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The Ethics of Uncovering Something Else in Histoire(s) du cinema
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the essay\u27s opening paragraph:Marguerite Duras prefaces the second edition of Le navire night, from which an excerpt is cited above, by explaining that after writing the story of a man named J.M., everything came too late, including the realization of the film version of Le navire night. Once the event has been written and the common night of history been closed up, did she have the right to flash a light into the darkness to go back and see? The only seeing through cinema that was possible, she continues, was to film the failure, the disaster of the film. But how does one film the failure of realizing a film adaptation of a written text, which itself was transcribed from an oral re-telling of a story, which itself was adapted from memory? The event already took place – writing, “this history here” –, leaving cinema to film what never took place, namely, the film itself. As Jean-Luc Godard confirms in a chapter titled Seul le cinéma in Histoire(s) du cinéma, not only in the form of his project as a whole but also more explicitly in one shot that positions two close-up photographs of his face with the sound of Paul Hindemith’s “Funeral Music” and this text: “Faire une description précise de ce qui n’a jamais eu lieu est le travail de l’historien.” Describing the rise of the film Le navire night from its disastrous death, Duras writes: “On a mis la caméra à l’envers et on a filmé ce qui entrait dedans, de la nuit, de l’air, des projecteurs, des routes, des visages aussi.” The camera turned upside-down, or in the other sense, inside-out, Duras films the entrance of the exterior, a sort of a Levinasian visage. The question no longer is one of having the right but of the duty to re-write history, as is insinuated by the reference to “The Critic as Artist” written across one of the photographs mentioned above, which is again a gesture of Godard’s positioning himself as the critic whose role Oscar Wilde defined: “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
Inner Experience and Worldly Revolt: Arendt’s Bearings on Kristeva’s Project
Get PDFWhat is at stake when political revolt depends upon radical inner experience? Is the only route to cultural and political change, as Kristeva seems to argue, through personal introspection and revolt? If we want more from life than the freedom to channel surf, as she says, need the direction of inquiry be primarily inward? Need there be an either/or of psychical versus public life? Is the only answer to social and political dead ends really found by turning inward? Is the micropolitics of the couch the path to freedom? “Today,” Kristeva writes, “psychical life knows that it will only be saved if it gives itself the time and space of revolt: to break off, remember, re-form. From prayer to dialogue, through art and analysis, the crucial event is always the great infinitesimal emancipation: to be endlessly recommenced.” In this essay I ask whether we might move Kristeva’s “New Forms of Revolt” from the couch to the polis with the help of one of her major interlocutors, Hannah Arendt, who reminds us that thinking is always a plural affair. I develop a link between Arendt’s thinking and Kristeva’s revoltto show how thinking-as-revolt puts subjects in relation to each other and to the political. Such a political culture of revolt can engage in the work needed to move beyond adolescent fixations in melancholic times. And with it we might in fact create more meaning for our lives.
Ready When You Are: A Correspondence on Claire Elise Katz\u27s Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism
Get PDFA Conversation with Claire Katz about her book, Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism
\u27So Much the Worse for the Whites\u27: Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution
Get PDFThis article sets out from an analysis of the pioneering work of Susan Buck-Morss to rethink, not only Hegel and Haiti, but broader questions surrounding dialectics and the universal brought to light by the Haitian Revolution. Reading through the lens of C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, I seek to correct a series of ironic silences in her account, re-centering the importance of Toussaint’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and underlining the dialectical importance of identitarian struggles in forging the universal. Finally, I offer Frantz Fanon’s reformulation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—overlooked in Buck-Morss’ account—as a corrective that allows us to truly rethink progress toward the universal in decolonized dialectical terms
New Forms of Revolt
Get PDFPopular uprisings, indignant youth, toppled dictators, oligarchic presidents dismissed, hopes dashed, liberties crushed in prisons, fixed trials, and bloodbaths. How are we to read these images? Could revolt, or what is called “riot” on the Web, be waking humanity from its dream of hyperconnectedness? Or could it just be a trick played on us so that the culture of spectacle can last longer? But what “revolt” are we talking about? Is it even possible
Self-Mimetic Curved Silvering: Dancing with Irigaray
Get PDFIn lieu of an abstract, here is the opening paragraph of the essay:One of Luce Irigaray’s many important contributions to philosophy consists in invoking dance more frequently than any other canonical Western philosopher. Unfortunately, however, her treatment of dance has rarely been treated substantively in the secondary literature, especially in regard to her most influential commentators, including Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and Margaret Whitford. Accordingly, I will begin my first section by situating the theme of dance in Irigaray’s work in the context of that of the latter three philosophers. I will attempt to show, moving from Butler to Grosz to Whitford, an increasing tolerance for, and ultimately even celebration of, ambivalence in the form and content of Irigaray’s work. I will then conclude my first section by considering Elend Summers-Bremer’s “Reading Irigaray, Dancing” in tandem with Gerald Jonas’ Dancing: The Power, Pleasure and Art of Movement. My suggestion here will be that a certain Irigaray-informed approach to social dance could be seen as foreshadowing Irigaray’s later work on a new, more positive, kind of heterosexual relationship. Overall, then, this first section provides the justification for my thematic focus on dance
Review Essay: Dwayne Tunstall, Doing Philosophy Personally: Thinking about Metaphysics, Theism, and Antiblack Racism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013)
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Review Essay: Ann Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary
Get PDFReview essay of Ann V. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary
L’apostrophe de l’événement: Romano à la lumière de Badiou et Marion
Get PDFLes pensées contemporaines de l’événement, tout comme la langue de tous, déterminent l’événement comme étant une exception sur l’ordre normal du monde. À la différence des faits, les événements ont un caractère exceptionnel qui provient pour l’essentiel de leur caractère assigné, adressé. Alors que les faits intramondains sont ouverts à tous, l’événement est toujours vécu à la première personne, de façon unique et non-itérable. Grâce à une lecture comparée des théories de l’événement de Claude Romano, Alain Badiou et Jean-Luc Marion, nous questionnons ce problème de l’adresse et posons une adestination essentielle de l’événement, nous obligeant par là à penser non pas une exceptionnalité de l’événement mais au contraire sa grande banalité.Les pensées contemporaines de l’événement, tout comme la langue de tous, déterminent l’événement comme étant une exception sur l’ordre normal du monde. À la différence des faits, les événements ont un caractère exceptionnel qui provient pour l’essentiel de leur caractère assigné, adressé. Alors que les faits intramondains sont ouverts à tous, l’événement est toujours vécu à la première personne, de façon unique et non-itérable. Grâce à une lecture comparée des théories de l’événement de Claude Romano, Alain Badiou et Jean-Luc Marion, nous questionnons ce problème de l’adresse et posons une adestination essentielle de l’événement, nous obligeant par là à penser non pas une exceptionnalité de l’événement mais au contraire sa grande banalité
The Call and the Phenomenon
Get PDFOriginally published in French as François Laruelle, "L’Appel et le Phénomène," Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 1996 (1): 27–41. English translation by Kris Pender