Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema

Book excerpt: Global Cinema takes a new approach to world cinema through critical theory. Whereas world cinema often refers to non-American films deemed artistic or peripheral, author Seung-hoon Jong here examines its mapping frames: the territorial 'national frame,' the deterritorializing 'transnational frame,' and the 'global frame.' If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, his global frame sheds light on films' reflections of global phenomena related to two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the 'soft-ethical' inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems, and their 'hard-ethical' symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. The antagonism between these two brings crucial challenges to the notions of subjectivity and community. Throughout Global Cinema, Jeong explores a vast net of contemporary films circulating globally in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit since the 1990s. Jeong comparatively navigates these films, highlighting less essentialist particularities than compatible localities that perform new universal aspects of subjectivity and community by centering the narrative of 'double death': the abject as symbolically dead struggle for lost subjectivity or new agency until physically dying. This narrative pervades global cinema from Hollywood blockbusters and European art films to Middle Eastern dramas and Asian genre films. Ultimately, Global Cinema deftly investigates critical discourses through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies on the issues of multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia.