Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
Abstract
In these innovative essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today's image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we've all "had our eyes done"; why we are "moved" by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of "making sense" requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.
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The role of touch in interpretation has been discussed in other media forms, such as cinema.
“The role of touch in interpretation has been discussed in other media forms, for example in cinema (Sobchack 2004;Marks 2000).”
From Carnal Hermeneutics and the Digital Game (2018) · cites this paper as Sobchack 2004
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Nash, K. (2014) · Continuum · doi:10.1080/10304312.2014.893995 · Cited by 52 · see citing works
Carnal Hermeneutics and the Digital Game
Martin, P. (2018) · Journal of the Philosophy of Games · doi:10.5617/jpg.2934 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
- Authors
- Sobchack, V.
- Corresponding author
- Sobchack, Vivian
- Venue
- University of California Press eBooks
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Published
- 2004-11-01
- OpenAlex
- W4233394093
- Cited by
- 1,310
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 74 · 2025: 122 · 2024: 116 · 2023: 96 · 2022: 61 · 2021: 101 · 2020: 52 · 2019: 63 · 2018: 73 · 2017: 51 · 2016: 63 · 2015: 48 · 2014: 68 · 2013: 57 · 2012: 16
- FWCI
- 4.40
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- University of California Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Visual Arts and Performing Arts › Visual Culture and Art Theory
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art
- Keywords
- embodiment, film spectatorship, sensory experience, mind-body split, phenomenology, moving image culture, photographic space, digital space
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