Bio
Marco Abel is a professor of English and film studies and Chair of the English Department at the university. He is the author of two books and over fifty articles, as well as co-editor of three books, three journal issues, dossiers, or sections, and the University of Nebraska book series Provocations (together with Roland Végső). He specializes in critical / poststructuralist / (neo-)Marxist theory as well as film history and film theory. Abel’s interest in theorizing images from what one might call an a-signifying perspective. Rather than assuming that images re-present a preexisting world against which we can measure and evaluate an image’s meaning, veracity, morality, and political viability, he approaches signs—cinematic or otherwise—from the idea that images are first and foremost “just images, not just images” (Jean-Luc Godard): images have force and do things, but they do not—at least not primarily—bear or represent meaning; images work by their constitutive intensities and affects rather than by re-presenting something in a way that may or may not be just or justified.