Joseph Westfall

12. A Little Empathy for Hannibal Is a Dangerous Thing -- V. It's Beautiful in Its Own Way, Giving Voice to the Unmentionable -- 13. An Aesthete par Excellence -- 14. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Dinner Party -- 15. The Art of Killing -- VI. The Beauty and Art and Horror of Everything This World Has to Offer -- 16. Empathy for the Devil -- 17. The Beguiling Horror of Hannibal Lecter -- 18. Doctor, Heal Thyself -- Ingredients -- The Hannibal Lecter Canon -- Works about Hannibal Lecter -- Other Resources -- The Psychopaths -- Index

The Heart of the Matter

Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy

This study engages in a detailed examination of Kierkegaard's works of literary and dramatic criticism, including those works directed at interpreting Kierkegaard's own authorship, with a specific concern for both what Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard's anonyms and pseudonyms write about the nature and practice of authorship, as well as how the Kierkegaardian authors practice authorship themselves. Moving through five chapters, each devoted to one or more works of Kierkegaard's criticism, the study develops a new approach to reading Kierkegaard - a new Kierkegaardian hermeneutic - that begins always with the character of the author. This new approach avoids the challenges of critics of biographical criticism, such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, by positing the author always as a work of fiction him- or herself, the creation of an unknown and ever anonymous "author of the author".

Authorship and Performance in Kierkegaard's Literary and Dramatic Criticism

The Kierkegaardian Author

The first collection of its kind, The Continental Philosophy of Film Reader is the essential anthology of writings by continental philosophers on cinema, representing the last century of film-making and thinking about film, as well as all of the major schools of Continental thought: phenomenology and existentialism, Marxism and critical theory, semiotics and hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and postmodernism. Included here are not only the classic texts in continental philosophy of film, from Benjamin's “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to extracts of Deleuze's Cinema and Barthes's Mythologies, but also the earliest works of Continental philosophy of film, from thinkers such as Georg Lukács, and little-read gems by philosophical giants such as Sartre and Beauvoir. The book demonstrates both the philosophical significance of these thinkers' ideas about film, as well their influence on filmmakers in Europe and across the globe. In addition, however, this wide-ranging collection also teaches us how important film is to the last century of European philosophical thought. Almost every major continental European thinker of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had something to say-sometimes, quite a lot to say-about cinema: as an art form, as a social or political phenomenon, as a linguistic device and conveyor of information, as a projection of our fears and desires, as a site for oppression and resistance, or as a model on the basis of which some of us, at least, learn how to live. Purpose built for classroom use, with pedagogical features introducing and contextualizing the extracts, this reader is an indispensable tool for students and researchers in philosophy of film, film studies and the history of cinema.

The Continental Philosophy of Film Reader

This study examines the problematic practice of authorship in the works of Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, whose infamous and invasive literary and stylistic idiosyncrasies must enter into any interpretation – philosophical, theological, or literary. The work offers a radically anti-biographical reading of Kierkegaard’s literary and dramatic criticism, suggesting ultimately that the closest one ever comes to the “real” author of a written work is in an understanding of how all authors are themselves works of creative fiction.

Joseph Westfall

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