Of a Cinematic Construction in Progress

Louise Burchill (bio)
University of Melbourne

A Review of Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift. U of Minnesota P, 2016.

That there is no sustained reflection on cinema in Jacques Derrida’s corpus, despite its consideration of photography, painting, drawing, architecture and the subject of vision and visuality per se—as well, of course, as philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, history, law, sexuality, and so on—can be taken as an object of speculative inquiry and pursued in two principal directions. On the one hand, the question or problem is what it is in, or of, cinema that could occasion such an occultation in Derrida’s work. Would not some characteristic of the cinematic apparatus or medium have determined an inattention more apotropaic than merely circumstantial through its resistance to the conceptual constellations comprising Derrida’s thought? And, if cinema is Derrida’s blind spot, what specifically is he incapable of countenancing, or simply doesn’t wish to see? On the other hand, should the lack of any rigorous reflection be construed not as a problem but as an indication that a Derridean “theory of film” is rather to be gleaned by refraction—that is to say, in the light cast on cinema within other trajectories of his thought—then a very different line of inquiry is opened up. Here the question is neither “what (is it) about cinema?” nor “why not cinema?” but rather “where, then, in Derrida’s oeuvre, is cinema to be found?”

In Screen/Play (1989), the first book on Derrida and cinema, Peter Brunette and David Wills responded to the latter question with the unabashed affirmation of “everywhere”—as adduced principally by deconstructive deliberations on (or “around”) framing and supplementation: “Given that everything he writes about a medium is precisely that, about or around it—in other words concerned as much with the separation between inside and outside as anything else—what would he have to have written before we could say he had written on cinema?” (99). Everything Derrida wrote—which was, as the authors note, predominantly in reference to literary and philosophical questions in the period their book was published— would then be potentially applicable to film theory, with Brunette and Wills thus taking up the task of “translating” Derrida’s concept of writing to the medium of cinema. One review of Brunette and Wills’s book aptly notes that their application or translation of “writing” to cinema “dissipate[s] the phenomenality of film into the recesses of an allegorical (literary) theory,” incurring thereby the loss of cinematic specificity (1131). That review is all the more apposite here because its author, Akira Mizuta Lippit, has now written in his turn a book (or perhaps more accurately, a book-in-progress) on the theory of cinema “adrift” in Derrida’s corpus.

As indicated by its title, Cinema without Reflection equally follows the line of inquiry for which Derrida’s lack of reflection on cinema is not in itself a matter of interrogation: such speculative absence being of “no concern for those who have nonetheless perceived the tremors and evocations of the cinematic in this philosopher’s writings,” as Lippit put it in his review of Screen/Play (1130). Yet no less than Lippit’s criticism of Brunette and Wills’s “construct[ing] the premises of cinema within the confines of the grammatical,” these lines presage the difference between Lippit’s critical endeavor and that of his predecessors. Rather than apply to cinema concepts elaborated in respect to other (literary or philosophical) objects of inquiry, Lippit proposes to chart the topoi in Derrida’s thought that “appear to point towards cinema” and which thereby deictically compose “a secret thesis on film”—a “scrypt” deposed by Derrida, “elsewhere” (2). Of course (and in all fairness to Brunette and Wills), the years separating the publication of their book from Lippit’s saw the omnivorous extension of deconstructive schemas to just about every field or problematic one can think of, including a multiplication of texts by Derrida on photography and other visual arts that might seem particularly propitious for a deictic delineation of a covert theory of cinema.¹ Even more pertinently, from the mid-90s on, Derrida was to make a number of interventions in the field of cinema itself. For example, he appeared as both actor and subject—or, as he put it, “an Actor who plays the role of himself”—in three films, a documentary and two “docufictions,” respectively released in 1994, 1999, and 2005 (although Derrida’s cinematic debut actually dates from 1983, when he appeared in the experimental film by Ken McMullen, Ghost Dance). Several important interviews about, or touching on, cinema—often themselves filmed and all of which relate, in part at least, to the films in which Derrida plays his “autobiographical role”—also date from this period, as does a text again addressing one of his cinematic forays (“Letters on a Blind Man: Punctum caecum”). For Akira Lippit, these “on-screen” and on-the-screen interventions are absolutely crucial; they are the veritable site—a medium-specific site—of Derrida’s film theory: “If Derrida has indeed formulated such a theory,” he stipulates, “then it is performative, which is to say, it takes place in taking place— a site-specific theory of film that occurs on screen” (21).

This site-specific performativity accrues more than one sense over the course of Lippit’s argument. First and foremost, it refers to the fact that Derrida’s theory of film is, for Lippit, enacted and delivered within the frame of film itself, such that “Derrida’s cinema,” albeit “without reflection,” is nonetheless actualized and instantiated in voice and images. One such instantiation Lippit returns to repeatedly is the scene from Ghost Dance in which Derrida first declares himself to be a ghost before setting down the “algebraic formulation”: “Cinema plus psychoanalysis equals a science of ghosts” (Derrida, Echographies 117). This is indeed one of Derrida’s most incisive declarations of cinema’s affinity with spectrality but, in addition, as Lippit emphasizes, we witness here Derrida “yield[ing] to the phantom”:

Because he is playing himself in a film, Derrida says he lets the phantom (his voice and image) speak on his behalf. It takes over and takes his place; he yields to it, but it also becomes him and marks his return . . . The other Derrida on-screen is a phantom second person (you) that takes his place. (31–32)

In this spectral scene, Derrida is indeed presenting his film thesis in a performative mode, yet he is equally—in a second, “theatrical,” sense of performativity—performing himself, even if this entails his “playing […] an Actor who was, as it were, playing myself” (Derrida, Tourner 74). It is the inextricable intertwinement of these two performative occurrences—Derrida’s saying and doing his theory of cinema on screen, and Derrida’s playing himself in a phantom exchange of “one Derrida for the other”—that comprises, in fact, the medium-based articulation of Derrida’s film theory as Lippit understands it. This articulation therefore determines the topoi in Derrida’s oeuvre that “point towards cinema”: namely, spectrality, autobiography, and narcissism. These three topoi or discourses—themselves intertwined and interwoven in Derrida’s site-specific interventions—structure Lippit’s exegesis of Derrida’s “secret” film theory; his text tempering in this way, one might say, the extravagance of Brunette and Wills’s claim that a theory of film exists potentially “everywhere” in Derrida’s oeuvre.

Yet the final pages of Lippit’s text introduce a topological complication in the context of returning to the medium-based performativity of Derrida’s film theory, now endowed with a third sense. The cinematic scene that prompts, or performs, this complication is less Derrida’s instantiation of his phantom status in Ghost Dance (though this does equally haunt Lippit’s analyses here) than his reflection on the myth of Echo and Narcissus in Amy Kofman and Kirby Dick’s Derrida. Situating Ovid’s tale of metamorphosis as a “privileged narrative” throughout Derrida’s oeuvre, Lippit writes that it provides “an illustration and orchestration of Derrida’s film thesis” (35) because—in addition to its invocation of voice and image, reflection and repetition—it finds its resolution in the recognition that subjectivity is irreducibly derived from the other (such that I discover myself “in the form of another, in another’s form—image and voice—in you” [61]). Derrida’s statement on-screen that he is “acting as both Narcissus and Echo at one and the same time” is, that said, what specifically informs Lippit’s final rendition of the “medium specificity” articulated by Derrida’s film theory. As is the case predominantly throughout Lippit’s text, this thesis is less set out constatively, in a series of argued points, than (at least at first) by way of paraphrase, reiteration, and word association. If Derrida acts as both Echo and Narcissus, he is, Lippit glosses, “[i]n the middle, mediating between Echo and Narcissus, . . . their medium” (61). From this, Lippit adduces that the specificity Derrida would attribute to cinema as a medium is neither formal nor technical (pace Greenberg or Krauss), but related to “the specific place of the medium in the middle” (61). Certainly, this definition gestures towards the cinematic techniques of “eyeline” and what Lippit names “echophony,” both of which enable a spectral exchange or “channeling” of voices and images, and thereby the transition of subjectivities: another’s voice allows me to speak on my behalf; my image becoming another’s “leads me to you” (60). However, this “medium” or “in the middle” is ultimately to be understood in a performative sense: “In this scenario Derrida is himself the medium” (61). That is, Derrida is “in the middle,” mediating qua “spiritual medium” the cinematic transaction of voice and image, but this role or place of in-between also marks Derrida himself, with “medium” now to be understood as “the place where phantom subjectivity takes shape.” Lippit immediately qualifies this place as the “trace of subjectivity”—a place, he states, that Derrida designated “already, long ago,” Derrida having in this sense “always been thinking about cinema in one form or another” (62). With this assertion, however, not only does Derrida’s medium-based performativity abruptly exit the confines of the film frame, as it were, but the place of cinema in Derrida’s oeuvre—in its qualification as “the place of the trace,” “always already,” “in one form or another”—exceeds its refraction in the discourses on narcissism, spectrality and autobiography, ultimately laying a claim to … everywhere.

II

Once identified as the medium where spectral subjectivity takes shape—and thereby the place designated by Derrida from the very beginning for the play of the trace—cinema would, then, always-already be found everywhere in his oeuvre. That Lippit’s contention replicates, in its underlying logic, Brunette and Wills’s claim of cinema’s omnipresence in Derrida’s thought does not mean, however, that it likewise incurs the loss of cinematic specificity. Locating cinema’s singularity in its instantiation of the logic of the trace pinpoints with far more acuity than do professions of cinema’s “writtenness” the topos in Derrida’s thinking that displays the greatest “proximity to the topographies and matrices of the cinematic apparatus” (to cite once again Lippit’s Screen/Play review; 1130). It is also counter-signed by Derrida himself when he insists that everything he advances concerning spectrality—and, hence, the “essence” of cinema qua an unprecedented instantiation of spectral logic—is informed by his deconstruction of Husserl’s living present, which was to reveal, of course, a constitutive play of traces at the very heart of the latter: at once the index of a “past that had never been present” and an irreducible exteriority preventing any identity to be closed within a proper “punctiform” interiority. This “radicalization of phenomenology”² does indeed inform everything Derrida wrote, his deconstructive logic or matrix first devised in respect of philosophy/phenomenology spawning a multitude of paleonymic strategies in relation to the multifarious and disparate objects he was to focus on. Let us retrace our steps, therefore, back from “everywhere” to “medium specificity,” and turn now to the way in which Lippit would have us understand cinema’s configuration within Derrida’s deconstructive matrix—qua the place, let us say, of the trace of subjectivity.

In keeping with Derrida’s pronouncements on spectrality and cinema, the opening chapter of Cinema without Reflection sets off from the scene in Ghost Dance in which Derrida both proclaims and performs this cinematic spectrality, with Lippit focusing here on not only Derrida’s algebraic formulation but equally his preceding definition (or demonstration): “cinema . . . is the art of allowing phantoms to return.” Lippit immediately glosses this definition in terms that resonate with what he will later designate “phantom narcissism”: “It [cinema] is the advent of oneself as another, as a phantom second person, ‘you’” (7). This inflection of Derrida’s own analysis of cinema’s spectrality and (thereby) specificity is significant. If “cinema is spectral in its very essence” for Derrida, this follows from its “structural specificity” of reproducing the event, scene or person captured by the camera with such an effect of “proximity” that this filmic inscription appears “live” and/or “living” (Echographies 39). In keeping with the deconstructive logic instantiated by cinematic spectrality, this “restitution of the living present” nevertheless bears death and absence within itself, insofar as these are structurally inscribed in any means of reproduction, however “live” or “im-mediate” its re-presentations appear. Crucially, Lippit later explicitly disagrees with claims that situate cinema’s specificity in such effects of “liveness,” and his refutation thereby encompasses the structural specificity adduced by Derrida, even if this is in no way acknowledged. In lieu of cinema’s unprecedented capacity of “’quasi presentation’ of an ‘itself there’ of the world whose past will be, forever, radically absent,”³ Lippit once again promotes the motif of phantom narcissism: “the singularity of cinema [is] not that it projects images and sounds as if live but that it brings the image and sound together into an impossible metonymy of the subject, of myself” (43).

Whatever Derrida’s own pronouncements on cinema’s specificity, the secret film thesis to which his work points—if one attends to its deictic constellations and to the flashes and glimpses therein of a hidden “scrypt”—would be this: cinema’s singularity is that it is an apparatus of phantom identification, a machine that “allows one to believe another’s image, another’s voice, to be one’s own, as an image and voice proper to oneself, but also as one, image and voice” (43). That this unavowed thesis, “articulated without the use of its proper name” (57), would be uncovered by the analytic method of deciphering a script “written elsewhere” recalls to us quite simply (however evident be this point) its status as a construction: Derrida’s secret film thesis is, by definition, a thesis that Lippit assembles or pieces together on the basis of the material at his disposal, the traces he surmises this thesis to have left behind. Thus his way of proceeding less by constative or argumentative exposition of the discursive topoi he singles out in Derrida’s corpus than by recourse to word, or thematic, association, and the reiteration—or echoing—of Derrida’s statements in order to inflect and open these to a new, hitherto secret, implication (in accordance with his notion of echopoiesis?). In this light, though, the question confronting the reader of Cinema without Reflection is less the purport of Lippit’s Derridean film thesis per se than whether this thesis is constructed in a manner that “holds.” Whatever one might think of the thesis, it is the viability, the consistency, or indeed—to use Freud’s criterion—the “correctness” of its construction that must be pondered. As a film theory imputed to Derrida, does it, when all is said and done, hold up?

III

Lippit’s construction—his crafting of the discourses of spectrality, narcissism and autobiography into Derrida’s secret thesis—may be seen to wobble, waiver, and, on the whole, founder at a number of crucial junctures. Of the two such instances to be considered here, the first and clearest consists in attributing to Derrida an argument he is in fact contesting but which Lippit nonetheless draws on in order to bolster his contention that cinema’s phantom narcissism is at once constitutive and revelatory of a subjectivity always achieved only in the second person, such that “you” would be the subject’s most proper, and secret, name. According to Lippit, Derrida endorses this conception of the subject’s secret proper name when, in the context of a discussion on psychoanalysis and the history of the names in one’s life, he states:

the ideal pole or conclusion of analysis would be the possibility of addressing the patient using his or her most proper name, possibly the most secret. It is the moment, then, when the analyst would say to the patient ‘you’ in such a way that there would be no possible misunderstanding on the subject of this ‘you.’ (“Roundtable” 107)

However, Derrida is not here stating a position he himself holds, but is paraphrasing the stance of his interlocutor (Patrick Mahony) in order to mark his disagreement. “Pure address” or “a secret proper name” is impossible, Derrida immediately counters (now speaking in his “proper voice”), because

the most secret proper name has its effect of a proper name only by risking contamination and detour within a system of relations . . . I can never be sure when someone says to me . . . ‘you, you,’ that it might not be just any old ‘you.’ . . . This is inscribed in the most general structure of the mark. (“Roundtable” 107)

One cannot conclude, as does Lippit, that “Derrida’s proper name that comes at the end of psychoanalysis” can equally be said to end in cinema (with this shared status of endpoint following from cinema’s being “also the site in which a proper name appears . . . the apparition of this second person ‘you’ where I am” [30–31]). Quite simply: because there is not for Derrida a proper name that comes at the end of psychoanalysis, any film thesis constructed on the basis of a claim or misreading to the contrary cannot be attributed to him—not even were this a thesis that, by virtue of its being secret, would purportedly be all the “more properly” Derrida’s for being without the insignia of its proper name.

The second instance of Lippit’s “instable construction” also relates to phantom narcissism’s exchange of one singularity for another, focusing in this case on the place in Derrida’s oeuvre where the thesis that subjectivity is constituted from the outside would show itself to be deictically indexed to cinema. Lippit finds this in Derrida’s reading of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (a text seeking to define the nature, or eidos, of photography), which Lippit intertwines with propositions extrapolated from Barthes’s text itself. Put as succinctly as possible: Lippit’s construction is based on the “superposition” (19) to cinema of Barthes’s concept of the punctum, a fortuitous element in a photo that provokes a sudden emotional response in the viewer, quite unlike the general interest (the “studium”) solicited by the photograph’s “subject” or “signification.” Lippit then refracts Derrida’s reading of the punctum as “the site of metonymy, of an illicit, even supernatural, exchangeability” (12) firmly in the direction of a secret film thesis. Yet the punctum as “site of metonymy” only yields its full resources for filmic narcissism—on, and for, Lippit’s argument/construction— when understood to pass “from the outside” into the spectator’s body. Only “once it enters the body” does its singularity, on the one hand, become metonymic and thereby pluralize itself, “mak[ing] possible the exchange of one singularity for another, me for you” (13). On the other hand, and at the same time, the irreducible singularity and unique referentiality Barthes attributes to the punctum are shown to be “an effect of the outside, of an external light that enters into the system of representation through a puncture on the human body” (13). Here, Lippit mobilizes Barthes’s etymologically-inspired description of the punctum’s singular and “poignant” affect as “piercing, wounding, bruising, pricking” the viewer. The punctum’s force of puncture becomes indissociably intertwined with the motif of the eyes qua “punctures in the body” in Lippit’s construction (12), as well as with the cinematic convention of the “eye-line,” to which Derrida refers in relation to Ghost Dance. When re-watching this film several years after its making, Derrida was to re-share, as it were, an eye-line with the actress Pascale Ogier, who had since died—and who was indeed reappearing therefore, as one come back from the dead, to confirm the existence of ghosts. For Lippit, this experience exemplifies “the phantom economy of an eye-line,” on which he calls to consolidate his construction of a film thesis instating subjectivity to come from the outside: as an eye-line without symmetry—no reciprocity and no reflexivity being possible in the field of vision between a ghost and the living (14)—the phantom gaze “turns,” states Lippit, “me into you” (15). Which is equally to say—via a citation from Lacan on subjectivity’s constitution by the gaze, and Barthes’ description of the photograph as literally an emanation of the referent, “entering the spectator’s interiority through the force of puncture” (17)—that “I,” the subject/spectator, is “constituted from the outside” (16).

What makes this construction problematic is not simply (as in the instance of misquotation above) that it attributes to Derrida a stance he did not hold, and with which he would not hold; it is also the confusion and confounding of things he did say with positions foreign to his own and which he sought in fact to deconstruct. I shall attempt to demonstrate, or unravel, (some of) this confusion by way of but two remarks.

1/ To attribute to Derrida the thesis that the punctum’s seeming irreplaceability and unicity are an effect of “an external light” entering into the system of representation “through a puncture on the human body” is to attribute to him mutatis mutandis a position that he ceaselessly subjected to deconstruction from 1967 on: namely, that of an “originary impression” that would be the source or absolute beginning of the movement of constitution within—to use Lippit’s terms—the system of representation. Derrida identifies this position with Husserlian phenomenology, and it is, as such, significant that he recasts Barthes’s claims for photography qua an emanation of a past reality—of that which has taken place only once—as an echo of Husserl’s insistence that whatever is constituted in intentionality is first of all conditional upon an originary, punctual impression that is necessarily foreign to the intentional movement itself (Copy 8–9). Here it suffices to note Derrida’s succinct refutation of Barthes’s qualification of the photograph as a luminous emanation of the referent, by which the rays of light having touched a real body before the camera lens would be transmitted to the viewer: “what Barthes calls ‘emanation’ . . . is not a ray of light” (Echographies 122).

2/ Derrida does indeed locate a site of metonymy in the punctum. Moreover, as Lippit states, he does so “following Barthes” insofar as Barthes recognizes in the punctum a force of metonymy. Yet Derrida adduces that, drawn thereby into a general exchangeability, the punctum’s singularity “pluralizes itself” such that “the unique” is immediately, and everywhere, repeated. This development, far from following Barthes—for whom the punctum’s metonymic force entails neither substitutability nor generality of address (Camera 73)—seeks instead to unsettle, dismantle, or simply disqualify the latter’s notion of “the referent” qua the necessarily real thing having been present before the camera lens and, as such, an indubitably singular occurrence that conjoins past presence and reality. Derrida’s and Barthes’s differend in this respect—pertaining to nothing less than the very nature, or eidos, of, let us say, (cinematic) perception/representation—is hardly minimal: Barthes’s notion of the referent, like the punctum that is inseparable from it, runs directly counter to Derrida’s deconstructive tenet that “the manifest evidence of an originary presence” can only be referred to within the movement of differance—the “play of the trace”—as an “absolute past” (Grammatology 72).

This being the case, surely one should pause before amalgamating the resources of Derrida’s and Barthes’s respective determinations of the punctum? Let me be clear: to detect in Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Barthes a discursive development that points towards film—the punctum as the site of metonymy, of substitutability, “the metonymy of the phantasy of the eye,” “metonymy of the world,” “everything everywhere”—is one thing; to conjoin and confound this deictic constellation with themes extrapolated from Barthes’s own determinations of the photographic punctum and referent—eyes as punctures through which the punctum passes, the latter’s emanation of external light irradiating the body: becoming the “metonymy of the body,” as well too, as the point of contact, or eye-line, between two bodies: me and you—is quite another. Such a confusion of contradictory theses yields a film theory that would configure cinema’s “place of phantom subjectivity” (the place of the play of the trace) as, on the one hand, dependent on an originary impression irreducible to consciousness, entering by “puncture” from the outside, thereby conjoining—on Barthes’s understanding— past presence and reality; whereas, on the other hand, it would itself be what determines any such (notion of) originary impression as an “absolute past,” with the play of the trace understood here as “the memory of something never having had the form of being present.” In short, for this inconsistent, hybrid theory to be Derridean, Derrida would have had both to deny and to recognize cinema to call into question deconstruction’s foreclosure of an alterity irreducible to the internal workings of an auto-affective apparatus.

The claim that cinema’s singularity consists for Derrida in its instantiation of the logic of the trace—that this is where Derrida’s thinking displays the greatest proximity to the topographies and matrices of the cinematic apparatus—is a thesis, a line of speculative inquiry, well worth pursuing. In his prefatory remarks, Lippit describes Cinema without Reflection as “a draft, sketch or design” of a work perhaps to come⁴; a description that aligns with the University of Minnesota’s “Forerunners” series, which publishes works “written between fresh ideas and finished books.” For Lippit’s sketch to be “finished,” the film thesis attributed to Derrida would best be fleshed out, I would advance, not only by tempering its inconsistencies with a stronger general construction but, equally, by reprising the idea at its source.

Footnotes

1. Derrida had, however, written texts relating to both photography and painting before 1989; notably, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” Right of Inspection and The Truth in Painting (published in French respectively in 1981, 1985 and 1978). These three texts are, moreover, mobilized by Brunette and Wills in their argument for the relevance of the schema of “framing” to cinema.

2. See Note 6 in Chapter 5 of Specters of Marx (189).

3. “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” By Antoine de Baecque & Thierry Jousse. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Discourse, Vol. 37, No. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2015), p. 33.

4. Cinema without Reflection is, it should be noted, a revised and slightly amplified version of an article published in Discourse in 2015 and comprises, as such, a small volume of but some 70 pages. Lippit’s reading of Freud’s “On Narcissism” constitutes the major addition to the original text.

Works Cited

• Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard, Hill & Wang, 1981.
• Brunette, Peter and David Wills. Screen/Play. Derrida and Film Theory. Princeton UP, 1989.
• Derrida, Jacques. Copy, Archive, Signature. A Conversation on Photography. Edited by Gerhard Richter, translated by Jeff Fort, Stanford UP, 2010.
• ———. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins UP, 2016.
• ———. “Roundtable on Translation.” The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Edited by Christie V. McDonald, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Schocken, 1985.
• ———, and Safaa Fathy. Tourner les mots. Au bord d’un film. Galilée/Arte, 2000.
• ———, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Translated by Jennifer Bajorek, Polity Press, 2002.
• ——— “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” By Antoine de Baecque & Thierry Jousse, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Discourse, Vol. 37, No. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2015), pp. 22–39.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Constructions in Analysis.” Standard Edition 23. Hogarth Press, 1964, pp. 257–269.
• Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Review of Screen/Play. MLN 105 no. 5, 1990, pp. 1130–1133.