Resumen

This study has a dual pursuit. On the one hand, it seeks a theoretical understanding of the overwhelming feeling of “life” triggered by the aesthetic experience and certain cinematic practices. On the other hand, it traces the shared logic of continental film theory and Kant's transcendental critique of reason, insofar as both find the meaning of being human in the aesthetic dimension. Kant's concept of the transcendental provides an apt method for this investigation, while the philosophical rationale of Kant's bimodal aesthetic reflection of the beautiful and the sublime offers a fecund model of the limit consciousness that this study seeks to grasp. Through a reevaluation of Kant's critical philosophy, the dissertation demonstrates the conceptual links between the Kantian transcendental subject as manifest through a bipolar aesthetic and key themes in continental film theory, notably, the cinema-mind parallelism, reflexivity, and cinema's alleged privileged access to an essential reality inaccessible to ordinary perception and cognition. Further, Kant's notion of the transcendental helps to realign “classical” film theories hitherto divided along a formalism-realism axis, and to demonstrate the continuity between Romantically-inspired cinephilic approaches and Deleuze's “post-humanist” time-image aesthetic.

Seeking to theorize aesthetic experience, the dissertation uncovers seldom recognized connections between (1) Kant's bimodal aesthetic reflection and “disinterested” pleasure, (2) Freud's primary process and pleasure principle, and (3) Deleue's masochistic aestheticism. Moreover, the dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the phallic economy of signification in placental-umbilical terms. Introducing the ephemeral maternofoetal organ of the placenta into psychoanalytic film theory as the prototypical fetish, phallus, dream screen, virtual or lost maternal object, and object of desire ( objet petit a) may resolve the impasse reached by feminist theories keyed to Freud's and Lacan's patriarchal phallic economy. The placenta is seen as having the same function as Kant's transcendental subject—that of a focus imaginarius, a virtual memory organ furnishing the idea of both plenitude and lack, and making possible symbolic signification as a synthetic a priori. Finally, a parallel is drawn between the decidual logic of the placenta and that of Kant's “mother wit,” the indecipherable art of nature that informs judgment.