Voir venir the New Wave: Plasticity in Jacques Rivette’s Film Criticism

Abstract

This article shows that Jacques Rivette’s film criticism recalls the Hegelianism of Catherine Malabou’s formulation of plasticity in The Future of Hegel. Enlarging the scope of a previous article on Hegel’s influence on Rivette (Douglas Morrey’s “To Describe a Labyrinth”), and taking a cue from Rivette’s distinction between analytic and synthetic directors (the latter being those who work on the dialectical bond between contingency and necessity, accidents and essence, the conceptual and the sensuous and so forth), I argue that Rivette considered true auteurs only those directors capable of expressing through their films a specific kind of temporality (thus, by extension, of cinematic action) that is reminiscent of the self-dividing temporality which Malabou highlighted in her take on Hegel’s substance-subject (i.e. a temporality which already in Hegel’s own formulation subverted what Heidegger would later call, contra Hegel, “vulgar time”). This calls, among other things, for a revision of Rivette’s conception of mise-en-scène.

Keywords

• Plasticity
• authorship
• criticism
• dialectics
• Rivette
• Malabou