Waking/Examined-After/Life

Citation

Fleming D (2025) Waking/Examined-After/Life [A Film-Philosophy Video Essay featuring Philosophers on Film]. Film-Philosophy, University of Malta (L'Università ta' Malta), 23.06.2025-25.05.2025. https://journals.ed.ac.uk/f-p-submissions/film-philosophyconference2025

Abstract
Waking/Examined-After/Life (W/E-A/L) is a found footage video-essay that invites viewers to survey how: ‘Media determine philosophy’s situation’ (Fleming 2025). Remediating and reappropriating a series of films by philosophically attuned filmmakers (such as Li Yuesheng, Astra Taylor, Mike Cahill, Amy Ziering & Kirby Dick, Richard Linklater, Woody Allen, and Jean-Luc Godard) that feature real and re-imagined philosophers (including Cornel West, Confucius, Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida, Marshall McLuhan, and Gilles Deleuze) W/E-A/L channels the spirit of “non-cinema” (Brown 2018) to undertake a meta-film-philosophy experiment. Architecturally, Linklater’s dynamically digitalised dialogue between Caveh Zahedi and David Jewell on cinema’s "photographic ontology" from within Waking Life is used as a spiralling terminus point. Thereafter, W/E-A/L leans into digital effects and AI-imaging to help Shanghai a series of philosophical pronouncements relating to film’s relationship with philosophy from within other films. The video-essay thus makes “monstrous children” (Deleuze 1973) of multiple global philosophers. However, contra Deleuze, rather than having these bastard offspring say what I, as author, want them to say, W/E-A/L works to decentre and introduce slippages, cracks and secret emissions via different means. Two tutor images from within the film can help set the scene. In a restyled fragment from Derrida (2002) Echo’s unrequited love for Narcissus is discussed by the titular philosopher as an allegory for his film philosophy (Lippit 2018). For as a site of emission Echo’s repetitions with différence allow her to reappropriate the meaning of Narcissus’s words. So too with W/E-A/L, which also formally resounds with Cornell West’s call to take Benjamin’s angel of history and “funky” jazz dissonance as an alternative starting point to Eurocentric Romantic philosophising. As such, and against acculturated desires for harmony and wholeness, this chthulumedia emergence virtually “verts” through Black holes created by the catastrophic piling up of past film and philosophical fragments upon one another.

Keywords
Film-Philosophy; Media Philosophy; Philosophy and AI; Philosophers on Film; Global Cinema

Journal
Film-Philosophy