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A cogent reconsideration of Assayas’s cinematic oeuvre and what it teaches us about the political today

The films of Olivier Assayas are widely celebrated for their complex responses to the many shifts that globalization has introduced in our time. Brian Price contends that they offer a different way of regarding the so-called problem of cultural and political enmeshment that Carl Schmitt and other conservative thinkers fear, including a contention that enmeshment is not a problem at all, in fact, but rather a different mode of social and political organization. Price puts Assayas’s films in dialogue not only with Schmitt’s theory of the political but also with the history of political philosophy after Schmitt, especially in the work of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and Chantal Mouffe, all of whom have attempted to reckon with the friend/enemy dynamic at the core of the political.

At the heart of Assayas’s cinematic oeuvre, and of this book, is a reflection on what it means to be politically serious, which, Price shows, cannot be reduced to criteria that can simply be applied or repeated. The boundaries between the political and the varied forms of the social demand a sensitivity to change and the unknown, none of which can be accessed in the states of absolute certainty that are derived from crises that do not repeat in the same ways. The messiness and nuances of modern life are held together by moving images, which insist that we know why we value what we demand and seek to protect.
 

Exploring how art cinema cultivates existential health through the films of Olivier Assayas
 
This book proposes that cinephilia can facilitate existential health, which makes palpable the potential for subjectivity to be recomposed through meaningful encounters with cinema. Adam Szymanskidraws on the ethos of psychoanalyst Félix Guattari and thinks with select films from director Olivier Assayas—including Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper—to theorize how the cinema can be invested with therapeutic value. Cinephilia and the Adventure for Existential Health engages the history of psychoanalytic film theory, excavates its long-standing concern with the production of spectatorial subjectivity, and challenges pathologizing understandings of cinema spectatorship couched in identification, fetishism, and voyeurism. By embracing the indeterminacy of the cinematic experience and the adventurous disposition of cinephilia, the book allies itself to the pursuit of collective health and challenges the logic of medical power.