Exercices spirituels et séries télévisées. The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Dexter

One of the obvious specific traits of the television series experience is that we tend to watch it every day. It is perhaps less common to argue that this experience can function as a spiritual exercise whose daily practice would ensure the transformation of latent mental and moral potentialities into real capacities. Just as physical exercise gives our bodies a new strength and shape, so the experience of television series would be able to strengthen and transform our minds. But if philosophy is first and foremost an activity of self-transformation, then we could conceive of the television series experience as a philosophical experience.By going back to the radical sources of Ralph Waldo Emerson's moral perfectionism in the ancient tradition of spiritual exercises, this article tries to show that we can practice these philosophical exercises of mental and moral transformation with television series because they can enable us to reconnect with ourselves, to the world and to others. If these remarks were to make sense, they would ultimately be just another way of repeating what Stanley Cavell taught us by encouraging us to use films as a way of not missing out on our ordinary daily experience.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.