Books by Laura McMahon
Introduction (uncorrected proof)
As they oscillate and flow between action and aesthetics, habit and creativity, rhythms are vital... more As they oscillate and flow between action and aesthetics, habit and creativity, rhythms are vital to our understanding of how subjectivities are constructed upon the shifting borderlines between life and art. Yet whilst rhythm remains an established concept in studies of French poetry, this is the first major overview to address the centrality of rhythm in fields such as literature, philosophy, dance and film, and to link these debates across periods and disciplines within French Studies. Drawing on thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva, Lefebvre, Meschonnic, and Virilio, the authors explore the concept of rhythms in relation to questions of temporality and the everyday, technology and the city, poetry and autobiography, space and the body in performance. In a wide-ranging series of innovative, theoretical and close readings, they examine issues which include the poetics of Mallarmé and Bonnefoy, the writings of Ernaux, Perec, Réda and Zobel, the choreography of Merce Cunningham and the cinema of Chris Marker.
Journal articles by Laura McMahon
NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, Jun 2015
Alphaville, 2014
This article explores the work of Claire Denis beyond the focus on the human body through which i... more This article explores the work of Claire Denis beyond the focus on the human body through which it is commonly read. Addressing Beau Travail (1999) and The Intruder (2004), I examine an ecological impulse that manifests itself through a nonanthropocentric detailing of the coexistence of body and landscape, and a nonhierarchical attentiveness to the distributed agencies of humans, animals and things. I draw here in particular on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the crystal-image and on Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking of ecotechnics, as elaborated in his essay on The Intruder (a film inspired by Nancy’s autobiographical essay, L’Intrus). In Beau Travail, Deleuzian crystals of time draw attention to the nonhuman histories of the landscape. In The Intruder, this crystalline structure persists, reactivating traces of nonhuman pasts, while a focus on canine gestures and responses signals nonhuman perceptual worlds in the present. Deleuze’s “Desert Islands”, another text that shapes The Intruder, offers a further way of reading the film’s attentiveness to the nonhuman—an attentiveness that extends, as Nancy suggests, to a consideration of environmental crisis.
Studies in French Cinema, 2014
Theoretical reflections on animals in film often invest in an ontological association between cin... more Theoretical reflections on animals in film often invest in an ontological association between cinema and the animal. This article traces this ontological association (in the work of André Bazin and Akira Mizuta Lippit in particular) yet also asks how reflections on screen animals might move beyond this theoretical trope. Denis Côté’s 'Bestiaire' (2012), an experimental documentary about a zoo, seems to affirm the idea that the onscreen animal reveals cinematic specificity. Including a sequence at a taxidermist, 'Bestiaire' reflects on the display of animals both living and dead, still and moving; it mobilises two key metaphors – cinema as zoo, and cinema as taxidermy – in order to interrogate the ontology of film. Yet 'Bestiaire' also moves beyond this theoretical conflation of cinema and animality. Drawing on work by Nicole Shukin and Anat Pick, I read the film’s strategies of framing and ‘witnessing’ as posing questions about zoo biopower, captivity and suffering. Invoking Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the Umwelt, I explore 'Bestiaire'’s attunement to nonhuman perceptual worlds. Initiating yet exceeding a reduction of the film animal to an expression of cinematic specificity, 'Bestiaire' explores two different concepts of life: the ‘bare life’ of zoopolitics and the life-worlds that expand, and make meaning, beyond this.
This article explores what cinema can contribute to recent philosophical engagements with animali... more This article explores what cinema can contribute to recent philosophical engagements with animality and what the work of contemporary French filmmaker Arnaud des Pallières in particular can bring to debates around the zoomorphic or ‘creaturely’ dimensions of film. Examining two works by des Pallières — the documentary Is Dead (Incomplete Portrait of Gertrude Stein) (1999) and the feature-length film Adieu (2003) — and drawing principally on the work of Jacques Derrida, the article attends to cinematic, historically-framed configurations of a shared vulnerability between the human and the animal. Such instances of commonality are shown here to unravel hierarchical taxonomies of being, in a rethinking of the ethics and politics of responsibility. These nonanthropocentric modes of cinematic inquiry also engage with issues of minerality and technicity, animating correspondences between forms of life and nonlife, philosophically broadening a consideration of relations between the human and the nonhuman.
This article examines Jean-Luc Nancy's essay on Nicolas Klotz's La Blessure (2004), a film that d... more This article examines Jean-Luc Nancy's essay on Nicolas Klotz's La Blessure (2004), a film that draws inspiration from Nancy's L'Intrus (2000) as part of a reflection on issues of immigration, hospitality, and exile. Nancy's essay engages with the sensory dimensions of Klotz's film, posing a relation between cinematic movement and the senses that is articulated by Nancy in terms of scarring, passage, and partage (sharing/dividing). The article argues that Nancy's reading weaves an implicit series of connections between the tactile, sensory, rhythmic elements of La Blessure and a politics of dislocation, exile, and (transnational) movement. In particular, in its intimation of links between commonality, justice, and the senses, the figure of partage in Nancy's essay can be seen to foreground the ethical and political address of the film.
This article stages an encounter between the work of contemporary Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre ... more This article stages an encounter between the work of contemporary Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and the thinking of the political elaborated by Jacques Derrida. In La Promesse (1996) and Le Fils (2002) the Dardennes explore issues of responsibility, justice, hospitality, and forgiveness, tracing fragile modes of relationality formed on the ruins of the paternal–filial bond. The article argues that Derrida's interrogation of the homofraternal logic underpinning democracy, and his attendant recasting of the political in terms of the promise, the incalculable, the spectral, and the démocratie à venir, offers a fertile framework for reading the deconstruction of the political in these two films and for thinking through the moves made here by cinema beyond the present, beyond ontology, and beyond identification.
Moving between Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on world-forming, community and the artwork, this art... more Moving between Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on world-forming, community and the artwork, this article argues that the question of space in Nancy’s work raises key issues which connect the ethical and the political to the aesthetic. Nancy configures space in
terms of the sharing and distribution of singular plural beings, as that which disperses the totality of the global and extends as the condition of justice. Tracing this elaboration of space through Nancy’s writings on sculpture and painting—attending in particular
to questions of distinction and demarcation—this article suggests a reading of Nancy’s thought as a perpetual attempt to do justice to the infinite and inexhaustible spacing of the world.
This paper traces the trajectory of Jean-Luc Nancy’s invocation of the real – and attendant issue... more This paper traces the trajectory of Jean-Luc Nancy’s invocation of the real – and attendant issues of the body, exteriority, presence and touch – across a range of his writings on film, including texts on Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis, Nicolas Klotz and Jean Renoir. Articulating a manifestation of the real shaped by opening and withdrawal, revelation and concealment, Nancy’s thinking of cinema allows for the possibility to engage with notions of contact, evidence and worldly presentation much further than a deconstructive unease with such terms might permit. Drawing on what Jacques Derrida has named Nancy’s ‘post-deconstructive realism’, this paper argues that in redeeming the real in the wake of deconstruction, Nancy provides fertile ground for thinking about existence, presence, justice and ethics in cinema.
This article takes as its point of departure Maurice Blanchot's pairing of Marguerite Duras and J... more This article takes as its point of departure Maurice Blanchot's pairing of Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Nancy in The Unavowable Community, and reads India Song, a film by Duras, through Nancy's work on community. Just as Nancy articulates a thinking of community in terms of touch, so Duras develops her own filmic vocabulary of touch to examine questions of being-with, exposure, love and sacrifice against the background of a negative model of community. The article argues that the figure of touch in India Song, both between bodies onscreen and between viewer and film, becomes central to the film's engagement with issues of community, finitude and the political.
Chapters by Laura McMahon
The Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border, ed. Marjorie Vecchio, 2014
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, edited by Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland, 2014
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Books by Laura McMahon
Journal articles by Laura McMahon
terms of the sharing and distribution of singular plural beings, as that which disperses the totality of the global and extends as the condition of justice. Tracing this elaboration of space through Nancy’s writings on sculpture and painting—attending in particular
to questions of distinction and demarcation—this article suggests a reading of Nancy’s thought as a perpetual attempt to do justice to the infinite and inexhaustible spacing of the world.
Chapters by Laura McMahon
terms of the sharing and distribution of singular plural beings, as that which disperses the totality of the global and extends as the condition of justice. Tracing this elaboration of space through Nancy’s writings on sculpture and painting—attending in particular
to questions of distinction and demarcation—this article suggests a reading of Nancy’s thought as a perpetual attempt to do justice to the infinite and inexhaustible spacing of the world.