The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema, by Timothy Holland

Timothy Holland, The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema (NY, Oxford University Press, 2024), ix + 270pp.

Reviewed by Arzu Karaduman

What did Derrida have to say about cinema? What kind of a role did the cinematic play in the philosopher’s oeuvre or his thinking in general? In The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema, Timothy Holland traces ‘the ostensibly paradoxical status of the traces of Jacques Derrida’s cinema’ (2), which is an impossible task because as Derrida confesses in ‘his most sustained commentary on the cinematic medium,’^[1] that is his Cahiers interview, he didn’t have any memory of the films he had seen (1-2). The connection Derrida makes between cinema and spectrality and hence the trace^[2] inspires Holland to dive into the ‘complex origins’ of Derrida’s thinking that does away with the concept of a fixed and stable origin (8-10). The dislocatory, disseminating and unruly gestures of all three terms demand a similar complexity in the production of this scholarly work from its author aiming to trace the cinematic in Derrida and Derrida in cinema. The fragmentariness of Derrida’s cinema, and its trace structure, hence leads Holland to engage with the many interlocutors of Derrida, from the texts he wrote to his coauthors and translators of his books to the scholars he inspired and the films he appeared in.

In his first chapter, ‘Ses fantômes,’ Holland lays out film theory’s neglect of Derrida and deconstruction that is unjustifiably blamed on Derrida’s supposed neglect of cinema. Holland highlights the presence of deconstructive manoeuvres during the height of semiotics and linguistics before film theory gradually abandoned Derrida and deconstruction in its evolution from the 1970s Marxist psychoanalytic approaches to the 1980s social-scientific quantitative studies and the proliferation of practice-based degree programs at higher education institutions. Published in 1989, Screen/play was considered by many to be the first sustained work on film and deconstruction. In Screen/play, Brunette and Wills explain that in the semiotic, Marxist and psychoanalytical theorizations of the 1970s and 1980s ‘political modernism’^[3] there was no room for deconstruction’s avoidance of metaphysically grounded answers (26-28).^[4] The suspicion in approaching Derrida and the failure to embrace a politics of difference, destinerrance, or dissemination of the trace structure that does away with binary oppositions are also implied as a culprit for what Lapsley and Westlake called the ‘structuring absence’ of Derrida in film theory (29-30).^[5] Holland states that Philip Rosen upholds Brunette and Wills’ explanation which is later rephrased in Lapsley and Westlake as a ‘structuring absence’ (28).^[6] To counter the claims about the absence of politics and cinema in the alleged early works of Derrida that are used to justify his absence in film theory of the corresponding era, Holland problematizes the periodization of Derrida’s work into an early linguistic vs late ethicopolitical one (32-33).

In ‘Ses fantômes,’ Holland starts weaving the thread of the significance of the cinematic in Derrida by turning to Derrida’s reference to the ‘cinematic model’ in ‘Force and Signification’^[7] before his better-known reference to cinematography in ‘Writing Before the Letter’.^[8] These two essays that later open Derrida’s 1967 masterpieces, respectively Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, were first published in the early to mid-1960s. In the following four decades, Derrida’s engagement with cinema certainly intensified, despite Derrida not choosing to tackle the subject head-on. Even his quickest references to cinema or cinematography display a rumination on the medium and its material specificity, movement, spatiotemporality, audiovisuality, technē and fascination of its audiences. In ‘Believing without Believing’, for instance, Holland elaborates on Derrida’s unfulfilled project of ‘cinema’s mode and system of belief’,^[9] or ‘believing without believing’^[10] as Derrida puts it in the Cahiers interview with de Baecque and Jousse titled ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts’. In Ken McMullen’s 1983 film Ghost Dance, in an improvised performance of playing himself in what he calls his ‘proper role’, Derrida confesses ‘Here, the ghost is me’ as he ruminates on spectrality and cinema’s mode of belief in his ventriloquized voice.^[11] About twenty years later in his Cahiers interview, Derrida elaborates on the cinematic ghost belief adding that sound recording is foundational to cinema as the originary origin of cinema when cinema is understood as ‘the recording of the world’s movement’ (qtd. in 84-85).^[12] This is a succinct theory of cinema that attends to its spectral, acti-virtual, testimonial audiovisuality. Reflecting on its closeness to the Bazinian ‘total myth,’ that is ‘the impossible dream … of archivization’ (85), Holland is curious if this audiovisuality at the core of cinema could be less about idealist aspirations towards artistic realism than ‘a dissimulation of self-annihilation’ as ‘an autoimmune impulse’ (207).

The particular task of tracing these traces in and of Derrida’s writings, interviews, TV and film appearances and ruminations on cinema is no easy task considering how prolific of an author Derrida was, the degree of rigor of each text he produced and other scrupulous thinkers’ rigorous inhabitations and solicitations of Derrida’s works. On top of the challenge of tracing the traces of Derrida in cinema and cinema in Derrida, Holland puts deconstruction into action simultaneously assessing and weighing the possibility of its applicability in his third chapter entitled ‘Inhabitations (Derrida and David Lynch)’. Thinking with the concepts of inhabitation, inheritance, signature, and tradition, Holland returns to or inhabits his proper role as a film theoretician and analyses the content and aesthetic language of many a Lynch film through those concepts. Lynchian cinematic operations are aligned with Derrida’s texts and deconstructive manoeuvres and many a time this unlikely couple meet in Holland’s analyses emphasizing the transgressed boundaries of the traditions of the cinematic and the philosophical. ‘The Remains and Solicitations of Cinema’ ambitiously self-dissects such an institutionalized operation of scholarly analysis and justification of the study of cinema as a discipline of a higher educational institution, namely the university.

The impossibility of tracing Derrida’s thoughts and philosophy as they relate to the cinematic is indisputably cancelled out in Holland’s text on Derrida’s own texts as well as the echographies, nodding to the title of a coauthored book by Derrida and Stiegler,^[13] of many texts produced by ‘his most astute and respected commentators and translators (such as Bennington, Wills, Peggy Kamuf, Michael Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, Nicholas Royle, Samuel Weber and J. Hillis Miller)’ (15). In this book, Holland converses with the outliers in the 1970s and 1980s turn away from Derrida such as Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier’s 1980s texts and cinécriture and Brunette and Wills’ two early books on the relationship between Derrida and film theory and the spatial arts respectively. However, Holland spares more substantial dialogues with the interventions, conceptions, reflections and philosophical thinking pursued by a second group of scholars including Akira Lippit, D. N. Rodowick, Brian Price and James Leo Cahill that has brought a Derridean lens to film and media studies since the turn of the 21st century. From questions of medium specificity to notions of belief, spectrality, time, visuality, technology, science, semiotics, psychoanalysis, politics, religion and the university and many more, Holland collects the pieces of a complex puzzle in The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema.

1. Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts,’ trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 37, nos. 1– 2 (2015): 23. ↑

2. De Baecque and Jousse, ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts,’ 26. ↑

3. D.N. Rodowick qtd in Holland, 27. D. N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). ↑

4. Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/ Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 21. ↑

5. Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006), 65. ↑

6. Philip Rosen, ‘Screen and 1970s Film Theory,’ in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 266. ↑

7. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force and Signification,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 16. ↑

8. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 9. ↑

9. De Baecque and Jousse, ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts,’ 27. ↑

10. De Baecque and Jousse, ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts,’ 27. ↑

11. Ghost Dance, directed by Ken McMullen (1983; West Germany/ UK, Channel Four Television and ZDF, 2008), DVD. ↑

12. De Baecque and Jousse, ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts,’ 32– 33 ↑

13. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002). ↑