To touch a ghost: Derrida’s work of mourning and haptic visuality in three films

Abstract

This article represents an effort to outline the existence of a fundamental and unremarked-upon relationship between Jacques Derrida’s reconfiguration of the Freudian work of mourning and theorizations of haptic visuality. While Derrida is under-represented in film-theoretical discussions generally, and in discussions of haptic visuality specifically, the author argues that the ethical goal of his work aligns with that of the film-makers in question, and that it should be of key importance for the discourse. Oliver Stone’s JFK, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma are examined through these twin prisms in order to illustrate how the engagement with this work of mourning and the employment haptic techniques are used in conjunction in order to hasten a new relationship to alterity.

Keywords

• jacques derrida
• haptic visuality
• hauntology
• death
• cinema
• memory
• ethics
• loss