CSI presents: Judgement Against Itself: Negativity in The Green Ray

This talk will chart a path through discussions of negative aesthetic judgment, emphasizing in particular its use in enlivening democratic life. That is, this talk will ask what it means to dismiss, reject, even hate a film, and how this might be useful to democracy. It will proceed by in particular addressing the striking conflicts that haunt this pairing of negativity and judgment. These two threads arrive via very different skeins of thought, and they enable traditions that are so often put in opposition to one another. The liberal tradition enabled by judgment and the more radical outcomes of negativity are, that is, often taken to be fundamentally opposed. However, the figure of the liberal subject, the subject constituted by democracy and anchored by the capacity for judgment, it is argued here, is uniquely enabled by this unstable combination. The major claim of this talk, then, is that the supposed rationality of liberal judgment is shot through and otherwise imbricated with doubt and indecision, and that negativity reveals these qualities. What this talk will contend, ultimately, is that judgment—the fulcrum of the rational subject—is in fact constituted through a striking relationship with illogic, a configuration that negativity highlights. Rather than diminishing judgment, however, this talk will evaluate how negativity reenergizes the subject, albeit at the cost of its certainty. This argument will be realized through Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, which presents a series of seemingly casual interactions that in fact allow striking glimpses of the barriers and obstructions present in the workings of the liberal subject.

Kalling Heck is Assistant Professor of English and Screen Arts at LSU. His work connects political theory and art cinema in order to examine the relationship between aesthetics and politics. He is the author of After Authority: Global Art Cinema and Political Transition (2020). His current book, from which this talk is drawn, is titled On Hating Movies: Negative Aesthetic Judgment and Democratic Thought.