work

Scholarly articles:

“Through analysis of works by Chris Marker and Frédéric Boyer, this study considers the inextricability of place and time in the constitution of environment. Both authors offer attempts to see environment in its spatiotemporal fullness through what I call a poetics of space-time. In Marker’s film Sans soleil (1983), various geographic and virtual spaces are juxtaposed through their differing temporal dimensions; they form a matrix that is regulated by globalization, mediated by technology, tradition and, most significantly, time. This heterogenous quality of contemporaneity de-centers representations of the earth based upon place. Boyer assesses the ethical and political consequences of these temporal considerations in Quelle terreur en nous ne veut pas finir ? (2015), an essay that emphasizes how subjective unawareness of questions of time and their relation to questions of space contributes to the most menacing problems facing humanity. From these works, I conclude that thinking about how time structures space is necessary for more adequately representing and understanding the earth.”

“This study considers the political significance of Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime through a comparison of the structural determinations imposed on subjectivity by the time machine and the analogous determinations imposed by the mechanism of cinema and the structures of capitalism, demonstrated by the film’s medium and content. To participate in the time travel experiments, Resnais’s character must be both conscious and passive. Like in film spectatorship or life under capitalism, the time-traveling subject is fully aware, but this experience is determined by an exterior structure and its machinations. The exteriorized mechanism of Resnais’s malfunctioning time machine thus permits an outside view of its structural determinations of time that I compare to those imposed by cinema and capitalism, which emerge as time machines of their own. I analyze this using Althusser’s theorization of the conceptual mechanisms that reproduce real objects (time, cinema, capitalism) as thought-concretes. I then suggest, through Rancière’s recent work, that aesthetic experience inside of these time machines presents the potential to recuperate one’s subjectivity from their grasp. To conclude, I contrast Resnais’s character’s solitary experience in the time machine with the collective aesthetic experience of film that is already inclined toward political consequence.”

“This is a comparative study of Samuel Beckett’s Textes pour rien (1950, published 1958) and John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1949, published 1961). These two projects, each of which emblematizes the lifelong artistic pursuit of its creator, offer a glimpse at the affinity between the two creators themselves. This article examines these two works and their authors according to three axes: first, nothing and how it is defined and deployed in each author’s creation, with an emphasis on the function of the prepositions “on” and “for” used in each author’s title; second, silence, which, in both cases, serves an important function as one of nothing’s major phenomenological counterparts—notably in Cage’s subsequent composition 4’33” and in Beckett’s quest to suppress the narrative voice of subjectivity; third, noise, which I will claim is the paradoxical but determinant residue that results from each author’s search for nothing and for silence.”

“In this study, I examine the two histoires of Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête: two histories attached to two identities – French and Algerian – and two stories – Camus’s L’étranger and Daoud’s novel as a response to it. I do so through three connected attempts at unearthing. First, the unearthing of memory: I explore Daoud’s engagement with the buried past of the Algerian War of Independence and of his brother who was killed in Camus’s novel; I look at his narrative techniques for digging up this past, especially as they relate to the influence of Camus. After that, I turn to the unearthing of identity production; I suggest that identity is structurally determined, placing an emphasis on capitalist imperialism and on the purity that is presumed in the book as a form, in the French language, in the nation-state, and I discuss the role of each of their corresponding temporal regimes in the construction of an illusory homogeneous identity. Finally, I consider how this “unearthing” is made possible through an archeological approach to time in Daoud’s novel that stems from his narrator’s understanding of his positioning in a heterogeneous, hypermediatized and globalized world which, I contend, brings to light a long-dissimulated past and demystifies the representations of a so-called national identity that is in fact the pernicious fruit of imperialist social domination.”