Impressions of Panagia’s Impressions of Hume

The very process of writing this review exemplifies a key argument for the aspectual approach to philosophy that one finds in Davide Panagia’s new book, Impressions of Hume. Before writing the review I of course read the book, in proper linear fashion from page 1 to its conclusion on page 143. Along the way, however, my attention would occasionally wander as some passages and arguments did not grab my attention as much as others, or my attention simply wandered and I had to return to reread the paragraph. Of the passages that stood out, I would underline and in a few instances add marginal notes and comments. Upon finishing the book I then assembled a list of the key passages and marginal notes on a sheet of paper and then sketched an outline for a several-paragraph review of Panagia’s book based upon the assemblage of underlined passages and marginal comments that now punctuate my copy of the book. My writing of the review then proceeded on the basis of this outline. This review is thus an artifice, an assemblage of the highlighted points and passages that stood out to me, the reader, points that then got transformed into another image of continuity in the form of a review that one can now read, in linear fashion, from beginning to end.

My experience of preparing for and writing this review is precisely, Panagia argues, the experience that typifies the world Hume lived in, “a world besieged by artifice” (1). For Hume there is no final safe harbor of “constancy, continuity, commonality, custom,” (ibid.) but instead these harbors are always only provisional, subject to change, and constantly up for revision. Even the self, Panagia points out, “is an appearance that appears one way and disappears in another way, without rhyme or reason” (3). In other words, for Hume there is no final ground upon which one can lay one’s claims to know and/or act in the world. All we have are those punctual points that strike us, with force and vivacity as Hume frequently put it, and it is from here that we begin to develop a set of habits and responses to situations, habits that are, in turn, subject to striking discontinuities that can upend our ways of doing things. This is the basis upon which we are to understand a theory of political resistance that is both attentive to Hume’s philosophy and engages with contemporary philosophical discussions such as those found in the work of “Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière … ” (143) among others. It is the relationship between what Panagia calls an “ontology of discontinuity” (16) as best exemplified in the work of Hume and political resistance that is the central concern and message of Impressions of Hume.

One of the key concepts Panagia develops in laying out and presenting his “aspectual” understanding of the implications of Hume’s “ontology of discontinuity” is the cinematic. More precisely, Panagia argues that the “stochastic serialization” (25) one finds in the motion picture provides us with an example of how a discontinuity between elements, the AND between one frame AND the next, can project the illusion of continuity, commonality, and identity. In cinema we also find the presence of artifice in a more pronounced form. For instance, Panagia follows Stanley Cavell’s claim that in cinema there is “a human something” (36) in that the images presented are indeed of a human, “an actor projected on a screen…that appears animated like a human, but is not live” (ibid.). This “human something,” moreover, is an assemblage of discontinuous parts, discrete scenes, and the advantage of cinema, Panagia claims, is that the close ups and camera shots do not give us parts of a completed body or whole but to the contrary it gives us the face itself, the parts. “The part,” as shot or close up in cinema for instance, is for Panagia “not a part of something, it is simply...