Of a Cinematic Construction in Progress. A Review of Akira Mizuta Lippit's Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift

Abstract

Of a Cinematic Construction in Progress.A Review of Akira Mizuta Lippit's Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift Louise Burchill (bio) Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift. U of Minnesota P, 2016. That there is no sustained reflection on cinema in Jacques Derrida’s corpus, despite its consideration of photography, painting, drawing, architecture and the subject of vision and visuality per se—as well, of course, as philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, history, law, sexuality, and so on—can be taken as an object of speculative inquiry and pursued in two principal directions. On the one hand, the question or problem is what it is in, or of, cinema that could occasion such an occultation in Derrida’s work. Would not some characteristic of the cinematic apparatus or medium have determined an inattention more apotropaic than merely circumstantial through its resistance to the conceptual constellations comprising Derrida’s thought? And, if cinema is Derrida’s blind spot, what specifically is he incapable of countenancing, or simply doesn’t wish to see? On the other hand, should the lack of any rigorous reflection be construed not as a problem but as an indication that a Derridean “theory of film” is rather to be gleaned by refraction—that is to say, in the light cast on cinema within other trajectories of his thought—then a very different line of inquiry is opened up. Here the question is neither “what (is it) about cinema?” nor “why not cinema?” but rather “where, then, in Derrida’s oeuvre, is cinema to be found?” In Screen/Play (1989), the first book on Derrida and cinema, Peter Brunette and David Wills responded to the latter question with the unabashed affirmation of “everywhere”—as adduced principally by deconstructive deliberations on (or “around”) framing and supplementation: “Given that everything he writes about a medium is precisely that, about or around it—in other words concerned as much with the separation between inside and outside as anything else—what would he have to have written before we could say he had written on cinema?” (99). Everything Derrida wrote—which was, as the authors note, predominantly in reference to literary and philosophical questions in the period their book was published— would then be potentially applicable to film theory, with Brunette and Wills thus taking up the task of “translating” Derrida’s concept of writing to the medium of cinema. One review of Brunette and Wills’s book aptly notes that their application or translation of “writing” to cinema “dissipate[s] the phenomenality of film into the recesses of an allegorical (literary) theory,” incurring thereby the loss of cinematic specificity (1131). That review is all the more apposite here because its author, Akira Mizuta Lippit, has now written in his turn a book (or perhaps more accurately, a book-in-progress) on the theory of cinema “adrift” in Derrida’s corpus. As indicated by its title, Cinema without Reflection equally follows the line of inquiry for which Derrida’s lack of reflection on cinema is not in itself a matter of interrogation: such speculative absence being of “no concern for those who have nonetheless perceived the tremors and evocations of the cinematic in this philosopher’s writings,” as Lippit put it in his review of Screen/Play (1130). Yet no less than Lippit’s criticism of Brunette and Wills’s “construct[ing] the premises of cinema within the confines of the grammatical,” these lines presage the difference between Lippit’s critical endeavor and that of his predecessors. Rather than apply to cinema concepts elaborated in respect to other (literary or philosophical) objects of inquiry, Lippit proposes to chart the topoi in Derrida’s thought that “appear to point towards cinema” and which thereby deictically compose “a secret thesis on film”—a “scrypt” deposed by Derrida, “elsewhere” (2). Of course (and in all fairness to Brunette and Wills), the years separating the publication of their book from Lippit’s saw the omnivorous extension of deconstructive schemas to just about every field or problematic one can think of, including a multiplication of texts by Derrida on photography and other visual arts that might seem...