Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity (Modernity and Political Thought)

Davide Panagia's Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity is volume fifteen of Modernity and Political Thought, the Rowman & Littlefield series in contemporary political theory. Through close attention to Hume's theories of sensation, Davide Panagia conceptualizes the modern even more radically (though also more literally) than many of the previous authors in this series. While devoting attention to how a historical thinker such as Hume is read and misread, used and abused in the modern intellectual world, Panagia also focuses on developing a theory of Humean perception and by so doing emphasizes the contemporaneity of Hume's thought. In what at first seems to be an anachronistic as well as wildly curious claim about a philosopher of the eighteenth century, Panagia holds that Hume was a cinematic thinker. Review Davide Panagia has offered a very important contribution to Hume scholarship that promises to show the relevance of Hume to a number of contemporary debates and discussions.--Theory & Event In a terse and vivid reading Panagia affiliates Hume's Treatise with the experience of cinema: evanescent, kaleidoscopic, flickering, forever unsettling. Resisting regulation or consensus, Hume's writings on sensation enable us to put an aesthetic of film in the service of a politics. A committed and sustained reflection on every page, Impressions offers a pragmatic and historically informed treatment of philosophy and cinema.--Tom Conley, Department of Romance Languages, Harvard University About the Author Davide Panagia is a political and cultural theorist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at Trent University. He is the Co-Editor of the cultural and political theory journal, Theory & Event, and is a contributor to The Contemporary Condition.