Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis: Cinema at the Edge of the Political
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis examines the films of Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis, two celebrated French filmmakers who exhibit a profound and sustained engagement with questions of the political through their cinematic work. In particular, both Duras and Denis are attentive to subjects who exist at the edge of sites of political inclusion. Yet both filmmakers display challenging, often extreme or problematic approaches to their representation of these marginalised subjects, which frustrate and interrupt monolithic, optimistic political readings of their work. Chapter One examines the ways in which Duras seeks to bring to representation the unarticulated suffering and censored histories of colonial and postcolonial subjects. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s politics of aesthetics, I suggest that Duras’s formal strategies in her treatment of subjects of colour might be read optimistically as cinematic interventions in the sensible. At the same time, the films examined here invite critique, as their radical formal strategies risk reproducing representational modes associated with erasure, tokenising gestures, ethnographic distancing, and silencing. This chapter attends to these risks, drawing on Jonathan Beller’s reflections on the racist violence of the ontology of the photographic image. This critical reading of the image, predicated on the violence of visibility and concomitant objectification, informs the chapter’s turn to postcolonial theory. Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity, and Brandon LaBelle’s model of sonic agency, offer ways of thinking the non-white subject’s withdrawal from view and from comprehension. At the same time, Glissant’s poetics of Relation provides a means of reading sound as the basis of a community not predicated on sameness or comprehension - and thus offers a means of thinking community beyond Rancière’s demand for mutual intelligibility as the basis for political inclusion. Chapter Two examines Denis’s exploration of themes of dispossession and exclusi…
abstract: This thesis examines the films of Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis, two celebrated French filmmakers who exhibit a profound and sustained engagement with questions of the political through their cinematic work. In particular, both Duras and Denis are attentive to subjects who exist at the edge of sites of political inclusion. Yet both filmmakers display challenging, often extreme or problematic approaches to their representation of these marginalised subjects, which frustrate and interrupt monolithic, optimistic political readings of their work. Chapter One examines the ways in which Duras seeks to bring to representation the unarticulated suffering and censored histories of colonial and postcolonial subjects. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s politics of aesthetics, I suggest that Duras’s formal strategies in her treatment of subjects of colour might be read optimistically as cinematic interventions in the sensible. At the same time, the films examined here invite critique, as their radical formal strategies risk reproducing representational modes associated with erasure, tokenising gestures, ethnographic distancing, and silencing. This chapter attends to these risks, drawing on Jonathan Beller’s reflections on the racist violence of the ontology of the photographic image. This critical reading of the image, predicated on the violence of visibility and concomitant objectification, informs the chapter’s turn to postcolonial theory. Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity, and Brandon LaBelle’s model of sonic agency, offer ways of thinking the non-white subject’s withdrawal from view and from comprehension. At the same time, Glissant’s poetics of Relation provides a means of reading sound as the basis of a community not predicated on sameness or comprehension - and thus offers a means of thinking community beyond Rancière’s demand for mutual intelligibility as the basis for political inclusion. Chapter Two examines Denis’s exploration of themes of dispossession and exclusi…
author: Pleming, Katherine
language: eng
keywords: Claire Denis, Marguerite Duras, Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe, Deleuze, Glissant, postcolonial, sound, incest, politics, Rancière, ethics, Ngai, affect
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/fc7321f1-79aa-4e5b-b2b6-82b7ecf296b8/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2020-09-30
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:16Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.69284