'May I be alive when I die!' Dreaming of reanimation in Flaubert, Beckett and NDiaye

In his chapter ‘“May I be alive when I die!’ Dreaming of (re)animation in Flaubert, Beckett and NDiaye’, Andrew Asibong argues that the protagonists of Flaubert, Beckett and NDiaye do not truly live live, and that, in exactly the same way, they fail to properly die. Asibong unpacks this strangely ‘undead’ quality that permeates the worlds of Flaubert, Beckett and NDiaye by focusing on the analogous way in which all three writers play – in a remarkably ghoulish manner – with the representation of suicide. After examining a few instances of bewildering pseudo-resurrection in Flaubert and Beckett, Asibong suggests, via the psychoanalytic work of André Green and his theory of the ‘dead mother’, some potentially instructive emotional frameworks through which to read the failure of their characters to finally die

Discussion of Green's "Melanie Klein and the Black Mammy: An Exploration of the Influence of the Mammy Stereotype on Klein's Maternal and its Contribution to the 'Whiteness' of Psychoanalysis"

This article is a response, in cinematic, historical and autobiographical terms, to Emily Green’s ‘Melanie Klein and the Black Mammy: An Exploration of the Influence of the Mammy Stereotype on Klein’s Maternal and Its Contribution to the “Whiteness” of Psychoanalysis’. The author attempts to open up Green’s analysis to a wide range of aesthetic, emotional and political implications, moving between a consideration of the ‘passing’ motif in Douglas Sirk’s film Imitation of Life (1959); thoughts on racialization and trauma in psychoanalytic history more generally; and reflections on the author’s own experiences of racialization and collective disavowal in psychotherapeutic training

Beyond a carnival of zombies: the economic problem of ‘aliveness’ in Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud

Laurent Cantet’s film Vers le sud (2005), based on three short stories by the Haitian-Canadian author Dany Laferrière, explores the problems of ‘aliveness’ and ‘deadness’, both physical and psychical, questioning the systemic and emotional methods by which these states become racialised and concomitantly commodified. Central to the film’s living potency is the acuity of its politicised analysis: from start to finish, Vers le sud shines an unswerving spotlight on the simultaneous precariousness and over-exposure of certain kinds of Black (in this case poor Haitian adolescents’ and children’s) lives. The film’s politics, grounded in a lucid presentation of the material and ideological conditions of racialised inequality on which neo-colonial, neo-liberal (and, in this case, sexualised) tourism takes place, are combined with a specifically cinematic critique of the gaze of the wealthy, White female subject who buys the power not only to look at this life, but also, vampirically, to ingest its perceived qualities of vitality. Politics and aesthetics come together in the film to deconstruct a set of (frequently masked and insidious) operations formed at the disavowed crossroads of capitalist, racist and child-abusing phantasies of corporeal and emotional appropriation

'Then look!' Unborn attachments and the half-moving image

This article explores the emotional impact on the viewer of disturbing and disorienting images of infant-caregiver relationality in four “melo-horror” films: Imitation of Life (Stahl, 1934), Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959), The Brood (Cronenberg, 1979), and Beloved (Demme, 1998). Comparing some of these filmic images with the infant performances of “disorganized” attachment styles captured on videotape by attachment researchers such as Mary Main, the author argues that the filmed audiovisual enactment of relational trauma, whether in the context of scientific research or cinematic art, offers the spectator an opportunity to work consciously and unconsciously with representations of unbearable psychic and psychosocial experience—both her own and that of others—that may hitherto have been thought unrepresentable or simply not thought at all

Meat, murder, metamorphosis: the transformational ethics of François Ozon

This article argues that French filmmaker François Ozon's fantastical explorations of murder and metamorphosis provide a surprisingly ethical commentary on the tightly interwoven cultural processes of social reification and identity fetishization. Using the two early films "Sitcom" (1998) and "Les Amants criminels" (1999) as a point of departure, it claims that Ozon is essentially concerned with the different ways in which the subject appropriates alterity in his or her attempt to instigate alternative existences. Using the theories of Deleuze and Guattari on ‘deterritorialization’, those of Slavoj Zizek on ‘the Act’, and those of Giorgio Agamben on ‘the witness’, it will present three distinct stages of transformation at work in Ozon's films: from a seeming championing of transgressive social ‘difference’ for its own sake emerges an exploration of impossible, psychotic metamorphosis, and finally a linking of such ‘unspeakable’ change to a potentially political process of traumatic dehumanization. Real, that is, ethical, transformation in Ozon's films can come about only through the blinding perception of one's enslavement to fetishistic desire, and through the radical dismantlement of this desire and the (excessively) coherent socio-political identity it confers upon one. Ozon's demanding approach to different modes of transformation deserves close analysis at a time when increasingly rigid conceptions of social identity are again becoming dangerously allied to lazy conceptions of social change, in France and elsewhere

La mise en scène de la blancheur dans le cinéma Français

Book synopsis: "Whites", "poor whites", "anti-white racism" ... These expressions borrowed from the historical lexicon of the extreme right have redone a sudden appearance in the French public debate since the 2000s. While France continues reaffirm his Republican credo that there can be no racial distinction, up to banish the word "race" of legislation, how to understand this emergence of the "white matter" in the political and media rhetoric? On PS Manual Valls once tried to put the image "some whites, some white, some blancos ..." in his beautiful city of Evry; on behalf of the UMP, Jean-Francois Cope is he went to war against the "anti-white racism", while the publisher and polemicist Richard Millet is not afraid to say that through the Châtelet-Les Halles 6 pm is an "absolute nightmare [...] especially when I am the only white person." The debate on "visible minorities" prégnant last twenty years, and has moved to a questioning of the "invisible majority". But what does being white? A color? It would be so simple ... For the first time in France, this book seeks to decline the nuances of this controversial term in order to examine the relevance and uses. Written by contributors backgrounds, opinions and diverse backgrounds, it is both an exploration of contemporary sociopolitical discourse, a historical analysis of its genesis and its colonial heritage, but also a reflection on how this "white" colors our cultural imaginary, from cinema to literature, rap television

"Mulier Sacra": Marie Chauvet, Marie Darrieussecq and the Sexual Metamorphoses of `Bare Life'

In his recent work "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life", the prolific Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben elaborates an idiosyncratic and highly provocative conception of sacredness. I want to explore the ethical and political implications of Agamben’s concept of "homo sacer" or sacred man, juxtaposing his philosophical insights into the brutal workings of modern ‘democratic’ power with comparable literary visions provided by two controversial women authors: the Haitian novelist Marie Chauvet (1916– 1973) and the French writer Marie Darrieussecq (b 1969). Chauvet and Darrieussecq’s disturbing, sexually violent narratives both illustrate and anticipate Agamben’s theory of the modern ‘camp-like’ State, but in doing so problematize Agamben’s apparent presentation of its deathly processes as essentially indifferent to the question of sex

Unrecognizable bonds: bleeding kinship in Pedro Almodóvar and Gregg Araki

Up to the early 2000s, Pedro Almodóvar’s and Gregg Araki’s films, for all their colourful queerness, could be read as symptomatic of a quasi de rigueur trend in art-house cinema towards the gleeful deconstruction of the love story. But more recent work by the two auteurs suggests that each is increasingly interested in more demanding visions of how humans might achieve something like loving relations, visions based neither on cinema’s return to traditional narratives of romance nor on its brittle championing of post-modern desire, but rather on its dreaming of a shared survival of – and identification with – something like unrepresentable suffering. This article argues that the shift by Almodóvar and Araki into new cinematic representations of non-realist and unthinkable forms of love, beyond either singularizing romance or multiplicitous desire, is both ethically and politically crucial in an era of the increasingly easy leftfield posture of post-ideological disillusionment

Nouveau désordre: diabolical queerness in 1950s French cinema

Book synopsis: This collection brings together scholars from across the humanities in a fresh examination of queer lives, cultures and thought in the first full post-war decade. Through explorations of sexology, literature, film, oral testimony, newspapers and court records it nuances understandings of the period, and makes a case for the particularity of queer lives in different national contexts – from Finland to New Zealand, the UK to the USA - whilst also marking the transnational movement of people and ideas. The collection rethinks perceptions of the 1950s, traces genealogies of sexual thought in that decade, and pinpoints some of its legacies. In so doing, it explores the utility of queer theoretical approaches and asks how far they can help us to unpick queer lives, relationships and networks in the past