For our 7th event this term, we will be joined by horror scholar Jon Greenaway over Zoom - this will be hosted in our regular meeting space but attendees will also be able to join via Zoom from the comfort of their 'living' room or local cemetery. Further details will be released over the next week, so keep an eye on this space and/or the WhatsApp group. Abstract follows:
Life and Death in Capitalist Modernity: Horror Film and Horror Phenomenology
If one could write an ontology of the present it would be one of horror. Following thinkers like Linnie Blake and Mark Steven, this talk argues that contemporary horror films offer a precise and politically important articulation of the experience of contemporary capitalism. Drawing from some contemporary horror films this talk asks what does it feel like to live through the increasing responsibilisation of the present (what Mark Fisher termed capitalist realism?) How does the institution of marriage and the perpetuation of class based family relations aim to continue the occultic violence of wealth extraction? How does the neoliberal mode of ideology so form our sense of self, that even our dreams become mere continuations of the violence of the market? Yet despite the ways in which capitalism remains the greatest horror of the moment, all these films offer what Ernst Bloch would call Spuren -- traces of something that remain ineradicable, glimmers of utopian possibility under the blood and in the midst of the horror.
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Room: 3.320 @ 6pm AND ZOOM!!
As always, we will reconvene in Top Bar afterwards:)
Attendance is open to all, free of charge, as per usual!!
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