Most of my work has been in the field of post-Kantian Continental philosophy, in particular recent continental ethical theory and aesthetics. My PhD Research consisted of a comparative analysis of the role of skepticism in the work of Hegel and Levinas. In this study I explored the way in which Pyrrhonian Skepticism was developed as a fundamental structural element within Hegel's dialectical idealism, then reconfigured as different strategies of resistance to Hegel by Schelling, Feuerbach, and Kierkegaard, before finally arguing that a sophisticated radicalisation of skepticism was developed by Levinas as part of an ongoing effort to elaborate an ethical resistance to the totalising plasticity of the Hegelian dialectic. The focus of my recent research has been contemporary continental aesthetic theory, in particular the work of Gilles Deleuze.

I am particularly interested in the broad question of philosophy's relation to the aesthetic and non-philosophical fields of the arts, artistic creativity and the specificity of the art of painting. In exploring the broad questions of expression, creativity, sensibility and intuition I am interested in drawing from a wide range of philosophical engagements with art and painting, from Hegel to Deleuze. I am preparing an original monograph on Deleuze's philosophical writing on creativity, art and painting where I am particularly interested in explicating the way Deleuze elaborates a philosophical understanding of the intrinsic self-ordering and creative self-positing associated with the materiality of paint, together with the specific "logics of sensation" he unfolds for understanding different types of painting such as prehistoric art, baroque, expressionism and figurative abstraction. I am also currently engaged in researching Deleuze’s two volumes of film philosophy. I believe that Deleuze’s analysis of the two major cinematic expressions of time contained within these volumes, first through classic ‘movement-image’, and secondly through contemporary ‘time-image’, provide us with a vital intervention into our philosophical understanding of cinema’s historical developments and its ontological status. I am particularly concerned with researching Deleuze’s specific analysis of different forms of ‘time-image’ cinema where there are attempts to go beyond classical narrative and representational forms of film. In different forms of contemporary cinema Deleuze argues that there is a radical turn from representing states of affairs in exteriority towards attempts at figuring interiority, belief, thought and direct images of time. In my research I am currently exploring the detail of Deleuze’s specific elucidations of many post-war European filmmakers (including Renoir, Bresson, Resnais, Marker, Godard, Antonioni, Herzog and Bergman) in an attempt to extrapolate and productively apply some of the notions associated with ‘time-image’ cinema to the American Filmmaker David Lynch. I am also working on applying some of Deleuze’s film philosophy to the contemporary art filmmakers Douglas Gordon and Anthony McCall.

I am the Programme Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature.

Selected Publications

•  The Persistence of Skepticism: Levinas Beyond Hegel - Forthcoming
• 'Levinas, 'Illeity' and the Persistence of Skepticism' in Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 17, Summer 2006
• Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader, ed. D. Ambrose & S. McKeown - Forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. Contributors include Constantin Boundas, James Williams, Dan Smith, Howard Caygill & Gary Banham.
• 'Logic of Sensation' - Review of Gilles Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation in Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 14, Winter 2003
• 'Reading Hegel's Entrails' - Review of Christopher M. Gemerchak's The Sunday of the Negative: Reading Bataille Reading Hegel in Radical Philosophy, Vol.125, May/June 2004
• 'Hegel and Continental Thought' - Review of Leo Rauch & David Sherman's Hegel's Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness in the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, Spring 2005
• Editor for themed issue on 'Deleuze and Aesthetics' Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 16, Spring 2005
• ‘Gilles Deleuze’ - entry in Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, ed. J. Vickery & D. Costello (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006)
• ‘30, 000 B.C.: Painting Animality – Deleuze & Prehistoric Painting’ forthcoming in Angelaki, 10:4, General Issue, 2006
• 'Deleuze, Philosophy and the Materiality of Painting' in Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, Special Issue Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction, Vol. 10 No. 1, Summer 2006, ed. C. Boundas
  
• 'Gilles Deleuze' - forthcoming entry for The Literary Encyclopedia
• 'Painting Time With Light: Deleuze, Guattari and Contemporary Filmwork' - forthcoming chapter in Producing the New: Deleuze & Guattari and Contemporary Life, ed. S. O'Sullivan & S. Zepke (Continuum, 2007)

• Review of Simon O’Sullivan’s Art Encounters Deleuze (Palgrave, 2005) and Stephen Zepke’s Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze & Guattari forthcoming in PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 18, Winter 2006

• “The Universe is a Haunted House”: Coil and the art of Ghostscapes - forthcoming chapter in Sonic Hauntologies, ed. M. Fisher

   

 

Email:

D.Ambrose@warwick.ac.uk

Undergraduate Modules

Philosophy of Film

MA Modules

Philosophies of Difference: Heidegger & Levinas

Deleuze and Literature

Blog

 

Podcast

Deleuze and Francis Bacon