(Dis)locating the Subject, Moving the Image and Reasoning with History

“Idealism,” unlike realism and materialism has not featured much in philosophical engagements with film. Representation, redemption, construction – these terms, among others, marked philosophical debates on the image’s relation to reality (Bazin, Hansen). A Deleuzian perspective, on the other hand, focused on the reality of the image, while the focus on “affect”, the “body” and “feelings” reframed the image in “materialist” terms (Deleuze, Sobchack, Marks, Massumi, Ngai). The philosophical complexity of idealism’s conceptualization of the subject, I argue, got lost in this bifurcation. Both the referential focus of the realism debates and the reduction of the spectator to the body in the “materialist” turn, to varying degrees, sidelined the reasoning subject’s dialectical relation to both its own reality and the place of the moving image in it. A dialectical understanding of the reasoning subject’s shifting relation to a moving object in historical reality, I argue, enriches a philosophy of the moving image by productively developing the contradictions implicit in the realism debates while avoiding the reductive materialism avowed by ahistorical theorizations of affect, the body and the senses. Analyzing Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021), the essay produces an encounter between the dislocated subject reasoning with history through the moving image. Extending the post-Hegelian critique of Kant’s idealism developed by Theodor Adorno, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, Gillian Rose, Todd McGowan and others, my argument elaborates the tension between the embodied subject’s power of reasoning and the moving object’s negativity as the register through which reality is both thought and experienced. The point is not to avoid the image-reality relationship but to understand reality as intrinsically part of and transformed by an unstable subject’s encounter with the forms of the moving image.