Judging Cinema: Peter Greenaway’s Visual J’accuse

Abstract

For Kant, inasmuch as he epitomizes the thought of Enlightenment, the stakes of critical judgment are knowledge. Strictly speaking, Kantian critical judgment is a bid for knowledge of the limits of our human capacities in order that we may better exercise them. The epistemic burden of critique according to eighteenth-century philosophizing generally is the notion that limitation invites knowledge of its own conditionality.¹ To put this in terms that are fluent with aesthetic practice, I might say that critique presupposes a search for an epistemically secure point of view. But the wished for and often vaunted fixity of this viewpoint will be at odds with the spirit of critique if it ignores the necessity to make limitation an object of inquiry as well as a device for framing intellectual inquiry.