New Books In Critical Theory

If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, Seung-hoon Jeong’s global frame highlights 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.  Reflecting both and suggesting their alternatives, global cinema draws attention to new changes in subjectivity and community that Jeong investigates in terms of biopolitical ‘abjection’ and ethical ‘agency.’ In this frame, Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema (Oxford UP, 2023) explores a vast net of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. Ultimately, the book renews critical discourses on global issues––including multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia––through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies. Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor o