Cinema Derrida: the law of inspection in the age of global spectral film and video

Abstract

My contribution in the interdisciplinary field of film studies involves expanding the concept of spectrality from its linguistic, deconstructive context to articulate new cinematic subjectivities and visual forms of mourning. Spectrality emerges as a key theme in Derrida’s cinematic collaborations, like Ghost Dance (1983), D’ailleurs Derrida (1999), Derrida (2002), and has gained traction in the postmodernist cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and contemporary documentary. Unlike many of his generation, Derrida made it a critical point to experiment with film from the early 1980s onward by exploring and exposing the archival, haunting nature of film. This dissertation studies the cinematic collaborations of Jacques Derrida through the lens of both primary and secondary Derrida literature with a view to critically examine the evolution of this idea that became so central in his philosophical project and important for his legacy. With postmodernism there is a break from the past and all we are left with ostensibly is history without the foundations that would make it a teleological process. Deconstruction’s critique of the transcendental signifier helped pave the way for much of this shift in thinking. Hauntology comes into high relief with post-modernism and poststructuralist philosophical movements to articulate the haunting of the sign. Poststructuralism is the last great philosophical attempt to explain this sense of flickering between presence and absence, and how spectrality stages an encounter with the other and with the law of another time. I draw out the main tenets of spectrality from Derrida’s seminal texts Of Grammatology and Specters of Marx and other writings, like Echographies of Television, in order to fill a gap in studies of Derrida and film. For this project, I draw on communication, media, and film theorists, including Jaimie Baron, Barthes, Edgar Morin, Mulvey, Michael Naas, and John Durham Peters.