our ideas about political life in general and ask yourselves: do films simply have an entertainment value, or are they significant resources for studying the political culture, and cultural politics, of a society? Do films teach us anything about politics? And, if so, what is the nature of this learning? What experiences do films provoke and procure, and can we call these political experiences? These and many other questions will help us explore diverse issues that engage the politics-theoryfilm nexus.

Aesthetics and Politics

Winter 2015 UCLA Grad Seminar (PS 218) 'Aesthetics & Politics'

This as-of-yet-to-be-written essay will examine the phenomenon I call "datapolitik" as an importa... more

Rancière’s Style

Intermedial Relations: A Critique of Reification Theory

The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balan... more The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiment (I.i.1.3) Miriam Bratu Hansen arrived in the United States in the 1980s and quickly developed a rich program for the study of film. 2 This might, at first glance, seem like a break or departure from her stature as a second generation Frankfurt School critical theorist, a school of thought typically not optimistic about the vital role of cinema for life. Yet Hansen sought with perspicuity and rigor an inquiry into the history of modern spectatorship, as well as the experiences of psycho-perceptual transformation and the cultures of publicness complicit with modern practices of medial life. In short, Hansen saw technical media, peoples, and theory as crucially entangled the one with the other in such a way as to generate sites and sources of experience for emerging publics, or what she calls "intermedial relations." 3 1 The essay was occasioned by an invitation from Dilip Gaonkar and Scott Durham to participate at a conference at Northwestern University, organized at the Center for Global Culture and Communication, in honor of the publication of Miriam Bratu Hansen's Cinema and Experience. I am grateful to the organizers and all the participants for their insights and conviviality. 2 For a brief biography of her intellectual life, see Tom Gunning's tribute here: http://www.cmstudies.org/news/58161/Tribute-to-Miriam-Hansen.htm 3 Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodore Adorno (hereafter cited as CE, followed by a page number, directly in the text), 38.

Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity

Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity, Aug 2013

In Davide Panagia’s Impressions of Hume we discover an entirely new Hume, a philosopher dramatica... more In Davide Panagia’s Impressions of Hume we discover an entirely new Hume, a philosopher dramatically different from the modern thinker whose greatest contribution to the arts and sciences has been a far too humble recognition of what counts as knowledge and knowing. Panagia’s Hume is a luminary of the visual world that surrounds us and penetrates our everyday lives, a cinematic thinker who offers us an uncanny grasp of what the modern world has come to understand as the image. A century before the birth of film, Panagia shows, Hume developed a deep understanding of human experience as essentially cinematic in nature, so that the most important dimension of what should now be called the cinematics of human experience is revealed to include possibilities for human creativity that only our most radical democratic visionaries have proposed. In presenting these under-appreciated aspects of Hume’s thinking, Panagia extends his contribution to the development of modern political thought, philosophy, and the social sciences.

Theory & Event TOC Booklet

This is a booklet printed in August, 2013 of all the Tables of Content from each issue of Theory ... more

Why Film Matters to Political Theory

ATTACHED IS THE COMPLETED PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION OF THE ESSAY. FOR A COPY OF THE PUBLISHED VERSI... more ATTACHED IS THE COMPLETED PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION OF THE ESSAY. FOR A COPY OF THE PUBLISHED VERSION , PLEASE GO TO THE LINK BELOW OR CONTACT ME AT MY TRENT UNIVERSITY INSTITUTIONAL ADDRESS.

ABSTRACT: In this essay I claim that film matters to political theory not because of the stories films recount, but because the medium of film offers political theorists an image of political thinking that emphasizes the stochastic serialization of actions. I thus argue that the stochastic serialization of moving images that films project make available for democratic theory an experience of resistance and change as a felt discontinuity of succession, rather than as an inversion of hierarchical power. In my treatment of these issues I rely on Hume’s ontology of “broken appearances” and “interrupted perceptions”, as well as Stanley Cavell’s ontology of film as treated in The World Viewed, and elaborate the following four aspects of the relation between film and political theory: 1. The Action-Image; 2. Discontinuity and the Fact of Series; 3. Actors, Artificial Persons, and Human Somethings; 4. Political Resistance and an Aesthetics of Politics. The manner in which I proceed is to show the aspectual overlay between film and political thinking. Such a method of exposition suggests a further, methodological, site of mattering of film to political theory: namely, that the stochastic serialization of moving images in film provides political theory with a genre for elaborating ideas that is not reducible to the analytics of causal argument.

Blankets, Screens, and Projections: Or, The Claim of Film

The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, 2014

In this paper I argue that Stanley Cavell's moral writings on intersubjective ethics and justice ... more In this paper I argue that Stanley Cavell's moral writings on intersubjective ethics and justice cannot be divorced from his writings on the ontology of film. In this latter set of thoughts, Cavell articulates a conception of ethics that relies on the liminal experience of transgressing borders; specifically, the border posed by the projection of other bodies on a screen. Central to this experience is the bearing that Cavell gives to the advenience of an appearance. In this regard, the paper is interested in establishing the central methodological concerns for an aesthetics of politics. By exploring Cavell's articulation of the ontological relationship between beholder and projected image and the microcultural practices of interface that emerge in the dynamics of beholding we approach the possibility of an ethics of appearances for contemporary democratic life.

Film Blanc: Luminosity and Perspicuity in the Films of Michael Mann

One of the consistent themes in the films of Michael Mann regards what humans are capable of doin... more One of the consistent themes in the films of Michael Mann regards what humans are capable of doing during moments of hard times. Through such explorations of extreme conflict as in Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995), Collateral (2004), and Miami Vice (2006), Mann offers his viewers a view of life as composed of moments of intense engagement and equally intense reprieve. Crucial to such representations is his filming of light. This paper is a study of the place of luminosity in the films of Michael Mann and the way in which luminosity is not a tool of illumination but an iridescence that makes available what Ludwig Wittgenstein refers to as the “perspicuous representations” of things in the world. In my analysis of his films I will argue that Mann’s commitment to filming luminosity presents a problem to the dominant approaches for the analysis of aesthetics and politics that offer a moral theory of the image. Whether endorsing the subversive power of cultural objects or condemning their participation in the culture industry, such approaches to the political analysis of films begin with the idea that cultural objects belong to an order of knowledge. I refer to this as political and cultural theory’s betrayal of aesthetics. In contrast, Michael Mann’s films offer an alternative to the moral theory of the image: an ethics of appearances rooted in the experience of advenience.

Chiarismo; Or Luminosity in Dark Times

"the meeting of line and light in Padova’s Chiarismo works irradiates the territoriality of line,... more "the meeting of line and light in Padova’s Chiarismo works irradiates the territoriality of line, clearing the way for things, people, and events to appear. Irradiancy and clearing (both terms which adequately capture the linguistic sense of “Chiarismo”) become the instruments through which appearances emerge; and it is through the appearance of things, people, and events that we encounter the world in all its immediate finitude."

Georges Canguilhem: The Teaching of Philosophy in France

Published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1954

The Teaching of Philosophy: An International Enquiry of UNESCO Published by the United Nations E... more The Teaching of Philosophy: An International Enquiry of UNESCO

Published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Georges Canguilhem, Editor

In 1951 and 1952, UNESCO conducted an international enquiry into the teaching of philosophy, with special reference to its place in the educational systems of various countries. The Teaching of Philosophy presents examinations of philosophy teaching in Cuba, Egypt, France, the German Federal Republic, India, Italy, United Kingdom and the United States, along with conclusions that emerged from replies to the UNESCO questionnaire. Most conclusions are in the form of suggestions for measures best suited to the development and improvement of philosophy teaching, with particular reference to education for international understanding.

Politics, Theory, Film - UCLA, Political Science 113B

This course aims to develop an ability to understand forms of cultural production in relation to ... more This course aims to develop an ability to understand forms of cultural production in relation to wider political theory contexts, as well as to foster discussion and writing skills. Students will gain the tools to approach today's media environment from a cinematic perspective, and will thus be able to work within a changing mediascape.

A Political Theory of Algorithms Syllabus

Course Synopsis: This seminar asks the following research question: How are algorithms political?... more Course Synopsis: This seminar asks the following research question: How are algorithms political? The course is designed to approach this question not on the basis of the human use of algorithms, but by exploring the modes of existence of the technical object. Topics of inquiry include the following: • media ontology • political theories of movement • the differences between mimetic and virtual media • the nature of algorithmic governmentality • cybernetics • dataveillance

CAVELL WITTGENSTEIN Seminar Syllabus

This seminar explores the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell. The objective is to... more This seminar explores the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell. The objective is to work through the material together in class. Some of the general themes of the course are listed below, but these are intended to be only indicative and suggestive. Some general themes of the course: • How do we group things together? • How do we go on… reading, thinking, following a rule? • Queer connexions/perspicuous presentations • Avoidance and conviction • The matter of skepticism • The ordinary • Family resemblance, rule following • Seriality and medium • Language games, conviction of/in math • Aspects/grasping/acknowledgement • Selection/canon formation • Seeing as… • What is a philosophical investigation? Grades: 20% = Weekly Writing Assignment 60% = Final Writing Assignment 20% = weekly, in class, participation Weekly Writing: Each week you are responsible for keeping a journal entry of your curiosities that will take the following form: 1. Articulate 3 questions that arise from your readings, and link them to specific passages in the readings. 2. Identify and explain how these questions formulate political theory problems. 3. Write a clear, concise, and manageable thesis sentence for each of the questions you raise based on your sense of the political theory problem that arises. At least one student per week will be asked and tasked with presenting their material. This will count towards 20% of your final grade.

Politics, Theory, Film UG Syllabus

Office Hours: M 2-4 pm Course Description:

Syllabus: Political Theory in Transnational Context: "Comparing Politics"

The objective of this course is to reflect on the role of comparison in social science and humani... more The objective of this course is to reflect on the role of comparison in social science and humanities research. The theme of this class on transnational contexts is " distance. " The focus will be on how varying methodological approaches to comparison in the humanities and social sciences attempt to breach distance, and the forms of thinking developed and deployed to create proximities of " comparison. " In short, our focus will be on the " trans " in " transnational " as a relational practice that generates collective forms. Our capacity to imagine proximity between different things – that is, our willingness to " trans " distance through comparison – has radical implications for our senses of critical thinking and political judgment, not to mention our methods of human and social science research. Acts of spectatorship, participant observation, archival research, quantitative analysis, ethnography, aesthetic criticism, interpretive reading – all of these tried and true research modes presume that we already know what comparison is and how to compare, that the terms of comparison are available, and that the methods for collecting and assembling evidence and interpretations about comparisons are settled. But the fact of the matter is that comparison is a mode of relating that which is unrelatable and that whenever we do compare things, we assemble things that are different. Indeed, comparison regards a forging of relations when no common set of conditions or attributes are available. The ambition of this course, then, is to consider the breaching of distance and separateness as an aesthetic relation that doesn't presume a principle of commonality in any act of comparison.

Political Theory & Media

My UG Seminar on non-human governance in the modern period.

Affect Theory Syllabus, Winter 2016, UCLA

Politics, Theory, and Film Syllabus

This is the course syllabus for PoliSci 113-B at UCLA offered in Winter, 2015.

MA Seminar: Radical Empiricism and Political Theory

Radical Empiricism: what is it and how does it work? The term was minted by William James, though... more Radical Empiricism: what is it and how does it work? The term was minted by William James, though it has come to signify a minoritarian tradition of theoretical reflection in politics and culture that attempts to articulate the events of relation -or relata -that arise when particularities affront one another (i.e., the events of association and dissociation; consensus and dissensus; composition and discomposition in political life).

Ph.D. Seminar: Value, Conviction, Attention

Panagia Davide Sentimental Empiricism Politics Philosophy and Criticism in Postwar France

Fordham University Press, 2024

Sentimental Empiricism reconsiders the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and... more Sentimental Empiricism reconsiders the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and moral sentimentalism for the intellectual formation of the generation of postwar French thinkers whose work came to dominate Anglophone conversations across the humanities under the guise of “French theory.” Panagia’s book first shows what was missed in the reception of this literature in the Anglophone academy by attending to how France’s pedagogical milieu plays out church and state relations in the form of educational debates around reading practices, the aesthetics of mimesis, French imperialism, and republican universalism. Panagia then shows how such thinkers as Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault develop a sentimental empiricist critical philosophy that distances itself from dialectical critique and challenges the metaphysical premise of inherent relations, especially as it had been articulated in the tradition of Aristotelian scholasticism.

Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy and Criticism in Postwar France

Sentimental Empiricism reconsiders the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and... more Sentimental Empiricism reconsiders the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and moral sentimentalism for the intellectual formation of the generation of postwar French thinkers whose work came to dominate Anglophone conversations across the humanities under the guise of “French theory.” Panagia’s book first shows what was missed in the reception of this literature in the Anglophone academy by attending to how France’s pedagogical milieu plays out church and state relations in the form of educational debates around reading practices, the aesthetics of mimesis, French imperialism, and republican universalism. Panagia then shows how such thinkers as Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault develop a sentimental empiricist critical philosophy that distances itself from dialectical critique and challenges the metaphysical premise of inherent relations, especially as it had been articulated in the tradition of Aristotelian scholasticism.

Panagia develops the long disputed political legacy of French theory through an exploration of how these thinkers came to understand an aesthetic of mimesis as a credentialing standard for selection to political participation. Since, in France, the ability to imitate well is a state qualification necessary to access offices of elite power, the political, aesthetic, and philosophical critique of mimesis became one of the defining features of sentimental empiricist thought. By exploring the historical, intellectual, cultural, and philosophical complexities of this political aesthetic, Panagia shows how and why postwar French thinkers turned to a tradition of sentimental empiricism in order to develop a new form of criticism attentive to the dispositional powers of domination.

TEN THESES FOR AN AESTHETICS OF POLITICS PAGE PROOFS

Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics is an invitation to culture makers, political thinkers o... more Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics is an invitation to culture makers, political thinkers of all kinds, and everyday spectators to reconsider their love of the world of appearances. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s Ten Theses on Politics and work by Hannah Arendt, Stanley Cavell, and Roland Barthes, Davide Panagia offers conceptual provocations that emphasize the sense of conviction one has when facing the frictions of aesthetic experience. Rooted in varied and variable experiences of border crossings, Panagia invites readers to reflect on the relational practices that appearances engender.
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/ten-theses-for-an-aesthetics-of-politics

Politics, Theory, and Film PS113B, Winter 2020 Instructor: Prof. Panagia

This course aims to develop an ability to understand forms of cultural production in relation to ... more This course aims to develop an ability to understand forms of cultural production in relation to wider political theory contexts, as well as to foster discussion and writing skills. Students will gain the tools to approach today's media environment from a cinematic perspective, and will thus be able to work within a changing mediascape. Specifically, this course explores the relationship between politics, theory, and film. Central to this is an inquiry into the value of film to political theory, and to democratic life in general. Film is a recent addition in the canon of political thinking, though many scholars agree that cinema is integral to the age of modern democracies. Consider the many ways in which films speak to our political sensibilities, and how they inform our ideas about political life in general and ask yourselves: do films simply have an entertainment value, or are they significant resources for studying the political culture, and cultural politics, of a society? Do films teach us anything about politics? And, if so, what is the nature of this learning? What experiences do films provoke and procure, and can we call these political experiences? These and many other questions will help us explore diverse issues that engage the politicstheory-film nexus. Our specific focus for the course is the horror genre. But also the study of genre in general, and how we recognize and think about genres. Finally, we will explore how genre thinking is an element of democratic theory.

Intermedialities: Sentimental Empiricism, Political Theory, and Cinematic Experience

This book is about the relationship between politics, theory, and film. It proceeds by investigat... more This book is about the relationship between politics, theory, and film. It proceeds by investigating the political ontologies of technical objects. The relevance of such an approach-as opposed to one rooted in the content analysis of films-may seem counterproductive to any investigation that is interested in the politicality of film. My thesis is that claims about the politicality of films are rooted in assertions about filmic agency (on the doings of film) that are, themselves, premised on metaphysical arguments about the political ontologies of technical objects, their causal properties, their forms of power, and their perceptual effects. In other words, claims about the ontology of a medium matter to how we think about the politicality of film. Consider, in this respect, how we tend to think about the political import of films: as film scholars, cultural critics, and political thinkers we often begin with the assumption that the medium of film produces effects in viewers which shape their minds, their ideas, and their beliefs. This is what I refer to as the moral cognitivist account of film that asserts that film's political power is its capacity to influence viewers' minds and wills. My dissatisfaction with such approaches stems from their treating the technical ontologies of film, or the narrative content of specific films, as an occasion to confirm political and theoretical conclusions that remain unchanged despite the experience of the films being viewed. Indeed, these moral cognitivist approaches confirm that the question of cinematic experience is not a question worth asking at all because it is settled and generalizable since the issue of the ontology of film is settled. We know that film effects viewers' perceptions and beliefs and the best that we can do is show and describe how that is the case with reference to filmic examples that sustain our pre-ordained conclusions about film's political importance. This book offers a different source for thinking about the relationship between politics, theory, and film that is rooted in a sentimental empiricist tradition of political and philosophical reflection. 1 Sentimental empiricism puts the question of cinematic experience and political community on the table anew and in contradistinction to the more common Aristotelian approaches to which many of us adhere in our understandings of group identities, nationality, and statehood. Aristotle's account of political community is rooted in a metaphysics of substances and necessary causality. In the Politics we learn that the polis is a teleological substance that originates within the heterosexual matrix of the family (see Aristotle, Politics, Books 1&2, 1252 a-1253 b) all of which comprises a metaphysics of association with inherent and natural laws of causality. 2 This is what allows Aristotle to famously conclude that "Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity." 3 The sentimental empiricist tradition does something fundamentally different (and here I draw primarily from David Hume's A Treatise on Human Nature as inspiration). By turning to the sentiments (and thus the sensing body) as the source of human morality and motility in the world, the sentimental empiricists argued that there are no fixed associations (indeed, there are no substances) and that all relations are external and undetermined but the nature of the terms or entities being related. This means that a political community is not a singular entity or unit of measure, nor does it have fixed laws keeping it together, including (as Aristotle imagined) the law of the highest good. Rather, the sentiments betray an interstitial

The Algorithm Dispositif: Risk and Automation in the Age of #datapolitik

Film, Theory, Politics: UG Syllabus