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Citation

Fleming D Danse Macabre: Of the Dying and Death of Philosophers on Film [Event] Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. 23.04.2025-23.04.2025 Available at: https://filmdeath.fcsh.unl.pt/tag/david-h-fleming/

Abstract
A CINELAB talk and screening for the Film & Death ERC project: “Wherever your life ends, it is all there” essayed Montaigne in ‘To Learn to Philosophise is to Learn how to Die’ (1580). “Often the philosopher’s greatest work of art is the manner of their death” opined Simon Critchley in his later necrotic philosophical encyclopaedia, The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009): A work that—like this video-essay—creatively (re)casts the deaths and dying acts of real philosophers under the relational and revolutionary light of their philosophical projections and preoccupations. Critchley and Montaigne were far from first to link death with philosophy of course, for even before (Plato’s) Socrates, the Western philosopher has been imaged-imagined as a stoical being who faces death and makes nothing of it. Or, as Gilles Deleuze puts it, philosophers are those who have “returned from the dead in full consciousness […] and go back there” (2005). In Chinese traditions too figureheads such as Laozi and Kongzi thought of death as a porous boundary event that co-constitutes life’s dao. For the latter, venerating dead ancestors also became key for organising and weighing the ethical life. This video-essay investigates screen remediations and premediations of real philosophers’ deaths and dying in films such as Kǒng Fūzǐ (Fei Mu, 1940), Kǒngzǐ (Hu Mei, 2011), Wittgenstein (Derek Jarman, 1993), Ghost Dance (Ken McMullan, 1983), Spinoza: Apostle of Reason (Christopher Spencer, 1994), Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask (Issac Julien, 1995), Iris (Richard Eyre, 2001), ?i?ek! (Astra Taylor, 2008) and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2013). Concomitantly, in the wake of the 20 th century unconcealing how—as Daniel Frampton puts it—at “the ‘end’ of philosophy lies film” (2006), these image-imaginations of dying philosophers are framed as not only returning us to the age-old dance between death and philosophy, philosophizing and dying, but also betwixt cinema and death, filmmaking and philosophizing.

Keywords
Film-Philosophy; Death Studies; Philosophers on Film