The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema

Situated at the intersection of film and media studies, literary theory, and continental philosophy, The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema provides a trenchant account of the role of cinema in the oeuvre of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). The book is animated by Derrida’s self-confessed passion for the movies, his reluctance to write about film despite the range of his corpus, and the generative encounters arising between his legacy and the field of film and media studies as a result. Given the expanse of its references, interdisciplinarity, and consideration of Derrida’s approach to the experience of both spectatorship and the act of being filmed, The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema contributes to the ongoing close analyses of the philosopher’s work while also providing a rigorous introduction to deconstruction.
Author Timothy Holland interweaves historical and speculative modes of research and writing to articulate the peripheral-yet surprisingly crucial-place of the cinematic medium for Derrida and his philosophical enterprise. The outcome is a meticulously detailed survey of the centers and margins of Derrida’s oeuvre that include forays into such terrain as: his notable appearances in films; an unrealized project on cinema and belief that Derrida proposed in a 2001 interview; the correspondences between the strategies of deconstruction and the traditions, homecomings, and wordplay of David Lynch’s cinematic media; and the questions wedded to the future of film studies amid the vicissitudes of the modern, virtual university.

Ultimately, Holland pursues the thinking activated by the flickering of Derrida’s cinema-not only the absence and presence of film in Derrida’s professional and personal life, but also the rigor of academic discourse and the pleasures of the movies, ghosts and technology, religious faith and scientific knowledge, and ruination and survival-as a critical chance for reflection.

Timothy Holland is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University and co-editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.