The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life

Timothy C. Campbell

ISBN 10: 0823273253 / ISBN 13: 9780823273256

Published by Fordham University Press, 2017

About this Item

In Techne of Giving, Timothy Campbell elaborates a notion of generosity as way of responding to contemporary biopower. Reading films from Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni, he both updates their political lexicon while adopting them as models able to push back against neoliberal forms of gift-giving. Series: Commonalities. Num Pages: 240 pages, 30 b/w illustrations. BIC Classification: APF; HPS; JPA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 3887 x 5817 x 18. Weight in Grams: 431. . 2017. Illustrated. Hardcover. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780823273256

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0823273253
• ISBN 13: 9780823273256
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Over the last five years, corporations and individuals have given more money, more often, to charitable organizations than ever before. What could possibly be the downside to inhabiting a golden age of gift-giving? That question lies at the heart of Timothy Campbell’s account of contemporary giving and its social forms. In a milieu where gift-giving dominates, nearly everything given and received becomes the subject of a calculus―gifts from God, from benefactors, from those who have. Is there another way to conceive of generosity? What would giving and receiving without gifts look like?

A lucid and imaginative intervention in both European philosophy and film theory, The Techne of Giving investigates how we hold the objects of daily life―indeed, how we hold ourselves―in relation to neoliberal forms of gift-giving. Even as instrumentalism permeates giving, Campbell articulates a resistant techne locatable in forms of generosity that fail to coincide with biopower’s assertion that the only gifts that count are those given and received. Moving between visual studies, Winnicottian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian biopower, and apparatus theory, Campbell makes a case for how to give and receive without giving gifts. In the conversation between political philosophy and classic Italian films by Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni, the potential emerges of a generous form of life that can cross between the visible and invisible, the fated and the free.

About the Author

Timothy C. Campbell is Professor of Italian at Cornell University. His most recent book is The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life (Fordham, 2017).