Overview

With the release of Parasite (2019), winner of the Palme d’Or and an Academy Award for Best Picture, the South Korean director Bong Joon Ho secured his place as one of his generation’s leading filmmakers. While scholars and critics have long appreciated his penetrating critique of Korean society and global capitalism, this book presents the first cohesive philosophical analysis of his first seven feature-length films. It argues that Bong’s cinema not only engages with philosophy, but is radically philosophical. Writing as an intimate outsider to Korea, a “resident alien” married into a Korean family, and teaching at Bong’s own alma mater, Anthony Curtis Adler explores Bong’s visionary and re-visionary treatment of spatiality, temporality, myth, memory, genre, and the semiotics of monstrosity. Adler argues that for Bong Joon Ho, cinema doubles the ambiguity of philosophy, presenting the aesthetic means to represent anarchic motions and movements. While it can capture and contain them, subordinating them to an overarching order, it can also free them to appear in their anarchy. From the humble apartment building of Barking Dogs Never Bite to the train in Snowpiercer and Parasite’s mansion, Bong’s films stage interior spaces as representations of a cinematic apparatus that is, ambiguously, site of both imprisonment and liberation. Even while confronting globalism head-on, Bong’s films never cease to engage with the specific challenges faced by modern Korea, and, above all, the struggle of the Korean people for political representation and economic justice.

Full Product Details

Author:   Anthony Curtis Adler (Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, South Korea) ,  Costica Bradatan (Texas Tech University USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions:   Width: 14.40cm , Height: 2.60cm , Length: 21.80cm
Weight:   0.540kg
ISBN:  

9781350414655

ISBN 10:   1350414654
Pages:   344
Publication Date:   11 December 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

1. Introduction a. Why Bong Joon Ho? b. Korean Cinema in an Age of Globalization c. Bong Joon Ho as Philosophical Filmmaker d. Overview of the Argument e. A Personal Note on Hybrid Subjectivity 2. The Cinematic Apparatus of Philosophy a. Cinema as Projection of Movement and Life b. Plato’s Visionary Spaces c. Aristotle’s Poetics and the Drama of Meaning d. Psyche as Cinema e. Scientific Objectivity as Cinematic Apparatus 3. Barking Dogs Never Bite a. The Korean Apartment Complex as Visionary Space b. Dog as Food, Friend, Foe: Civilization and Domestication c. Endemic Corruption d. Ambiguous Liberation e. Nature and Sprawl 4. Memories of Murder, Mother a. Cinematic Genre as Visionary Space b. The Korean Countryside and the Logic of Sprawl c. Memories of Murder, Cinematic Voyeurism and the Domestication of Violence d. Mother and Murder: On Breaking the Umbilical Cord e. The Tunnel and the Camera Lens 5. The Host, Okja a. Philosophy, Cinema, and the Global Imaginary b. The Host, Mutation as Genetic Sprawl c. Okja, Genetic Engineering as Absolute Domestication d. From Tunnels to Networks e. Visionary Capitalism 6. Snowpiercer a. Tunnel, Network, Train b. Absolute Global Order as the Apotheosis of Visionary Capitalism c. The Subversion of Plot d. Civilization as Autophagy e. Political-theology: The Hero, The Messiah, The Emperor 7. Parasite a. Globalism Inside Out and Outside In b. The House as Visionary Space c. Civilization and its Parasites d. Oedipus, Complexer e. Scholar’s Dreams 8. Conclusion: Crashing the Cinematic Apparatus of Philosophy

Reviews

A brilliant analysis of the films of one of the most discussed and studied Korean filmmakers, written by a fine connoisseur of Korean culture and history. This book provides unique insights into the films of Bong Joon Ho. * Thorsen Botz-Bornstein, co-editor of Parasite: A Philosophical Exploration (2022) and Professor of Philosophy at the Gulf University of Science and Technology, Kuwait *

Author Information

Anthony Curtis Adler is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, South Korea. His most recent books include Celebricities: Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life (2016), and Politics and Truth in Hölderlin: ‘Hyperion’ and the Choreographic Project of Modernity (2021).

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