The author will look at aspects of thinking about the idea of Europe at the crossroads of the digital and post-digital epochs – through Edgar Morin’s text Thinking Europe and Guy Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, published in the late 1980s, in an attempt to understand their fundamental positions and implicit views on how to approach and pursue something like the political and supranational union of European countries in parallel with the rapid development of digital technologies and (...) new media, which fundamentally change our experience of the world. The very idea of a united Europe appears here as a Kantian “suspicious pleonasm”, whose value is questioned today, especially with the development of new global policies and post-cultural virtual environments that make – notions such as Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Western world – only artifacts of decadent Occidental cultures whose real ruins are overshadowed by an overly real spectacle of virtual abundance. (shrink)

In this paper, the author establishes and defends the thesis that the 1980s horror film production acts as a paradigm of the spectacle, especially in terms of the system of reduction of immediate life to image related mediations and phenomena. Thus, three disparate elements are now connected in a conceptual framework by which author supposes one must judge the media theory and media at large at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. The three elements (...) are the Heideggerian notion of the age of the world-picture, the Debordian notion of the spectacle, and the Deleuzian experiment of the philosophy of film that, through Beller, establishes itself as a film philosophy, to be a possible answer to the contemporary state of a society in which the film spectacle reflects itself in the essentially cinematic culture, that is, in society put in motion exclusively only through the relation of image representations. (shrink)