Dasein and the Question of the Heterogenous Film Viewer: A Commentary on Loht’s Heideggerian Phenomenology of Film

Abstract

In response to Shawn Loht’s 2017 project delineating a Heideggerian phenomenology of film, Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience, I examine how productive Loht’s Dasein-centric account of the film viewer might be for considering diverse film-viewer experiences. Starting from Loht’s premise that the film–viewer relation is the constitutive ground of filmic disclosure, I raise two concerns regarding Heidegger’s account of Dasein that might obscure an account of the diversity of film viewers and associated heterogeneity of filmic disclosure: Dasein’s lack of concreteness with respect to lived experience, and Heidegger’s neglect of embodiment and bodily difference. I firstly argue that Dasein’s lack of concreteness is productive for theorising the diversity of film viewers by discussing the concept of Dasein through formal indication, a Heideggerian notion that Loht draws upon in order to account for filmic disclosure. I then examine a key objection, that Heidegger’s neglect of embodiment limits the productivity of a Dasein-centric account of film viewers for theorising diversity. I refer to Katharina Lindner’s interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world in a queer phenomenology of film, set out in “Questions of Embodied Difference: Film and Queer Phenomenology” (2012), to suggest a pathway for how Dasein’s being-in-the-world might offer an account of film viewing that takes into consideration the embodiment of diverse viewers.

Keywords

• Heidegger
• film spectatorship
• heteronormativity
• Dasein
• feminist film theory
• queer phenomenology