Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain [Paperback]

Pizzato focuses on the staging of Self and Other as phantom characters inside the brain (in the 'mind's eye', as Hamlet says). He explores the brain's anatomical evolution from animal drives to human consciousness to divine aspirations, through distinctive cultural expressions in stage and screen technologies.Introduction Will the Real Cogito Please Stand Up? Ancient Specters (Prehistoric, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman) Phantom Limbs, Unconscious Zombies, and Multiple Selves Shakespeare's Roman Shades (Titus Andronicus and Titus) Theatrical Elements in the Mind's Eye Ghosts of Hamlet Onscreen Selective Spirits in Evolution Noh Desires and The Others Brain Stages

A fascinating analysis, based on research in psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychiatry, and neuroscience, of ghostly presences in our minds and brains and of how theater, film, and television function to activate these ghosts and transport them from one brain to another. This book marks a quantum leap in our understanding of the crucial role that dramatic performances can play in the intersubjective processes through which human subjects are constituted, maintained, and transformed. - Mark Bracher, Director, Center for Literature and Psychoanalysis, Kent State University

Mark Pizzato, who long ago slipped through the mirror stage of Lacan into the cellarage of the theater, is now ghosting that form, or being ghosted by it, with cinema too on the brain. Still drawn in the mind's eye to images of transcendence, what he perceives on the actor's body, in the era of the virtual, is augmented now by resources from neurology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, and with all that a transhistorical vision. Given the ancient dreams of immortality that possess him, there is nothing in that vision of a readymade historicism. As he moves from stage to screen, gods and ghosts going with him, surreptitiously in communion with images of the Self, he has written another book with extraordil³"