Tympan Alley: Posthumanist Performatives inDancer in the Dark

Abstract

While it is Derrida's late work on the ‘animal question’ that brought his insistence on limitrophy between species to wider attention, it is also named as the general condition of the limits in the much earlier text, ‘Tympan’. There, in dislocating the tympanum, the margins of philosophy are eaten. Equally, given the rhythmic address of the tympanum, we might say that the margins of philosophy are beaten.This paper considers the persistent play on rhythmic sounds in Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark as a ‘tympanising’ or derision of the limits, notably of the limits of the law in both juridical and symbolic senses, as they also work the edges of the film's two styles (broadly, realism and musical). In a provocative analysis of this film, Cary Wolfe suggests that we might understand Selma's vocal style (given singular expression by Bjork) as a refusal of the phallic imposition of language, and that her virtually suicidal submission to the death sentence allows for a notion of a ‘posthuman feminine’. ‘Tympan Alley’ redirects this tantalising term ‘posthuman feminine’ through a more consistently Derridean line of thought to sound out the implications of b/eating the limits through Selma's oblique ear.