A special issue of film-philosophy, Volume 12, Issue No.1, 2008.
Introduction
by Douglas Morrey
For a number of years now, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and the filmmaker Claire Denis have been describing intriguing circles around each other’s work, commenting, admiring, adapting, drawing inspiration from each other’s writings and films in order to pursue their own inimitable trajectories within philosophy and cinema respectively. Nancy’s interest in cinema was confirmed by his publication of a book devoted to Abbas Kiarostami (Nancy 2001a), part of a wider consideration of visual culture in his thought that notably takes in sacred Christian art (Nancy 2003a) and perhaps culminates in his lengthy theorisation of the image, Au fond des images (Nancy 2003b).
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Icon of Fury:Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day
by Jean-Luc Nancy
On the young bride’s shoulder is a mauve bite mark: the outline of a mouth, a double arch, teeth marks, open jaws, lips raised up over hard enamel. Not the barely open lips of a kiss on the skin; open, rather, as for a kiss on the mouth, but this time penetrating the skin: a bristling kiss with the teeth bared, extreme – at the limit of the kiss, or beyond. A cruel kiss: a kiss of flesh (cruor , bloody flesh). A young couple kisses in a plane: the beginning of the film. Later we will see this icon, not knowing when it was imprinted, like a tattoo or a branding with the red hot iron of some ancient justice.
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Open Wounds: Body and Image in Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis
by Douglas Morrey
Body and image are crucial to the elaboration of both Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy and Claire Denis’s work in cinema. Nancy’s short book about the body, Corpus (2006 [2000]), though it may initially have appeared as a minor work in his oeuvre, has since been shown, and notably since the intervention of Jacques Derrida, as the cornerstone of much of Nancy’s late thought. As Derrida (2000) demonstrates, Nancy’s interest in the body turns around the crucial trope of touch which comes to stand, in his philosophy, as the marker of the most fundamental limits that shape our understanding of and interaction with the world: between inside and outside, subject and object, matter and meaning. As such, the concept of touch frequently recurs in the discussion of art works, where the inscription of a material trace coincides with, or touches upon an evanescent sense. Nancy’s discussions of artistic meaning have frequently centred around images – both painterly and filmic – as the phenomena whereby the real, in manifesting its presence, is granted a certain sense.
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The Practice of Strangeness: L'Intrus - Claire Denis (2004) and Jean-Luc Nancy (2000)
by Martine Beugnet
A child of the era of decolonization, Claire Denis grew up in various regions of France’s sub- Saharan colonial lands, and was brought back to the ‘métropole’ as a teenager in the 1960s. She has thus had a double practice of foreignness, abroad, and in her ‘own’ country, which she did not know and where, in similar yet fundamentally different ways than in Africa, she felt like an outsider again. As the daughter of a colonial administrator – a childhood beautifully evoked in her first feature, Chocolat (1988) – she had stood as a highly visible embodiment of the Western presence on colonial soil. On her return to France, she would live through the more banal experience of becoming an invisible intruder, an exile at ‘home’– a theme explored in her subsequent works (Beugnet 2004). From the start, Denis thus drew on her personal knowledge of feeling rootless to explore issues that have remained at the heart of her filmmaking: the deeply perplexing questions of identity and alienation, assimilation and rejection, desire and fear inseparable from the post-colonial malaise that affects France with particular acuteness.
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The Community according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis
by Anja Streiter
In 2001, Jean-Luc Nancy was writing an essay (Nancy 2001a) about a film by Claire Denis (Beau travail 1999), while Claire Denis was reading Nancy’s essay on his heart transplant, L’Intrus (Nancy 2000b). Denis also read the book Jacques Derrida had written about Nancy’s work: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Derrida 2000). Denis felt that Nancy’s thinking and writing opened new ways for her in filmmaking and she continued thinking of L’Intrus while she was working on Trouble Every Day (2001). Finally she decided to contact Nancy for an adaptation of L’Intrus (Denis 2001). Philosopher and filmmaker have been engaged in a dialogue ever since. Nancy has written several essays on her films, they made a film together (Vers Nancy, 2002), Denis adapted L’Intrus in 2004 and they published a book together (Nancy 2005a). Such a steady dialogue is an exception even in France where film and philosophy in general rhyme more easily than in other countries. Still, it elucidates in an exemplary way the sensibilities and preoccupations of a specific generation of philosophers and filmmakers: those born in the years 1937-48, just before and during the German occupation or in the liberated ‘Empire éternel’ still fully immersed in the Vichy trauma.
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Deconstructing Community and Christianity: 'A-religion' in Nancy's Reading of Beau travail
by Laura McMahon
This article will argue that ‘A-religion’ (2004), Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of Claire Denis’s Beau travail (1999), can be understood in the context of concerns he explores elsewhere in his philosophical work.1 I will be focusing here on the ways in which his thinking of questions of community and Christianity (as they are elaborated in The Inoperative Community (1991) and Dis-Enclosure (2007) respectively) can be seen to influence and direct his reading of Denis’s film. Beau travail , this article will argue, comes to represent for Nancy a point of intersection between two main issues: the demand of community on the one hand and the deconstruction of Christianity on the other, that is, broadly speaking, the political on the one hand and the theological on the other.