About the film:
Reasonable Doubt
Scenes from the lives and works of René Descartes and Kristina, Queen of Sweden
Theoretical fiction, docu-drama, 98 min.
After a relationship by correspondence, philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) met and briefly interacted with Queen Kristina (1626-1689) in Stockholm, where he died six week after arriving, due to the cold. Once Descartes had reached Sweden, the two didn’t see each other much. Kristina’s philosophical interest was genuine enough. But he was there in a more or less decorative function, to adorn Kristina’s ambitious project of creating an Academy that would put Sweden’s intellectual elite on the European map.
Descartes left Western thought with a burden and a treasure. The burden: a misconstrued dualistic tradition. In Mieke Bal’s view, he accepted the dualism of the Catholic Church, but fought against it all his life because it is not reasonable. The treasure: a decisive advance in rational thought that, precisely, did not excise the body; nor religion for that matter. According to Bal, the (in)famous cogito can be interpreted in the opposite direction, an attempt to embody thought. In Reasonable Doubt, her most recent film project, Bal looks back from his last book, The Passions of the Soul, and sees the ongoing struggle against dualism in different episodes of his life.
Sponsored by the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University
LOCATION:Sackler Building SLH STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20161117T223000Z DTEND:20161118T013000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR