The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television

What would constitute a queer-feminist alliance from a schizoanalytic viewpoint? This essay argues that schizoanalysis may function as a new means to ally feminist and queer analytic machines by effecting a radical desexualization of queer theory—a utopian gesture designed to liberate queer theory from its transcendental illusion, namely, the concept of sexuality itself. The essay therefore offers an account of the role sex and sexuality play in Anti-Oedipus as functional parts in the schizoanalytic conceptual system. It is shown that Anti-Oedipus’ use of sex and sexuality in relation to gender, sexual difference, and the “n sexes” originates in Deleuze’s Proust and Signs, and that by rearranging the relations between these categories, schizoanalysis implies the very form of queer-feminist alliances. The essay concludes with an analysis of criticisms of the #Me Too Movement for under-representations of sexual and other minorities, whereby the calculative logic of these criticisms becomes an index of a deeper problematic that reveals #Me Too’s true revolutionary power: a “NO” directed at one of capitalism’s most sinister expressions of cynicism, trafficking. This analysis demonstrates and concretizes the essay’s argument for the desexualization queer theory, or the overcoming of sexuality, as a gateway to broad coalitional alliances with feminism.

Is the concept of queer translation yet another recent, unexciting addition to the theoretical toolbox of queer theory and translation studies? Or does it actually make a difference and offer an opportunity for both queer theory and translation studies to reevaluate their critical practices? Employing Gilles Deleuze’s form of immanent critique, this article reconstructs a new concept of queer translation, redefined here as the minor art of desexualizing language in a repetition of difference. Understood as essentially pragmatic, problematic, and genetic, the Deleuzian critique of queer translation begins by scrutinizing two current conceptions of queer translation and their attempts at establishing the difference they make. I trace their critical impasses back to the type of thinking (or “image of thought”) that had engendered them: one that is based on a “weak” concept of difference in queer theory, and the other—on a “weak” concept of repetition in translation studies. In order to create a new concept of queer translation, I then turn to Deleuze’s concept of writing as pivot on which the theoretical concept becomes pertinent from a practical standpoint. This move not only renders the concept more coherent and effective, but also enable us, I argue, to discern existing practices of queer translation at play even in original works of literature. In the final section of the article, this argument is thus demonstrated in a discussion of French author Marie Darrieussecq’s literary technique in the novel Truismes (Pig Tales).

What could queer theory do and become had it not been so entrenched in the notion of sexuality?

Holding queer theory to its promise to revolutionise our ways of thinking, Nir Kedem offers a forceful encounter between Deleuze’s work and contemporary queer thought to provide both critical and practical means to re-evaluate and rework key concepts and methods, especially sexuality. Kedem provides a new pragmatic approach to working with Deleuze across multiple disciplines, a rigorous demonstration of its critical and creative power, as well as extensive analysis of the relations between Deleuze and queer thought. All of which exemplify that despite – if not owing to – the unassuming role of sexuality in his thought, Deleuze proves to be queer thought’s true ally.

"The relation of Orson Welles's 1962 virtuoso adaptation of Kafka's "The Trial" to the Holocaust is hard to overlook. Welles himself stated that he believed Kafka would have written The Trial differently after Auschwitz,  a claim which resonates with the freedom Welles had allowed himself in his adaptation, and indeed the film contains several clear allusions to the Holocaust.
In my presentation I would like to suggest that the Holocaust functions in the film as part of a strategy Welles incorporates in order to shift The Trial from a metaphysical notion of absence into a political notion of oppression. In Welles's adaptation of The Trial the metaphysical interpretation of Kafka's texts was cremated along with the millions in the Nazi death-camps. Absurd and meaninglessness are for Welles unfortunate results of political conspiracy and so never beyond the defiance and triumph of man and his spirit.
As part of this strategy of shifting the metaphysical into the political Welles displays a clear departure from key elements of the literary text. Welles's choice to make the most radical changes in crucial points of the narrative implies the importance they carry in his intention for the adaptation. I would argue that These Changes of the literary text, along with the adding of Holocaust allusions, mark Welles's The Trial as a statement against the "Kafkaesque" in the name of humanity in a post-Holocaust existence."

The Remnant of the Kafkaesque: Orson Welles Adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial

Ido Lewit, Film and Television Department. Tel-Aviv University

In his 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka's famous novel The Trial Orson Welles has deviated from the original in almost every conceivable aspect, from changing the characterization of the protagonist to omissions and additions to the plot itself. Indeed, Welles himself stated that The Trial is "my own film and not an illustrated Kafka". Moreover, as he acknowledges in an interview with Cahiers du Cinema in 1965, in relating the novel's anti-humanism to the atrocities of the Nazi regime during WWII Welles found moral grounds for changing radically the two concluding chapters of the story.
One of the most striking deviations of Welles' adaptation from its source is found in the film's rendering of "The Parable of the Law". In Kafka's novel the parable is told to the protagonist Josef K. by a priest while the polemical discussion between the two over the meaning of the parable becomes an intricate reflexive discussion on the unreadability of texts and the problem of their interpretation, a discussion which has long since been widely regarded as a nucleus of Kafkaesque absurd. In his adaptation, Welles removes the threat of loss of absolute meaning and of criteria for truth and morality posed by the scene's bleak existential uncertainty. Welles avoids entering the Kafkaesque maze of endless interpretation by turning the scene into a manifestation of human vitality and revolt against institutionalized power.
In my presentation I would like to suggest that despite Welles' mighty effort to "clean" the scene from any Kafkaesque traces, its reflexive nature holds a remnant of the Kafkaesque, which makes Welles' The Trial, at least at this single instant, more faithful to its source than most other film adaptations of Kafka (such as Soderbergh's Kafka or Haneke's The Castle for instance). Welles chooses to excessively aestheticize this scene by an abundance of shadow-play, expressive lighting and dominant sharp montage. Moreover, instead of a priest Welles has the advocate, a character played by him, standing behind a projector and "telling" the parable in the form of a visual slide-show – the very same slide-show which had opened the film. Welles thus can be said to be casting himself as the executor of this very adaptation.
Tracing the remnant of the Kafkaesque within a reflexive awareness to the act of adaptation in Welles' film could be read not only as a property of this adaptation's fidelity to the novel, but perhaps as an essential feature of any cinematic adaptation of Kafka's literature seeking to preserve a trace of Kafkaesque absurd. "

The cinematic quality of Kafka's prose, as noted by his biographer Max Brod, has been clear to many of the most important commentators on 20 th century art. Theodor Adorno, for one, claimed that Kafka's texts agitate the reader to the point he fears they will "shoot towards him like a locomotive in a threedimensional film." Walter Benjamin, meanwhile, compares the Kafkaesque situation with that of the alienated subject watching himself on film. Nevertheless, the idea of "imaging" the Kafkaesque was denied by many -first and foremost by Kafka himself, who famously urged his publisher to avoid an image of the insect on the cover of "Die Verwandlung". Be that as it may, it is unlikely that Kafka, a central progenitor of 20 th century art and thought, can be fully understood without reference to the revolutionary artistic medium of his century: cinema. The integration of Kafka and the moving image has thus materialized in adaptations, documentaries, biographical films, installations and otherwise.

In this paper I seek to explore the impact of the Holocaust on Welles's 1962 rendition of Kafka's The Trial, hoping to shed a new light on this frequently examined adaptation, and to offer a discussion of the differences and affinities between Kafka and Welles as well as of the unique way each uses his medium. I investigate the film's use of references to, and visual representations of, the Holocaust, contextualizing these aspects as part of a humanistic and anti-Kafkaesque argument on the part of the film. Drawing on Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia and parody and on Derrida's deconstruction, specifically the concept of the différance, I argue that Welles's film is closer to its literary source than might be apparent at first.

This article offers a literary reading of Palestinian poet Fadwā Ṭ ūqān's autobiography, Riḥ lah ṣ aʿbah, riḥ lah jabaliyyah (A Mountainous Journey, 1985). This text's literary complexities have not yet been adequately addressed, despite the critical attention it has received. The present study maps this text's central tension, namely, that on the one hand, it is populated by many characters and contains many voices, and on the other, that most of the voices which are sounded do not belong to the characters one might expect. In examining the voicings in this text, this study reveals how the text invokes genres not only through excerpting, but by writing in relation to traditional narrative structures, integrating them into a new context. It offers a reading of this text as an inverted riḥ lah, that is, as a journey of one who cannot travel. It also argues that this text recalls the tradition of the short story cycle, showing how the purported linearity of the text is imbued with circularity in content, language and structure. By implicating other genres, the text subverts patriarchal tradition from within ostensibly masculine cultural and literary structures (such as the riḥ lah), overlaying it with the more feminine-inclined framework of the short story cycle. In so doing, it challenges and extends the purport of the original texts, positioning them in dialogic conversation with Ṭ ūqān's criticism of them and her own textual compositions.

This study situates Hanan al-Shaykh’s Hikayati Sharhun Yatul (My Life: An Extended Commentary, 2005) within the realm of the autobiographical. At the crux of this inquiry are the contradictory strategies of self representation throughout. To this end, it explores the consequences of ‘‘speaking for’’ another and of representing oneself relationally. It also examines how the dynamic between the singular and the multiple
within the narrative voice articulates the connected themes of family, gender, and authority, and how its narrative choices engender it as an act of resistance. In this context, it focuses on the theme of illiteracy. This study fleshes out the ways in which this text constitutes self/selves rather than assuming either the uniqueness of the literary self or overall textual coherence.

This article considers Shimon Ballas' 2009 autobiography Be-Guf Rishon in light of theories of selfhood in diaspora and border-crossings. It argues that the text's hybrid stance and multiple ruptures are articulated through a language of beginnings, and as such, this analysis engages theories of beginnings and origins in narrative.