David Norman Rodowick (born August 27, 1952) is an American philosopher, artist, and curator. He is best known for his contributions to cinema and media studies, visual cultural studies, critical theory, and aesthetics and the philosophy of art. He became a French citizen in 2002 though retains dual citizenship with the United States.

Background and education

Rodowick was born in Youngstown, Ohio and grew up in Houston, Texas. Rodowick never planned to attend university and from his teenage years pursued a career as a musician and singer-songwriter. For a brief period he was a protégé of the legendary country rock innovator, Gram Parsons, before Parsons’s untimely death in September 1973. Rodowick took occasional classes at the University of Houston and the University of St. Thomas. In 1974, he began his studies in earnest at the University of Texas at Austin, where he combined coursework in comparative literature, Romance languages, world dramatic literature, and film studies. From 1977 to 1978, he studied at the Centre Américain d’études critiques in Paris and the Université de Paris III (Nouvelle Sorbonne), working primarily with Raymond Bellour. Rodowick completed his Ph.D. in cinema and critical theory at the University of Iowa in 1983 under the supervision of

Dudley Andrew James Dudley Andrew (born July 28, 1945) is an American film theorist. He is R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he has taught since the year 2000. Before moving to Yale, he taught for thirty years ...

, while studying experimental film and video making with Franklin Miller.

Career

Rodowick has taught at Yale University, the University of Rochester, King’s College, University of London, and Harvard University, where he was named William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. At Harvard, he also served as chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (now Art, Film, and Visual Studies) and director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. He is currently Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago where he has also served as academic director for the University of Chicago Center in Paris. Rodowick has been a visiting professor at the Institut für Geschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria and at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris 3, Paris, France. He is currently an International Associate of the Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe Cinepoetics at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has also held fellowships at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities and the Internationale Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus-Universität, Germany. Rodowick was among the first scholars to write critical accounts in English of the French philosopher,

Gilles Deleuze Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volu ...

, especially in the context of international film theory and philosophies of the image. He is also known for his critique of political modernism in post-1968 film and literary theory as well as his genealogical investigations of the history of theory in general as a vexed concept in art and aesthetics. Rodowick is perhaps best known for his work on the aesthetic consequences of the global replacement of analogue technologies and representations by digital means and media. Expanding on Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the figural as an aesthetic order where the ontological distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down, he has written extensively on contemporary art and the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Since 2014, in several books Rodowick has been developing a philosophy of the humanities inspired by

Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considere ...

Stanley Cavell Stanley Louis Cavell (; September 1, 1926 – June 19, 2018) was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, an ...

Richard Rorty Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic phi ...

, Georg Henrik von Wright, Charles Taylor, and

Hannah Arendt Hannah Arendt (, , ; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century. Arendt was born ...

Books

* ''The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Second, paperback edition published with a new Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. . * ''The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory''. New York: Routledge, 1991. . * ''Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine''. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. * ''Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media''. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. . * ''The Virtual Life of Film''. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. . * Editor. ''Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. . * ''Elegy for Theory''. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Winner of the 2015

Katherine Singer Kovács Katherine Singer Kovács (1946-1989) was an American film studies academicGottesman, Ron. ''Homage to Kitty Singer Kovacs.'' Cinema Journal 30, no. 3 (1991): 3–5. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1224926.''In memory of Katherine Singer Kovacs (1946� ...

Award for Best Book in Cinema Studies. * ''Philosophy’s Artful Conversation''. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. . * ''What Philosophy Wants from Images''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. . * ''An Education in the Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. .

References

External links

Online articles

D. N. Rodowick artist pages
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rodowick, David 21st-century French philosophers Living people 20th-century American philosophers 21st-century American philosophers University of Iowa alumni Naturalized citizens of France University of Texas at Austin alumni American emigrants to France Academics of King's College London University of Rochester faculty Writers from Youngstown, Ohio Yale University faculty Writers from Houston Harvard University Department of Philosophy faculty 1952 births