Event date: Tuesday 28 October 2025, 4.00 – 5.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room (first floor, right above the main entrance)

“Immanent Frames: Non-Human and Posthuman(ist) Memory in Postsecular Narrative Cinema”; given by Professor Russell J. A. Kilbourn (Wilfrid Laurier University)

Abstract

This talk compares a set of films in which the human subject is de-privileged or -centred, despite narrative cinema’s historical dependence on the human face, body, and voice. Another way of talking about the postsecular era, Charles Taylor’s concept of the ‘immanent frame’—“the disenchanted worldview of the secular age” (Caruana and Cauchi 2018)—also references the literal frame that determines the filmic image, imposing formal, semantic, and ontological limits on the onscreen world, reinforcing the properly immanent status of film form, denying in its very materiality the possibility of transcendence. Reflexive and self-critical, the postsecular represents an “incredulity toward the secularist narrative” supposedly constitutive of western modernity in which the question of belief or faith has never gone away (Caruana and Cauchi 4). The postsecular frames the privileging of immanence over transcendence fundamental to many posthumanist critiques of the Humanist tradition. This talk puts the postsecular into conversation with the posthumanist critique of the Humanist philosophical legacy as it manifests in select films that explore the convergence of memory and the question of the human.

Transhumanist deference to a technologically augmented or artificial memory must be measured against the idea of an always already technically supported ‘natural’ memory. Arguably, memory has always been posthuman because it has always had a technological or prosthetic dimension. The distinction is between a posthuman memory symptomatic of the transformation of the human subject’s cognitive and emotional relation to time, and a posthuman-ist memory that comes after the human: after the time of the human, when ‘we’ are no longer here. ‘Posthuman memory’ is still human memory, whereas ‘posthumanist memory’ is memory no longer understood in (purely) humanist terms, as something belonging wholly to ‘man’. To take account of the future of memory in a posthumanist context is to acknowledge that there is another kind of memory that demands to be thought in a post-anthropomorphic context, challenging us to conceive of a nonhuman, radically other, agent of memory/remembering. The most urgent question is: Who/what does the remembering, in the time of the posthuman?

Films include: L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni 1959); Le Quattro Volte (2010, Michelangelo Frammartino); Upstream Color (2013, Shane Carruth); Annihilation (Alex Garland 2018).

Bio

Russell J. A. Kilbourn is Professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. His books include: Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media: From Annihilation to High Life and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2023); The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino: Commitment to Style (Columbia UP, 2020); W. G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption: Catastrophe with Spectator (Northwestern UP, 2018); The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film (co-ed. Eleanor Ty; WLU Press, 2013); Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema (Routledge, 2010). Forthcoming publications include Framing Ferrante: Adaptation and Intermediality from Troubling Love to The Lying Life of Adults (co-ed. Roberta Cauchi-Santoro; La Società Editrice Fiorentina, Fall 2025) and a special issue of Quaderni d’Italianistica on Critical Posthumanism in Italian Cinema and Media Studies.

All are welcome. Admission is free, and registration is not required. For more information, please contact Stef Craps.