Seung-hoon Jeong, "Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Feb 7, 2025

Seung-hoon Jeong, Assistant Professor of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach, dives into complex themes in global cinema. He explores the tension between 'soft' and 'hard' ethical dilemmas tied to globalization, addressing how films reflect societal crises. Jeong critiques the superficiality of neoliberal multiculturalism while revealing how blockbusters and indie films intertwine narratives of identity and trauma. He also introduces the concept of abjection and its philosophical implications, challenging traditional views on human dignity and compassion.

Ask episode

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

Intro

00:00 • 2min

Cinema at the Crossroads of Catastrophe

02:15 • 9min

Soft vs Hard Ethics in Neoliberalism

11:36 • 8min

The Tension Between Soft and Hard Ethics in Global Contexts

19:09 • 4min

Cinematic Reflections on Globalization

23:10 • 24min

Cultural Narratives and Ethics in Cinema

46:43 • 8min

Exploring Abjection and the Sanction of Life

55:01 • 3min

Ethics and Global Cinema

58:23 • 21min

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 of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach. He is the author of Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media, co-translator of the Korean edition of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature, and co-editor of The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema and Thomas Elsaesser’s The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology.

Steve Choe is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University who researches and teaches in film and media theory. He is the author of Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (2014), Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium (2016) and ReFocus: The Films of William Friedkin (2023). He is the co-editor of Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (2019) and editor of the Handbook for Violence in Film and Media (2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory