Showing papers in "Substance in 2005"

Typewriter: Free Indirect Discourse in Deleuze's Cinema

Abstract: The figure of speech variously called "free indirect discourse," "quasidirect discourse," or "represented speech," dominates Gilles Deleuze's two-volume study Cinema, a work also containing a theory of cinematic "free indirect images." Deleuze develops a concept of free indirect images, which, he argues, articulate the social in "modern cinema," opening political and ethical dimensions of the "time-image." Although Deleuze does not present his conceptualization of cinematic free indirect images as a theory of his own writing practice, if we link it to the figure as it appears in Cinema, we cannot but wonder how Deleuze's writing relates to his thought. Cinema's reflection on free indirect images exposes a major literary device used by Deleuze since his first books, but the theory mirrors the practice in an interested way, presenting it in a glamorous light that makes it hard to see the position from which Deleuze writes. By ignoring class critique in his theoretical sources, Deleuze makes his own practice seem unquestionably righteous, yet despite its triumphal air and limited, unconscious cosmopolitanism, Deleuze's theory of free indirect images revitalizes the study of cinematic subjectivity. Beyond the boundaries of film studies, Deleuze's theory prepares us to think the ethical and political aspects in an implicit, unelaborated concept that informs contemporary modes of social controlthe concept of "life." In literature, free indirect discourse presents the speech, writing or thought of a character in the character's own language, but without using quotation marks, as in the following example from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. The italicized phrase below is clearly in the language of the "four rough fellows" attending Riderhood's death, and whose thoughts the narrator reports:

Alchemies of Thought in Godard's Cinema: Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty

Abstract: Notwithstanding Deleuze's indictment of phenomenology for its alleged failure to meet the challenges of immanence and difference, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze's philosophies and their implications for a theory of cinema remain close in many important respects. Both MerleauPonty's phenomenology of perception and Deleuze's transcendental empiricism dismantle epistemological systems that are grounded in noncorporeal acts of signification or cognition. The drive to determine a clear dividing line between subject and world, perceiver and perceived, objective reality and subjective experience, is equally suspected and accordingly undermined by both thinkers. In the continuity of human body and world that both these philosophies propose, a sensational and affective approximation to the world replaces the purely mental and visual methods of the disembodied cogito. As made apparent in his book on Francis Bacon, Deleuze shares Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the worldbody of sensation as a continuum between viewer/artist and art work: "sensation has no [objective and subjective] sides at all; it is both things, indissolubly; it is being-in-the-world, as the phenomenologists say: at the same time I become in sensation and something arrives through sensation, one through the other, one in the other" (Francis Bacon, 27). But despite the many ideas Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze share, it is also important to acknowledge the difference that separates them-a difference that renders their respective modes of thinking unique and therefore equally necessary. As many commentators have noted, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze part ways at the juncture where sensation and affect are variously theorized as either belonging to the realm of subjectivity or as operating in a desubjectified field of forces. Thus, while for Merleau-Ponty sensation and affect are subjective phenomena arising out of an intentional and individuated rapport with the world, Deleuze regards the sensational and the affective as material flows whose individuation and exchange does not rest upon subjectified intentions, but rather upon the workings of a non-organic, anonymous force or life.

The Futures of Surrealism: Hegelianism, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde

Abstract: In the course of urging upon us a "re-reading of the history of the modernism of the 1920s," Colin MacCabe counterposes, in a recent work, the writings of Georges Bataille and those of a man he calls that "loathsome Leninist Breton" (MacCabe, 82). The comment is an aside-it appears in brackets and in a book devoted to the late 1960s cult film Performance-but is perhaps all the more significant for that. For it would seem to reflect, all-too-fashionably, an extreme version of a pervasive contemporary doxa concerning surrealism and the relationship between these two figures. It is not my intention to trace the genealogy of such a view-though it would probably go, in part, via the selective "translations" of French theory (and of the Tel Quel group in particular) into the terms of Anglo-American post-structuralism2 -but, clearly, a pivotal moment in the construction of this opposition is represented by the writings of those associated with the American art journal October. In the 1997 Formless: A User's Guide, for example, co-authored by two of the journal's editors, Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, the former feels able to assert that "there is no connection whatever between Bataille's

The Expulsion of the Negative: Deleuze, Adorno, and the Ethics of Internal Difference

Abstract: To compare Deleuze with another thinker is already to proceed in counterpoint to Deleuzian practice, to refuse at some level to follow Deleuze's own method. The monograph (as applied to Bergson, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Leibniz, to name only philosophers) is Deleuze's favored method of investigation. Deleuze does not orchestrate encounters of contradictory voices, but instead revoices the philosophical character (personnage) he is studying. He isolates himself (selectively) in a windowless monad with the object of his inquiry to enumerate the essential qualities upon a single plane of immanence. If, with Guattari, Deleuze offers readers a bewildering multiplicity of objects to consider, these are understood to be singularities, each enclosed in the splendid isolation of its "operative function" (1993: 3). Between these singularities and the totality that Deleuze calls the univocity of being, no dialectical relations inhere, but rather an absolute leap of perception. Deleuze and Adorno thus appear to stand in irreconcilable opposition.' The former the philosopher of immanence and the univocity of being, the latter the foremost thinker of irresolvable contradictions and negative dialectics, they look to very different precursors and speak entirely different philosophical languages that allow for precious little communication to occur. Yet to leave each to his proper plane of immanence-in which their respective truth may be expressed without dissent--would be to abandon critique for the history of ideas. Instead, I think it is possible to compose a dissonant relationship between these two seemingly antagonistic thinkers. In this article, I propose to examine Deleuze's early writings via a critical reading of the founding operative concept of the Deleuzian project: "internal difference." If Alain Badiou rightly locates the precondition of Deleuzian thought in the "univocity of being," this remains "a silent, supra-cognitive or mystical intuition" (31) about which one can say no more than to repeat the mantra: "Being is One." What one can talk about instead are the modes or "simulacra" of

Cinema and its Discontents: Jacques Ranciere and Film Theory

Abstract: Jacques Ranciere may have entered a French pantheon of film theory in 2001 after his publication of an array of essays on classical and contemporary films in La fable cinematographique. In that book Ranciere posited cinema to be "to the storytelling art what truth is to falsehood."' Cinema rejects the Aristotelian poetics of fables and fabulation by reconfiguring the Greek philosopher's hierarchy that favored muthos, the rationale of a plot, over opsis, the "sentient effect of the spectacle." The camera records its stories via linked actions, headed toward various resolutions by way of often unforeseen twists and turns. The dramatic progression of the Aristotelian scheme is betrayed, however, when the camera records information and evokes sensations that go both against the grain of dramatic progress and in myriad directions, many of which are beyond the director's or editor's control and have little to do with the narrative. Citing an early essay by Jean Epstein, Ranciere notes that the intelligence of the playwright submits to that of the camera, a machine that "records this infinity of movements that create a drama of an intensity a hundred times greater than any change of fortune." The camera, Ranciere continues (along a Benjaminian line reminiscent of the last pages of the "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility") hardly reproduces things "such as they are gazed upon. It records them such as the naked eye does not see them, such as they happened to be." He then adds a flourish, recalling Gilles Deleuze's words on sentience in the first pages of his Cinema 2: L'Image-temps, when he describes things "in their state as waves and vibrations, before their qualification as objects, persons, or identifiable events by their descriptive or narrative properties" (8). Ranciere shows that Epstein intuited the power of film even before the onset of sound (said to have since attenuated the expressive force of its silent images [we have only to recall images that Epstein might have known, such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks]), linking film's power to the American industrialization of the seventh art, and anticipating a good deal of film theory. Yet Epstein's reflections, adds Ranciere, are based on pre-Romantic aesthetic theory in Kant, the Schlegels, Schiller, Herder, and even Hegel.

In media res : Interceptions of the Work of Art and the Political in Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract: We must be able to think a world, and therein lies the question that is not artistic at all, in the sense of not at all decorative, which is our question. Our question, or rather our categorical imperative, or again our necessity in the sense of our poverty and our way of being needy because we have no world, but we must be able to imagine a world. To imagine the total impossibility of thinking a world immediately leads to madness, to death. We must be able to think a world, thus there is a necessity for this possibility and the possibility of its necessity. It is possible that this world may be necessary, that every world may be—that of all people and that of each person—even though none of them shows either its reasons or its ends, but perhaps that’s what a world is—that which shows neither a reason nor an end. Anything that can show— or about which one can show—reasons or ends, is perhaps in a world, but it is not a world, it does not make a world. Thus, based on this possibility and necessity of a world—that is, of a totality of meaning, I am attempting to read these paintings. (Nancy, Transcription, 20)

Derrida's Hamlet

Abstract: Beyond all the sound and fury (which continues even now beyond the grave, in the crasser forms of obituary-speak), there are, at a very general level of reflection, three emphases in Derrida's work that have mattered to me, and which I still carry with me. The first has to do with the rebarbative notion of differance, the notion that being is never present to us, which I take to be first and foremost a reflection on the irreducible temporality not only of being, but also of our categories for thinking about being. The second turns on the view that everything human is problematic for the rest of human time. The third concerns the paradox of the notorious "undecidability" hypothesis, which, whatever it may be taken to mean, never meant exemption from the requirements of decision-making. These emphases have been glossed in numerous ways, none ever far from controversy. In this brief notice I would like to run them through a particular source, in which, in their own terms, they are all to be found: Hamlet, and the reading of Shakespeare's play that occupies the first part of Spectres of Marx. What is Hamlet doing in a book about Marx and ghosts--both Marx's ghosts (the famous spectre mentioned at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto) and the ghosts of Marx (broadly, what Derrida means by the "legacy" of Marx, as the constant returns of a kind of spectre in the midst of the contemporary neoliberal victory)? How is it that Derrida, citing an essay by Blanchot, in which Blanchot uses the expression "since Marx," can add that Blanchot's "since Marx" could easily have been "since Shakespeare"? Broadly speaking, the answers have to do with two interconnected, deep-structural and persistently recurring preoccupations of deconstruction: ontology (the philosophy of Being) and justice (the sphere of the politico-ethical); both these preoccupations assembled, or rather disassembled, in an overarching category that Derrida calls spectrality, the spectral nature of all our constructions (including the Marxist construction) of being and justice. Nietzsche claimed in The Birth of Tragedy that the essential point about Hamlet is not--as in the standard viewthat he thinks too much, but that he thinks too well; he is unable to act not because of a contingent psychological infirmity, but because the sheer lucidity of his thinking corrodes the ground of all possible action in a

"This Aggression Will Not Stand": Myth, War, and Ethics in The Big Lebowski

Abstract: Now this story I'm about to unfold took place back in the early nineties-just about the time of our conflict with Sad'm and the Eye-rackies. I only mention it 'cause sometimes there's a man-I won't say a hee-ro, 'cause what's a hee-ro?-but sometimes there's a man... and I'm talkin' about the Dude here-sometimes there's a man who, wal, he's the man for his time'n place, he fits right in there-and that's the Dude, in Los Angeles... (Coen screenplay, 4; my emphasis)

The Woodcutter's Gaze: Luc Moullet and Cahiers du Cinema

Abstract: Surely one of the most unjustly forgotten moments in the history of cinema is the day when Luc Moullet received a plastic leg in the mail from Samuel Fuller. The director of Fixed Bayonets! and Run of the Arrow was so taken with the article “Sam Fuller sur les brisées de Marlowe” that he sent its author an autographed fake limb in thanks.1 The gift paid tribute to Moullet’s argument, which held that Fuller was a filmmaker obsessed with the human body, and, in particular, with feet. Moullet saw this fascination as neither foot fetish nor Oedipal complex: instead, it exemplified how the plainspoken director’s films started from the physical world rather than from preconceived ideas. The feet were the most humble part of the body, the part directly linked to the ground, to movement, to action—in short, to what the critic considered the essence of cinema. The leg, signed “Sam Fuller, philopode,” was accompanied by a long, enthusiastic letter and a request for a subscription to Cahiers du Cinéma, which had published the piece in their March, 1959 issue. In one fell swoop, Moullet and the review found themselves officially endorsed by a director who would remain close to them for the rest of his life. The article marks a late high point for the auteur theory Moullet had been instrumental in defending. At the same time, it also contains a key phrase—“la morale est affaire de travellings” [morality is in the tracking shots]— which faintly announces the move away from established Cahiers doctrine and towards the militant film criticism that emerged on a massive scale in late-sixties France. While Moullet is a central figure in this critical shift, he is now primarily known as a director. To date, he has made over 30 awardwinning movies, such as the mountain-climbing bicycle epic Parpaillon [1992] and the underground western Une aventure de Billy le Kid, [1971] starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. Moullet belongs to a generation of craftsmen like Jacques Rozier, Jean Eustache, or Jean-Daniel Pollet, all of whom started making films in the wake of the New Wave’s initial success. Of all the

Roland Barthes's Cold-War Cinema

Abstract: Roland Barthes's essays are now part of the history of film studies, their force having pulled back with the tide of theory. Barthes's proclaimed "resistance to cinema" (Roland Barthes, 54), however, the choice he made near of the end of his life to write about photography "in opposition to Cinema" (Camera Lucida, 3), the pleasure he felt upon leaving a movie theatre, his suspicion toward what he called cinema's "imperialism,"' leave the impression of a vertiginous ambivalence toward the movies at the heart of a work that not so long ago was a fundamental reference for film scholars. This suspicion toward the moving image may be attributed to Barthes's melancholy penchant for the stillness and silence that inspired his meditative essays, or perhaps to a European literary scholar's mistrust of an art form that he saw primarily as a commodity and a popular spectacle. Barthes's ambivalence may also have been tactical, however. If we follow Barthes's writing on films, from the early Mythologies to his last essay on Antonioni, we find that Barthes's resistance to cinema may have also been an attempt to sketch out a resistance to what he saw as another sort of imperialism, that of the two rival and dominant Cold-War powers. Barthes's essays on film may very well have been determined not just by a desire to escape what in his 1975 essay "En sortant du cinema" he labeled the "ideological" (258), but also and more precisely by an attempt to question through writing an opposition that structured the film field after 1945, and which Barthes in his Mythologies, called "la grande contestation URSS-USA" (42). 2 We tend to forget today the extent to which Barthes's Mythologies, these essays by a Marxistfldneur on the streets of Cold-War Paris, describe his encounters with cinema. Barthes wrote about ad campaigns, a photography exposition, an article in Paris-Match, the steak he might have been served for lunch, but also about Charlie Chaplin, film noir tough guys, Chabrol's Le Beau Serge, Sacha Guitry, Greta Garbo, the invention of Cinemascope, and two films starring Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront and Joseph Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar. Running throughout these encounters with everyday culture is a 1950s left-wing sensibility that attempts to demystify the norms of petit bourgeois ideology, and

Deconstruction is Justice

Abstract: This provocative assertion, from Derrida's Force of Law (945), sharply contrasting with the decades-old criticism of deconstruction as an aesthetisizing apolitical and ahistorical exercise, recapitulated in 1989 the stakes of an infinite task and responsibility that, in spite of and because of its infinity, cannot be relegated to tomorrow: "[...] justice, however unpresentable it may be, doesn't wait. It is that which must not wait" (ibid., 969). It is in the spirit of such urgency, of a responsibility that cannot be postponed, that Jacques Derrida was an active and outspoken critic and commentator on issues such as South Africa's Apartheid, the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, the bloody civil war in his native Algeria, human rights abuses, French immigration laws, the death penalty, and on what Richard Falk has termed "the great terror war."' In our era-the era French historian Annette Wieviorka has called

Just Figures? Forensic Clairvoyance, Mathematics, and the Language Question

Abstract: A written symbol long recognized as operating non-alphabetically-even by those deeply and quite unconsciously committed to alphabeticism-is that of number... But, despite this recognition, there has been no sustained attention to mathematical writing even remotely matching the enormous outpouring of analysis, philosophizing, and deconstructive opening up of what those in the humanities have come simply to call "texts." Why, one might ask, should this be so? Why should the sign system long acknowledged as the paradigm of abstract rational thought and the without-which-nothing of Western technoscience have been so unexamined, let alone analyzed, theorized, or deconstructed, as a mode of writing? (Rotman, "Thinking DiaGrams," 18)

The Yellow Spot: Ocular Pathology and Empirical Method in Gaston Leroux's Le Mystere de la chambre jaune

Abstract: The 2003 release in France of Bruno Podalydes's film adaptation of Gaston Leroux's Mystery of the Yellow Room [Le Mystr in his film, the book's narrator Sainclair becomes a bespectacled photographer whose optical prosthetics identify him as "he who sees" (Podalydes, 352). But while the story's cinematic rebirth may tempt us to read its "optics" in a vague postLacanian sense (metaphors of mastery, sins of the filmic gaze), such a reading would elide a scientism specific to Leroux's age. As with so many late nineteenthand early twentieth-century detective novels, Mystery of the Yellow Room embeds its criminal investigation plot in the broader semantic universe of scientific investigation: the initial crime, a nocturnal attack on Mademoiselle Stangerson, occurs in a chamber (the Yellow Room) abutting a scientific laboratory where she and her father have spent years engaged in physics research the pre-radiographic study of the "dissociation of matter." The international renown of the Stangersons, described as precursors to Monsieur and Madame Curie, is said to be such that the threatened interruption of their research constitutes an "incalculable loss to science.J"2 But in Podalydes's film version, laboratory vials give way to quack machinery, as Stangerson is recast as a kooky inventor of solar cars and trick gadgets. In his decision to evacuate the serious scientific content of Leroux's

Immediacy and Forgetting

Abstract: In Re'cits d'Ellis Island, by Georges Perec and Robert Bober, the first chapter is entitled "'ile des larmes" (The Island of Tears)-the nickname given to Ellis Island at the time of mass immigration. In documentary style, this chapter describes the history of this small island in New York Harbor-a veritable factory producing properly stamped American citizens-until an anecdote replaces the statistical generalities and the linear recounting of events: An old Russian Jew was advised to choose himself a nice American name that the civil authorities would have no trouble transcribing. He sought advice from a baggage handler, who proposed the name Rockefeller. The old Jew repeated several times Rockefeller, Rockefeller, to be sure not to forget. But several hours later, when the official asked his name, he had already forgotten, and replied in Yiddish, "Schon vergessen" (I have already forgotten) and it was thus that he was inscribed under the very American name of John Ferguson. (17-18)

From Interests to Inter-esse: Jean-Luc Nancy on Deglobalization and Sovereignty

Abstract: sphere intermediatique IV Memoire et midiations Entre l'Europe et les Ameriques puts his philosophical topic of the "impossible community" at the heart of political debates on the disrupting effects of globalization Turbulent developments within contemporary geopolitics like the immigration and transmigration of politico-economic refugees, crypto-theological claims about the authenticity of nations, the increasing influence of global capital flows on the daily lives of citizens, technoscientific mediations of interactions, the diversification of fundamentalisms (from religious to market fundamentalism), and multicultural politics--all of these hot issues are touched upon philosophically by Nancy's thesis of "I'Ytre-asoi du peuple, son unite comme communaute ou comme corps social () comme inatteignable autant que n6cessaire" (La d6mocratie ai venir)I "Our" informational world as an intermediatic sphere is rapidly becoming an integrated web of networks in which economic transactions, political interactions, scientific inventions and cultural interventions are mediated by technologies that have become discourses with their own finalities Nancy tries to make sense of a "new intermediatic sphere, " criticizing this "medi@crity" as a global feedback system, pejoratively labeled "globalization" Reflecting upon the interrelations between economy, politics, science and culture, he implicitly raises the related question of how to make sense of a disintegration and fragmentation rooted in the modernist project: how to reorient the sovereignty of its political community par excellence-ie the nation-state and its people The deconstruction of state sovereignty through a profound reflection upon the possibility of a community dates back to the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century It evokes the names of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt and Georges Bataille Contemporary deconstructive thinkers like the late Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy frequently refer to this tradition in their analyses of globalization However, the ambiguity of this political endeavor became evident during

Milah : A Counter-Obituary for Jacques Derrida

Abstract: Obituaries, by definition, look back over the course of a life and a work. But the logic of the Derridean “legacy” also demands the forwardlooking perspective, geared to the prospective as well as the retrospective, albeit prospects now sadly broken by his death. Here, if I may be permitted, I have something to report, even if in the context of his death, sporting personal acquaintance with Jacques Derrida seems in particularly poor taste—as if to appropriate the departed as a personal belonging, in gross violation of everything Derrida said about property, gift, self and other. There is however, on this occasion, good reason to place on record what he said to me several times: that the reflection on “circumcision” and associated “Jewish” themes constituted for him “unfinished business;” in particular the link—constitutionally and irreducibly prospective in its own right—between a “Jewishness” and that fundamental call to the future that marks his work: the indeterminable à venir. More specifically, the unfinished business he was referring to has to do with certain “secrets” partly disclosed in Circonfession and a few other texts. These secrets revolve around circumcision, but “circumcision” with the peculiarly Derridean spin that combines “cutting” with “cutting to,” with special reference to language as contingent on scission. And Derrida has a word for this—one word that homophonically joins the two separate Hebrew roots for “circumcision” and “word”: Milah. Milah was very special to him (“Milah … I love that word,” he said fondly when I mentioned that I was thinking of writing a book about “his” Milah). It held a series of pivotal and private meanings for him, so much so that he celebrates it as providing “the whole lexicon that obsesses my writings” (Circumfession, 72). It does so partly because it captures the double bind that informs so many of Derrida’s central notions: the selferasing signature, the partition that marks the I, identity as contingent on division, the double indeterminability of à venir, and many others. Above all, Milah sets the scene for a figurative “circumcision” of language that turns on the double movement of incision and excision. It bears

Enough of This So-Called Minimalist Poetry

Abstract: In one of its greatest paradoxes, French minimalist literature exists only in the plural. However, by no means do the different types of minimalism enjoy the same level of prestige. Some, particularly in the area of prose narration, have a certain public success--not always validated with the same enthusiasm by criticism, and certainly not by theory. Others, like the field of "poetic" writing, suffer from a readership generally dissatisfied with this type of textual production, while nevertheless successfully representing to critics and theorists a kind of ideal of late twentieth-century poetic expression. These differences in reputation are not always justified, especially in the case of minimalist poetry. We think poetry is neither truly interesting nor truly minimalist, and there, perhaps, is the rub: the failure of much minimalist poetry is not due to its minimalist program as much as to the particular manner in which it is considered or implemented. The object of this article is to take a position in this debate by demonstrating that another minimalism is possible, and doubtless necessary if we are to overcome the impasses of the type of poems generally classified as minimalist.

Blanchot on Dreams and Writing

Abstract: The Experience of Writing, "Impossibility," and the Dream Blanchot reaches for an experience in his reflections upon writing. In his "critical" works--his reflections upon the writing of others-Blanchot will speak of L'experience de Mallarmen or L'experience d'Igitur, L'expirience de Proust and L'expirience de Lautriamont.1 This "experience" is neither the extra-textual experience of a subject placed at the origin of writing nor the experience of a written object conceived as the product of the work of such a subject. Blanchot's "experience" -l'experience de Blanchot-is the experience of writing understood, itself, as experience. Consequently, Blanchot's reflections on the "experiences" of other writers entangle themselves thoroughly in the reflexive webbing of the experience of the experience ofwriting.2 This entanglement begins, for Blanchot, in the impossibility of determining a subject when it comes to the experience of writing. "Ecrire," says Blanchot, "c'est passer du Je au II, de sorte que ce qui m'arrive n'arrive a personne" (L'Espace litteraire 31). This II is not an identifiable third person to whom any writing that happens may be referred. Rather, it remains "uncharacterizable":

Experience and Memory in the Films of Wim Wenders

Abstract: The Mobile Threshold of Memory Christopher Nolan's film Memento (2000) dramatically demonstrates the impossibility of replacing memory or of reproducing the network that is constitutive of all mnemonic activity. The protagonist has lost his short-term memory after a traumatic experience, and tries to replace it with a veritable cartography of relations and actions-Polaroid photographs (annotated, so he can recognize the people, places, or things in the image), tattoos, written notes he pins up anywhere he can. All this remains inert and ineffectual-an impossible attempt to replicate a network that can never remain fixed, since memory is of the order of the event, and of becoming a sort of vital sap. By representing the failure of this repeated and desperate attempt to recreate mnemonic processes and associations, substituting them with a network of things, Memento effectively shows the incessant work of memory, and indirectly reveals its affinity to the film medium. Several-if not allof German filmmaker Wim Wenders's films evoke or present a mise-en-scene of this invisible and living dimension of memory, exalting the film's shared lineage with the process of remembering. Also worth considering in these preliminary remarks is Belgian filmmaker Jaco van Dormael's Le huitieme jour (1996). The film begins with a voice-over that paraphrases the first book of Genesis-"In the beginning... there was nothing" -while the image consists of pixels, the swarm of small white points on a gray background that one sees before or after the daily television broadcast, a nothing that imposes itself on the spectator's gaze. The universe begins with television-or, perhaps, within the television, in its own way. The limit dividing inside from outside is blurred. Wenders's cinema revolves around this uncertain

Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (review)

Abstract: Given the recent scholarly writing on trauma resulting from September 11, the publication of Remnants of Song. Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan one year prior may help to put events in their proper historical perspective. In an “Editor’s Column” of the PMLA (October 2004), Marianne Hirsch discusses the implications of witnessing and mediating the destruction and carnage from September 11. Central to her discussion is Art Spiegelman’s comic book account of events entitled In the Shadow of No Towers, which she compares to its predecessor, Maus. In both performances of “an aesthetics of trauma,” according to Hirsch’s argument, the depiction is “fragmentary, composed of small boxes that cannot contain the material, which exceeds their frames and the structure of the page” (1213). In terms of Baudelaire, and Celan’s poetry, Ulrich Baer’s argument concerning the relationship between the two poets’ use of language to frame experience would appear analogous. Often what is left out is the most painful or traumatic of the experience. As Baer points out, the Shoah is never explicitly mentioned within Celan’s poetry, but its presence is not any less felt by the power of language. In like manner, Baer draws the parallel that Holocaust survivors avoid articulating the most traumatic elements of their experiences. The parallel between September 11 and the Holocaust ends, though, the moment one begins to speak of scale. If Hirsch talks of traumatized millions as “collateral damage” stemming from the collapse of the Twin Towers, she explains that these are the millions who witnessed the images through various media. Baer bases his discussion on Holocaust trauma and its linguistic implications for the literature of survivor testimony and for Celan’s uncanny foreshadowing of Holocaust memorial parks at Buchenwald and Treblinka in his poem “Projection of a Landscape.” As Celan expresses the jolting transition in “Straightening,” for the poet, the romantic notion of landscape becomes “terrain,” as in the terrain of war. Today, as Hirsch spells out in her commentary, the euphemistic use of the same “collateral damage,” to describe the unintended killing of civilians, and the use of “abuse,” to

De-Facing Derrida

Abstract: Throughout his life and his work, Derrida always called our attention to the innumerable possibilities of defacement, as well as to the limits of memory figured in "testamentary signs, traces, hypograms, hypomnemata, signatures and epigraphs, or autobiographical 'memoirs"' (Memoires, 29). One wonders, on occasions like these, an occasion that is already overdetermined, discursively (and otherwise), if it would be better to remain silent; to keep the act of memory secret or private, perhaps even intimate; not to risk betraying the other who is "in me" or "between us" to the spectacle of a loud display; to hold in confidence and completely away from the "public" the moments (however brief and, no doubt, inconsequential) I may have shared with one who is now departed and who only exists as a shadow, a shadow of a shadow, whose presence has been consigned to memory, forgetfulness, and de-facement. And yet, on occasions like these, we know that Derrida himself never chose to remain silent, or refused the strange imperative to speak publicly "in the memory of..."-of course, not without a series of endless qualifications that quickly became a hallmark of his manner (or style) of speaking on these occasions.

International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (review)

Abstract: archives of unpublished interviews surrounding Guyotat’s and Marianne Alphant’s Explications, for the preparation of Brun’s book. And Brun has made much of this mass of material. Though Guyotat’s novels are hardly autobiographical in any conventional sense, his occasional essays and interviews provide Brun with a rich source of detail and texture for her account of his life, of his life in writing, and of the mechanics of his unique writing process. Her writing is engaging and, more importantly, generous: rather than style her book as the final word on its subject (even in the moments when it may be) she writes as if she were merely providing information that the reader may find useful or not; she writes in preparation for our own reading and discussion of the work. Brun’s exceptional study fills a significant gap in our understanding not only of Guyotat’s work but of the currents shaping literature in France – and indeed shaping the French language – today. Like Michel Suyra’s writing on Georges Bataille or Richard Ellmann’s writing on James Joyce, Brun’s book will remain, I anticipate, the first and necessary point of reference for readers interested in Guyotat for years to come. Stuart Kendall Eastern Kentucky University

Le Cinema du diable: Jean Epstein and the Ambiguities of Subversion

Abstract: The words Georges Bataille used to introduce La Littirature et le Mal (1957) are well known: "Literature is the essential, or else it's nothing. Evil-a heightened form of Evil of which it is the expression, has for us, I believe, the supreme value. [...] Literature is not innocent, and, being guilty, it should in the end admit to it" (171-72). With these words, Bataille defends a sacrificial conception of literature and of the subversion of which it is the agent. In spite of everything, and contrary to his anthropologically inspired writings, Bataille is not concerned here with the social repercussions of evoking Evil as a category of symbolic representation. Despite the influence of Marcel Mauss, the principle of expenditure that invests the reader is not the object of his study; La littirature et le Mal is not about the sociology of gift exchange. If this phrase of Bataille's is well known, less familiar is that of Jean Epstein at the beginning of one of his last works, Le Cinema du diable (1947), whose terms strangely foreshadow those of the foreword of La Littirature et le Mal, ten years later: "Let's start the trial. The cinematographer pleads guilty" (339). With these words, Epstein begins a brilliant and rich demonstration that takes the form of a plea in defense of the only conception of cinema that he acknowledges-that of the avant-garde. Jean Epstein is known primarily for his work as a cinematographer: La Belle Nivernaise (1923), Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (1925), Mauprat (1926), La Glace a Trois faces (1927) and La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928), based on Poe's tale. In a vein that is halfway between ethnographic film and formal experimentation, Epstein made the works now known as his "maritime cycle": Finnis Terrae (1929), Mor'vran (1930), L'Or des Mers (1932), and Le Tempestaire (1947). But we cannot ignore the importance of his abundant theoretical works, written between 1921 and 1953, the year of his death. The argument of Le Cinema du diable, which follows in the footsteps of Epstein's previously published texts, such as Photogineinie de l'imponderable (1935) and especially L'Intelligence d'une machine (1946) rests on a paradox: cinema, Epstein argues, is intrinsically the work of the devil, since it diffuses a "secret propaganda" whose vectors are the irrational

Jacques Derrida or the Gift of Writing -- When Something Happens

Abstract: Like many others here, I have no desire to speak today.' I wish I did not have to. I have no idea what to say. That is why I am not going to say anything; instead, I plan to tell a few stories. I address my stories first and foremost to Marguerite Derrida, who I hope will recognize the memories I am going to evoke. Before beginning I also want to say that I will not be speaking alone today but for or rather with Suzanne Gearhart, who has her place, a very important place, in all the stories and memories I am about to relate.

The prescience of Élie Faure

Abstract: ion described by Faure in “La Prescience du Tintoret” is echoed in his description of the revelation of what he describes as his first glimpse of the cinema’s plastic potential. He writes: Je me souviens des émotions inattendues, que m’ont procurées, sept ou huit ans avant la guerre, certains films—français, ma foi!—dont le scénario était, d’ailleurs, d’une incroyable niaiserie. La révélation de ce que pourra être le cinéma de l’avenir me vint un jour, j’en ai gardé le souvenir exact, de la commotion que j’éprouvais en constatant, dans un éclair, la magnificence que prenait le rapport d’un vêtement noir avec le mur gris d’un auberge. (Cinéplastique 25)

Passing Time in Intercultural Cinema: The Exilic Experience of the Time-Passer in Atom Egoyan's Calendar (1993)

Abstract: I. In an age of technology in which the movement of the world is measured by the hegemony of the watch, the calendar, or the 24-hour cycle of news on CNN, it is possible to oppose another conception and another experience of time. No longer a stable, measurable, homogeneous category of temporal experience within us or without us, this conception would challenge the very premise of an age or an epoch because it would name the experience of time as pure passage.2 I would like to argue here that the rhythms and speeds of reproducible images resist inscription within the temporal economy of global capitalism or the narrative economy of the modern nation state, because they inscribe, make visible, and viscerally attractive, this form of passing and this state of passage. Corresponding to the idea of the loss of an absolute, empty, homogeneous experience of time is the conception of time as a multiple, contingent, heterogeneous series of experiences. Numerous theorists and critics have defended the hypothesis that the modern experience of exile inscribes itself in, and defines itself by, the loss of an absolute horizon of time and the discovery of a contingent and multiple series of temporalities. For a theorist like Homi Bhabha, the question then becomes: “What form of media—in the most general and generic sense of the technology of representation, the genre of mediation—would be appropriate to the modern experience of exile ? Is there a mediatic temporality that could be usefully described as exilic ?” ( ix). I would like to defend the idea that the features of this exilic temporality can already be discerned in the experimental practices of exilic and diasporic video and film. I am referring to what Laura U. Marks has called “Intercultural Cinema” in The Skin of the Film (2000) and what Hamid Naficy has called the “transnational-independent genre” in An Accented Cinema (2001).3 The very transnational independent form of production and reception of these videos and films, as well as their