Hitchcock as Philosopher of the Erotic

Richard Gilmore (Concordia College, USA)

$273

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Routledge
07 June 2024

History of Art & Design Styles; Individual film directors, film-makers; Phenomenology & Existentialism; Philosophy: aesthetics; Media studies

Series: Routledge Research in Aesthetics

This book reads Alfred Hitchcock as a philosopher of what constitutes the erotic. The author argues that Hitchcock is doing a post-Nietzschean, postmodern kind of philosophy in which he is exploring and creating possibilities of what the erotic can feel like and how the erotic can be expressed.

The erotic is a pervasive phenomenon in Hitchcock’s films. It involves irony, play, and sophistication, and there can be erotic failures as well as erotic successes. The erotic is most complexly explored by Hitchcock in his two masterpieces from the 1950s: Vertigo (1958), a story of the failure of the erotic, and North by Northwest (1959), in which the erotic is consummated in marriage. The author argues that Hitchcock has a philosophical theory about what makes the difference. It is a version of existential philosophy that understands what a person is to be based on what they make of themselves through their choices. The author argues that the erotic for Hitchcock is a process of mutual, reciprocal creation of the personality of the other person. This process is complicated by the fact that as one attempts to create the person one desires, one is simultaneously being created by that other person, and so what one desires is also in a process of being recreated in the mutual reciprocal dance of the erotic entanglement. There is a moral dimension to this because erotic failure is, in a way, a failure of the human, not in the sense of a human essence, but in the sense of realizing human possibilities that can make our lives more satisfying, complete, and full.

Hitchcock as Philosopher of the Erotic will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on philosophy of film, film studies, and philosophy of love and sex.

By: Richard Gilmore (Concordia College USA)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 480g
ISBN: 9781032451190
ISBN 10: 103245119X
Series: Routledge Research in Aesthetics
Pages: 166
Publication Date: 07 June 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

1. Introduction 2. Philosophies of Eros 3. Hitchcockian Hermeneutics: How the Non-Duped Err and the (Non-)Duped Can Not Err 4. The Erotic Hitchcock 5. The Existential Eros of Anguish 6. Erotic Losses and Wins: Readings of Vertigo and North by Northwest 7. Hitchcock on Erotic Failure and Success, Part II: Marnie Conclusion: Going to the Transferential End with Hitchcock

Richard Gilmore is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia College, Moorhead, MN. He is the author of Emerson as Philosopher: Postmodernism and Beyond (2023), Searching for Wisdom in Movies: From the Book of Job to Sublime Conversations (2016), and Philosophical Health: Wittgenstein’s Method in Philosophical Investigations (1999).