Laura McMahon (University of Cambridge)
The Justice of Images: Derrida and Nancy on Film
Jacques Derrida’s Echographies ([1996] 2002) and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Evidence of Film (2001) mark two recent instances of a move in contemporary French philosophy to think the cinematic image in relation to issues of existence and mortality, hospitality and the event, technicity and time. Both Derrida and Nancy configure the filmic image as a mode of incalculable address which raises questions of responsibility, justice and the ethical. Yet there are significant distinctions to be drawn between the two. For Derrida, the filmic image denotes a form of presence in perpetual deferral; cinema becomes a space of spectrality and the messianic, rendering justice to those no longer or not yet present. In contrast, Nancy’s thinking of cinema engages with notions of presence, worldly presentation and the real much further than Derrida’s deconstructive unease with such terms permits. For Nancy, justice takes place via cinema’s opening onto the world and a material coming-to-presence of the image.
Moving between Nancy’s ontology and Derrida’s ‘hauntology’, cinema can be reconfigured here, in the wake of deconstruction, in terms of what Derrida names Nancy’s ‘post-deconstructive’ realism, thereby providing fertile ground for thinking anew about existence, presence, mourning and ethics in film. Drawing on these reflections, this paper will explore Ken McMullen’s 1983 film Ghost Dance (in which Derrida himself appears) and Arnaud des Pallières’ 2004 film Adieu (on which Nancy has written a commentary) in order to examine issues of memory and mortality, hospitality and community, justice and time. Together Derrida and Nancy thus provide ways to rethink cinema’s relation and responsibility to the past, present and future, as the filmic image here is variously connected to modes of presence and spectrality, the material and the incalculable.
Moving between Nancy’s ontology and Derrida’s ‘hauntology’, cinema can be reconfigured here, in the wake of deconstruction, in terms of what Derrida names Nancy’s ‘post-deconstructive’ realism, thereby providing fertile ground for thinking anew about existence, presence, mourning and ethics in film. Drawing on these reflections, this paper will explore Ken McMullen’s 1983 film Ghost Dance (in which Derrida himself appears) and Arnaud des Pallières’ 2004 film Adieu (on which Nancy has written a commentary) in order to examine issues of memory and mortality, hospitality and community, justice and time. Together Derrida and Nancy thus provide ways to rethink cinema’s relation and responsibility to the past, present and future, as the filmic image here is variously connected to modes of presence and spectrality, the material and the incalculable.
