Company, 2008.

In this book Spencer Shaw explores film consciousness while engaging deeply with current philosophical debates. The most striking and productive contribution is his reappraisal of phenomenology, and of Edmund Husserl’s thought in particular. It is shown not just in a new light, but as a relevant and compelling way of thinking. Phenomenology emerges as a material and concrete philosophy both in its texts and through its relations to film. In the final two chapters of the book this is shown to be relevant to Gilles Deleuze’s thought and his analyses of cinema, something that might be seen as going decisively beyond phenomenology. Yet Shaw shows that this is not the case and that key themes in Deleuze’s work relate to and can be developed through phenomenology's methods and ideas. He does this not by reading back Deleuzian themes into phenomenology but by engaging closely with phenomenological texts. A key theme in the book is matter, which is central to his reappraisal of phenomenology. Shaw asks how different thinkers allow thought to get closer to matter, and how matte