Questions to Luce Irigaray

This article traces the "dialogue" between the work of the philosophers Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas. It attempts to construct a more nuanced discussion than has been given to date of Irigaray's critique of Levinas, particularly as formulated in 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas' (Irigaray 1991). It suggests that the concepts of the feminine and of voluptuosity articulated by Levinas have more to contribute to Irigaray's project of an ethics of sexual difference than she herself sometimes appears to think

Queering the Family: Fantasy and the performance of sexuality and gay relations in French cinema 1995-2000

This paper looks in detail at the representation of sexuality in the family in three films of the mid to late 1990s, Balasko’s Gazon maudit, Berliner’s Ma Vie en rose, and Giusti’s Pourquoi pas moi? Its double focus is the changing structure of the French family at the end of the twentieth century, considered against key political developments such as the pacte civil de solidarité (PaCS) of November 1999, and the cinematic fantasies in which these structural changes are envisioned. Fable, fantasy or anti-realism mark the endings of Gazon maudit and Pourquoi pas moi?, while sequences of childhood fantasy punctuate the entire length of Ma Vie en rose. No particular theoretical approach to fantasy is preferred, but the conclusion of the paper is that cinema may be a privileged cultural vehicle for politically enabling fantasy, and that the three films discussed demonstrate this where the French family is concerned

Bringing bodies back in: for a phenomenological and psychoanalytic film criticism of embodied cultural identity

This article reassesses the concept of identification in line with the increased importance phenomenology has taken on in film-philosophy of the 1990s and 2000s. In the 1970s and 1980s, a Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of identification dominated film theory and criticism, and spectatorial engagement with elements of films was understood as what psychoanalysis calls secondary identification – the identification with stable subject-positions (characters) in the film-text. But non-Lacanian psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology offer film-philosophy a very different understanding of identification as a non image-based, ‘blind’, bodily affective tie that is established between spectators and what Vivian Sobchack describes as ‘the sense and sensibility of materiality itself’ (Sobchack 2004, 65). By first exploring how this more bodily (for psychoanalysis, primary) identification is theorized by psychoanalysts (Freud, Paul Schilder, Henri Wallon) and by film theorists (Kaja Silverman), the article proposes that film criticism make greater use of it in order to engage more meaningfully with the visible cultural specificities – size, skin colour, age, sex – of the images of bodies viewed on cinema screens. It is not just ‘the’ body that needs bringing back into thinking about film spectatorship, but culturally differentiated bodies, both on the screen and in the auditorium. A psychoanalytic and phenomenological film criticism of embodied cultural identity, one that attends to the materiality of the film and of the body-images and objects on the screen, may be the most culturally and politically useful successor to ‘screen’ theory of the 1970s and 1980s

Feminist phenomenology and the film-world of Agnes Varda

Through a discussion of Agnès Varda’s career from 1954 to 2008 that focuses particularly on La Pointe Courte (1954), L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958) The Gleaners and I 2000), and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), this article considers the connections between Varda’s film-making and her femaleness. It proposes that two aspects of Varda’s cinema – her particularly perceptive portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment – make a feminist existential-phenomenological approach to her films particularly fruitful. Drawing both directly on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and on some recent film- and feminist-theoretical texts that have employed his insights, it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy in The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda’s blurring of fiction and documentary, and the dialectical relationship of people with their environment often observed in her cinema. It concludes that both Varda’s female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement and relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which Varda’s own subjectivity is registered within her film-texts