New York book launch: Irmgard Emmelhainz, Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking
Author in discussion with Soyoung Yoon

Join us at e-flux on Wednesday, September 25, 7pm to celebrate the launch of Irmgard Emmelhainz’s newest book Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking, published by Palgrave Macmillan (2019). The evening will feature a conversation between the author and theorist Soyoung Yoon.

Jean-Luc Godard’s films are inscribed in a reflection on the contradictions embedded in the relationship between ethics and politics and the artists’ capacity to represent or to be involved in historical or actual political events. These interrogations translate into matters of visibility and technique and to how to render present the absent in relationship to action or intervention and poiesis. Emmelhainz inscribes Godard’s oeuvre within the tradition of materialist aesthetics and describes his films as “dialectical materialist.” Godard’s work is an aesthetic-political project that has shifted according to historical changes in the past 50 years: from the “politics of representation” and its crisis in the 1960s, to the politics of counter-information in the 1970s, to an exploration of the new modes of subjectivation by capitalism in the 1980s and a search to resacralize mechanically reproduced images, to Godard’s critique of the culture and memory industries, to his controversial juxtaposition of the Shoah and the Nakba, to the post-political call for the redistribution of the sensible and for peripheral language.

Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Mexico City. Her writings on film, the Palestine Question, art, cinema, culture, and neoliberalism have been translated into several languages and presented at an array of international venues, including the Graduate School of Design at Harvard (2014); the Walter Benjamin in Palestine Conference (2015); the New School and the Americas Society (2016); SBC Gallery, Montreal (2016); the Curatorial Summit at the School of Visual Arts, New York (2017); and the Munch Museum, Oslo (2018). Her book in Spanish, The Sky is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine, is out now. Forthcoming in 2019 from Palgrave MacMillan is Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking.

Soyoung Yoon is Assistant Professor and Program Director of the Art History & Visual Studies at the Department of the Arts, Eugene Lang College, The New School. Yoon is also a Visiting Faculty at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP). She received her PhD from Stanford University, and holds a BA from Seoul National University. Yoon is at work on two book projects around the re-definition of the “document” from the post-war period to the present: Walkie Talkie and TV Buddhas. She has published in Grey Room, Discourse, Women & Performance, Millennium Film Journal, among other journals and books. Yoon’s essay “Do a Number: The Facticity of the Voice, or Reading Stop-and-Frisk Data” was awarded a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2016. She is currently a recipient of a Hauser & Wirth Research Fellowship for her work on the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-72094-4
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-72095-1

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.