Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis: Cinema at the Edge of the Political
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 exclusion via marginal ethical and erotic assemblages. In particular, I focus on the recurrent motif of father-daughter incest in her work, which often emerges as a site which exceeds the domination of violent political regimes. The chapter addresses the opposition of hostile public topographies and intimate, domestic spaces, and draws on Rosalind Galt and Sara Ahmed in order to examine the phenomenological and spatial investments of normative narratives versus the disruptive trajectories and blockages of incestuous desire. Turning to philosophers of biopolitics – Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe – as well as Jackie Stacey’s concept of the “genetic imaginary”, and Laura Marks’s “haptic visuality”, the chapter also explores the ways in which Denis makes visible vectors of power and domination, which are positioned in opposition to the tender visuality of care and devotion which marks the closed, incestuous community. Yet at the same time, the closed, marginal community grounded in incestuous desire is shown to be haunted by the threat of violence from within. Thus, via Sianne Ngai’s affect theory, Julia Kristeva’s figure of the abject and Georges Bataille’s reflections on eroticism, the chapter examines the implications of Denis’s strategy of positioning her political critique from within an ethical model which constantly asserts its potential for rupture and violation.
Claire Denis, Marguerite Duras, Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe, Deleuze, Glissant, postcolonial, sound, incest, politics, Rancière, ethics, Ngai, affect
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