Danse Macabre: Of the Dying and Death of Philosophers on Film [… And Film as an (archival) afterlife of philosophy]

David H. Fleming

On April 23 6PM, David H. Fleming will conduct a seminar under the theme “Danse Macabre: Of the Dying and Death of Philosophers on Film [… And Film as an (archival) afterlife of philosophy]”. The seminar will be held in english and it will be exclusively online, via Zoom. To receive information about joining the meeting online, it’s mandatory to register in advance here [inserir link].

ABSTRACT “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), Žižek! (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.

BIO David H. Fleming is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Stirling, Scotland. His research, which increasingly straddles theory and practice, gravitates around the intersectionalities of screens, technology and thought. He is a Principal Editor of Edinburgh University Press’s new book series “Screens, Thinking, Worlds” and a board member of the Film-Philosophy journal. He is the author of six monographs including Infinite Ontologies of the Chthulustream (2025) and The Squid Cinema From Hell (2020) with William Brown; Chinese Urban Shi-nema (2020) with Simon Harrison; and Cinematically Rendering Confucius: Chinese Film Philosophy and the Efficacious Screen-Play (2025) and Unbecoming Cinema: Unsettling Encounters with Ethical Event Films (2017). His gonzo video-essay Hiber-nation: The Green Ray from Under the Skin (2024) is currently screening via [In]Transition. Alongside Danse Macabre, he is working on completing an interfacing monograph entitled Global Philosophers on Film (forthcoming).