The distribution of emotions: Fassbinder and the politics of aesthetics

Germanic Review

Volumn 86, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 201-220

  Kappelhoff, Hermann ^a  

^a FREIE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN   (Germany)

Author keywords

aesthetics; cinema; emotions; Fassbinder; politics

Indexed keywords

EID: 80051484776     PISSN: 00168890     EISSN: 19306962     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2011.585086     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. Alexander Kluge, ed., Bestandsaufnahme, Utopie Film (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1983
2. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004
3. Jacques Rancière, "L'historicité du cinéma," in De l'histoire au cinéma, ed. Antoine de Baecque and Christian Delage (Brussels: Éditions complexes, 1998), 45-46 (my translation).
4. Cf. also Jacques Rancière, La fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001).
5. "The 'distribution of the sensible' is therefore a system or 'regime' of norms or habits that implicitly defines the perception of the common world, perception here meaning a topology that, independently of the places that individuals assume in space and time, assigns them to speak certain social functions, forms of activity, and ways of being." Maria Muhle in the introduction to the German version of The Politics of Aesthetics: Jacques Rancière, Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen. Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien (Berlin: b books, 2006), 10 (my translation
6. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1999).
7. Cf. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 12-19.
8. The notion of aesthetics in this context experiences a fundamental generalization, namely as the specific notion of a "system of thinking about the arts, which was established over another" of a "system of thinking in which the arts are released from the norms of representation," which marked the system of poetics as a system of representation. Cf. Rancière, "L'historicité du cinéma," 54-56.
9. For a related discussion ofAClockwork Orange and TheExorcist, see HermannKappelhoff, Realismus. Das Kino und die Politik des ästhetischen (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2008), 161-196
10. The motif of a post-Oedipal form of socialization also turns up frequently in Fassbinder's later films: In Mutter Küsters' Fahrt zum Himmel (1975)
11. It is a conglomeration of the remains of fatherless families and a political group; in Satansbraten (1976)
12. The grotesque farce of a group that collects around the sadistic chimera of a father; in Die Dritte Generation (1979)
13. A terrorist cell; and finally, in Lili Marleen (1981), a murderous party with a marked sense for how to mobilize popular culture, countered by the intact patriarchal order of the moneyed and educated middle-class and Jewish families
14. Wilhelm Roth, "Annotated Filmography," 133-34.
15. Cf.Wallace SteadmanWatson, Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Film as Private and Public Art (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 94-95.
16. Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 63-64.
17. or as the "melodramatic revocation of the modern." Heinz Brüggemann, "'Berlin Alexanderplatz' oder Franz, Mieze, Reinhold, Tod & Teufel?" Text + Kritik, 103 (1989): 51.
18. It is in this sense thatGillesDeleuze takes Brecht's social gesture as the starting point for his reflections on the category of the body. Cf. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 189-224.