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DECONSTRUCTION, FEMINISM, FILM SARAH DILLON Deconstruction, Feminism, Film Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity

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DECONSTRUCTION, FEMINISM, FILM SARAH DILLON Deconstruction, Feminism, Film Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity DECONSTRUCTION, FEMINISM, FILM SARAH DILLON Deconstruction, Feminism, Film Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity Victoria L. Evans EVANS 9781474409391 PRINT.indd 3 04/05/2017 11:00 Deconstruction,Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic ModernismFeminism, Film and the Culture of Modernity Sarah Dillon Victoria L. Evans EVANS 9781474409391 PRINT.indd 3 04/05/2017 11:00 For Gav Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Sarah Dillon, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Manila Typesetting Company, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3419 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3420 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3421 8 (epub) The right of Sarah Dillon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations of Works Cited by Jacques Derrida ix Introduction: Departing from Proust 1 1 Deconstruction, Feminism, Film 14 I It-Woman vs We-Women 17 II Singular Spectatorship 24 2 Supplanting Spectrality 40 I The ncidentalI Philosopher 41 II Feminist Trompe L’Oeil 47 III Feminist Camp Artifice 53 3 Feminist Countersignature 66 I Female Infidelity 69 II Adaptation as Reproduction 78 III Phenomenal Film 82 IV Dorsal Philosophy 88 4 Auto/biography 97 I Biography, or, the Realist Paradox 98 II Quer Autobiography (directed sideways) 109 5 How Do I Look? 129 I He Can’t See Queerly 130 II Metonymic Reading 139 III Veering from Borges 144 Bibliography 151 Filmography 162 Index 163 Figures 2.1 The ungrammatical knife 43 2.2 Pascale and the knife 44 2.3 Marianne on Marx’s tomb 49 2.4 Exposure of the trompe l’oeil 49 2.5 Rape scene 53 2.6 Performance artist Stuart Brisley 54 2.7 Performance artist Stuart Brisley 54 2.8 Pascale and Marianne keeping it real 58 2.9 Pascale and Marianne camping it up 58 3.1 Filmmaker Joanna released 76 3.2 Sophie and Theo reunited 76 3.3 Martin McQuillan and playground 80 3.4 Joanna reproducing portrait 80 3.5 Lucy reproducing poster 81 3.6 Lucy reproducing portrait 81 3.7 Sophie, wide shot without audience 87 3.8 Sophie, medium shot 87 3.9 Sophie, wide shot with audience 87 3.10 Marian Hobson reading from Derrida’s ‘Envois’ 92 4.1 Derrida’s wife Marguerite leaving their home in Paris 104 4.2 Split screen: Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington above; Derrida’s apartment below 106 4.3 Derrida’s sideways glances (1) 113 4.4 Derrida’s sideways glances (2) 113 4.5 Derrida’s sideways glances (3) 113 4.6 Sarah Polley at the mixing console 118 4.7 Six-second pause on Sarah Polley 119 5.1 Denaturalising heterosexuality 136 5.2 Entering the world of the two young girls 138 5.3 The irectorD transcribes Borges’ ‘Covered Mirrors’ 146 5.4 The irectorD transcribes more of Borges’ ‘Covered Mirrors’ 146 Acknowledgements I have carried this book for sixteen years. As I explain in the Introduction, it was conceived in 2001 in Loughborough when, as a PhD student, I listened to Derrida talk at John Schad’s ‘Life After Theory’ conference. The ideas fer- tilised that day have divided and multiplied over the years. I’ve produced essays that tackled some but not all of them. I’ve taught classes which helped my thinking develop, as encounters with the best students do. I’ve had two job moves and two children along the way: inevitably, this slowed things down, a phenomenon both frustrating but also productive, since it meant the book had time for its own unhurried gestation. It is certainly a different book to the one I would have produced without the interruptions of starting a family; I am equally sure that it is a better one. In fact, I do not think it could have been written until now. Many people have touched my life and thought over those fifteen years, contributing in their individual ways to the book’s development, leaving traces of their intellectual DNA. In particular I would like to thank Mark Breeze, Angus Brown, Joanna Callaghan, James Clackson, Tom Conley, David Cunningham, Jennifer Cooke, Michael Dillon, Zara Dinnen, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Bob Eaglestone, Elspeth Gillespie, Xiaolu Guo, Sarah Jackson, Dragan Kujundžić, Laura MacMahon, Laura Marcus, Leonie Mellinger, Cillian Ó Fathaigh, Joanna Page, J. D. Rhodes, Nicholas Royle, Richard Rushton, John Schad, Murray Smith, Alice Thorpe, David Trotter, Kate Wilkinson and Emma Wilson. A special word goes to my friend Nora Bartlett whose love of life was unsurpassed. She died too soon, as this book was being finished. She adored film and I wish she had been able to read this book – I think she would have delighted in it. I would like to thank the anonymous readers for Edinburgh University Press, who provided detailed and helpful feedback on the draft manuscript, and my editor Gillian Leslie for her faith in this project and her enthusiasm and support, just when it was needed most. Punctum Books have given kind permission to reproduce in revised form in Chapter 1 some material from my essay ‘Derrida and the Question of “Woman”’, in Christian Hite (ed.), Derrida and Queer Theory (Brooklyn: viii Deconstruction, Feminism, Film Punctum Books, 2017), pp. 108–30. Opening material in the Introduction has been extracted and adapted from my journal article ‘Life After Derrida: Anacoluthia and the Agrammaticality of Following’, Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006): 97–114, with a licence to reproduce obtained from Brill. High- quality original files for stills in Chapter 3 fromLove in the Post were kindly provided by Joanna Callaghan. My thanks to Benoît Peeters and Marie- Françoise Plissart for giving me permission to reproduce photographs from Right of Inspection in Chapter 5, and for providing high-quality copies of the images © Les Impressions Nouvelles/Marie-Françoise Plissart, 2017. Details of the most recent French edition of Droit de Regards are available at https://lesimpressionsnouvelles.com/catalogue/droit-de-regards/ (last accessed 18 September 2017). Finally, there have been a special few people whose company – intellectual and otherwise – has been constant over the past decade and a half. To them in particular I give my thanks, for supporting me when I was in danger of collapsing, and for keeping my feet on the ground when I was in danger of taking off: my parents, Mick and Jeannette Dillon; my sister, Jayne Dillon; my children, Isaac and Charlotte. Above all, I acknowledge my husband, fellow feminist and cinephile, Gavin McHugh. He turned me on to film in the first place and for that, for his unfailing support of my career, and for everything else, I dedicate this book to him. Abbreviations of Works Cited by Jacques Derrida A ‘Aletheia’, trans. Pleshette DeArmitt and Kas Saghafi,The Oxford Literary Review 32.2 (2010): 169–88. ACM ‘A Certain “Madness”: Must Watch Over Thinking’, with François Ewald, Educational Theory 45.3 (September 1995): 273–91. AF Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). AI ‘“As if I were Dead”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (eds), Applying: To Derrida (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 212–26. ASR Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean François Bonhomme, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). C ‘Choreographies’, with Christie V. McDonald, Diacritics 12.2 (Summer 1982): 66–76. CAS Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). CG ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, with Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 37.1–2 (Winter/Spring 2015): 22–39. CM ‘Circumfession’, in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). CS ‘Countersignature’, trans. Mairéad Hanrahan, Paragraph 27.2 (2004): 7–42. D In Frédéric Brenner, Diaspora: Homelands in Exile voices (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). DIS Dissemination (London: Athlone Press, 1981). DOD ‘Derrida on Derrida – Q and A with Jacques Derrida’, in Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Screenplay and Essays on the Film Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 110–17. DRB ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (eds), x Deconstruction, Feminism, Film Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 264–98. E ‘Envois’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). EC Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, with Bernard Stiegler, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). FT ‘following theory: Jacques Derrida’, in Michael Payne and John Schad (eds), life.after.theory (New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. 1–51. GD ‘The hostG Dance: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, with Mark Lewis and Andrew Payne, trans. Jean-Luc Svoboda, Public 2 (1989): 60–74. GOD The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). JD Jacques Derrida, with Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
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