Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift

Forerunners: Ideas First

by Akira Mizuta Lippit

Cinema without Reflection traces an implicit film theory in Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, especially in his frequent invocation of the myth of Echo and Narcissus. Derrida’s reflections on the economies of image and sound that reverberate in this story, along with the spectral dialectics of love, mirrors, and poiesis, serve as the basis for a theory of cinema that Derrida perhaps secretly imagined.

Following Derrida’s interventions on Echo and Narcissus across his thought on the visual arts, Akira Mizuta Lippit seeks to return to a theory of cinema adrift in Derrida’s philosophy.

Genres: Film, Philosophy, Art, Nonfiction

82 pages, Paperback

Published March 30, 2016

About the author

Akira Mizuta Lippit is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts, and Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures in the USC Dornsife College. His interests are in world cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and culture, experimental film and video and visual studies. Lippit’s published work reflects these areas and includes three books, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000), and his most recent book, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012). At present, Lippit is completing a book on contemporary Japanese cinema, which looks at the relationship of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Japanese culture to the concept of the world, and another on David Lynch’s baroque alphabetics.

His work appears widely in journals and anthologies, and has been translated into Croatian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. He is past recipient of the Fulbright-Hays and Japan Foundation awards.

Lippit is the General Editor of the journal Discourse, and is active in the independent film community where he programs events, serves on festival juries, and interviews filmmakers. He regularly teaches, lectures, and publishes in Japan, where he is a founding editor of the visual culture journal Ecce.

Reviews

[Gina Herald · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning work made in its own image, relieving its subject, and forcing language to speak of its own extradition into itself. Succinct, or passing?

[Sol]

Actual gibberish but this last page goes hard