Double Exposures: Derrida and

Cinema, an Introductory Séance

James Leo Cahill and Timothy Holland

Cinema is an art of the ghost.

Here, the ghost is me.
—Jacques Derrida

The promises of an introduction are many: it is an opening, an ini-

tiation, an overview, and a setup or mise-en-scène for an encounter
or encounters between unaligned phenomena. Its temporal con-
jugations are those of a beginning that is also a return, carrying
something of the rhythms of haunting, a contretemps that Der-
rida describes in Specters of Marx as “a repetition and first time.”1
For the encounter staged by an introduction to be worthy of its
name, it must not simply prescribe a series of relations and a fixed
course but must also open itself to difference and the unforesee-
able or incalculable. In this sense the introductory encounter may
produce a double exposure that captures a scene of spatial and
temporal heterogeneity in which all parties and all parts are doubly
exposed, opened up to forces that leave them mutually inflected,
affected, and even altered.
In the technical language of photographic media, the term
“double exposure” refers to an image produced when a camera’s
aperture allows light to pass through the lens and onto a sensi-
tized substrate within its dark chamber more than one time. The

Discourse, 37.1–2, Winter/Spring 2015, pp. 3–21.

Copyright © 2015 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
4 James Leo Cahill and Timothy Holland

outcome is a superimposition of several temporally discrete impres-

sions within the same frame, which by accidental development
or by design simultaneously testifies to these separate instances
and their mutual entanglements by virtue of being together in a
single visual field. Spirit photographs and early filmic ghosts owe
their existence to the technique of multiple exposures. They bear
the traces of the ghostly encounters and spectral economy occa-
sioned by the advent of photographic media and the age of techni-
cal reproducibility. But such tricks and special effects are but the
most explicit manifestations of the fundamental fact to which each
and every photographic and filmic impression testifies: all photo-
graphic images are spirit photographs, and all films are haunted. In
his 1993 text “Aletheia,” consecrated to the photographs of Kishin
Shinoyama, Derrida addresses these inextricable links, stating “No
phantasm and thus no specter (phantasma) without photogra-
phy—and vice versa”; he extends these thoughts to film in “Cinema
and Its Ghosts,” his 2001 interview with Cahiers du cinéma, where he
remarks on the “thoroughly spectral structure” of cinema.2 Photo-
graphic media conjure, capture, animate, and generate spatial and
temporal experiences marked by presence and absence, percep-
tion and hallucination, singularity and différance—in a word, the
flickering work of a phantom techné.
It is in this spirit of such double exposures and their mutual
hauntings that we introduce this special issue of Discourse dedi-
cated to Derrida and cinema. We have assembled reflections on the
generative encounters between Jacques Derrida and Derridean-
inspired thinking and the variable configurations of technologies,
techniques, texts, cultural practices, infrastructures, and institu-
tions called cinema. The encounters of this introduction are both
a repetition and a first time, which is to say that this introduction
is a return to an event that has already happened, that is already
there at work in the work, but also that its returns are generative of
novelty, new questions, and new pathways of thinking.

Repetition, Returns

Derrida makes clear in Of Grammatology’s opening pages that his

conception of writing exceeds the confines of print culture to
include cinematography, choreography, and any number of visual,
musical, and pictorial modes of expression and inscription.3 He
returns time and again to the key questions of film and media the-
ory. To name but a few entries of a bibliography still being devised,
still being discovered, reread, and translated in Derrida’s wake,
Double Exposures 5

one may consider his reflections on mnemotechnics in “Freud and

the Scene of Writing”; on the frame and parergon in The Truth
of Painting; on photographic media and ghosts in “The Deaths of
Roland Barthes,” Copy, Archive, Signature, “Aletheia,” and Athens Still
Remains; of video in “Videor”; on the experience of being filmed in
Echographies of Television, Tourner les mots and Trace et archive, image et
art (his 2002 intervention at the Institut national de l’audiovisuel);
and on storage, inscription, and archives in Archive Fever.4
This quick gloss on some of the primary texts, including ones
that have recently come to light, does not account for the numer-
ous commentaries that have arisen because of them, nor does it
address the abiding activity of Derrida’s thought in contemporary
scholarship. This is to say, all too quickly, that as Derrida’s corpus
continues to grow through translations and commentaries such
as those provided in this issue, so do the contours, scenes, and
“proper” places of and for what is called deconstruction. And yet,
by contributing to this dilation, we do not mean to suggest that
cinema is now, finally, in any sense deconstructed (as if any decon-
struction could be rendered terminal). Instead, this special issue
aims to inform and converse with a longer history of similar inter-
ventions, while also serving as a stepping stone for those to come.”
Recalling Tourner les mot’s subtitle Au bord d’un film (At the Edge
of a Film), Derrida’s reflections frequently remain at the edges of
film and media. They haunt their limits and work to interrogate
their thresholds. In this sense, his reflections frequently enter into
the fields of thought concerning film and media as a puncture
from an outside, introducing exterior forces into them that may
not be immediately recognizable or considered proper. Yet the
haunting presence of Derrida in the realms of cinema—including
Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983), Gary Hill’s Disturbance (among
the Jars) (1988), Safaa Fathy’s D’ailleurs Derrida/Derrida’s Elsewhere
(1999), Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick’s Derrida (2002)—and
cinema in Derrida’s oeuvre have gradually emerged or, rather, are
finally encountering the unknown addressees that any communica-
tive act hazards to reach.5

A First Time, Again

In their prefatory remarks for “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” Antoine

de Baecque and Thierry Jousse admit to the apparent strange-
ness of this encounter at the limits of cinephilia and philosophy.6
They quickly reassure readers of the virtues of their hospitality for
Derrida based on a list of his written works touching on the visual
6 James Leo Cahill and Timothy Holland

arts, his appearance onscreen in a number of films, and his own

confessed “passion” and “hypnotic fascination” for cinema.7 So,
what to make of the slight hesitation with which they introduce
the interview? It does not spring from a skepticism of intellectu-
als and theoretical endeavors: Cahiers has long made contact with
prominent thinkers, and prior to Derrida’s interview the journal
had already welcomed contributions from and conversations with
Alain Badiou, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Arlette Farge, Marc
Ferro, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, and
Bernard Stiegler, to name a few. Their hesitation suggests a slight
trepidation about opening cinema’s notebook and its film lover’s
discourse to the perspective of an outlier, a strange and foreign
influence—perhaps to the risks of deconstruction. While knowing
the precise contours of what was to appear in print, it is as if the
interview’s ideas remain potentially unsettled, capable of deferred
effects, aftershocks, unfinished work, and that category of events
Derrida called “to come” (l’avenir/l’à venir).8 The double expo-
sures of Derrida to cinema and cinema to Derrida, like the separate
scenes brought together into the same frame in spirit photography
and early trick films, have the potential to produce extraordinary
and unexpected supplements, as any good special effect does.9

Double Séance: A Thinking Together

The essays and interviews gathered in this issue provoke that spe-
cial order of encounter called a séance, of which the double expo-
sures of spirit photography are artifacts. They enact a conjuring
of Derrida in and for cinema and cinema in and for thinking in
Derrida’s wake. Séance, from the old French seoir (to sit) and the
anatomical séant (posterior), refers to a sitting, meeting, or session.
It is an assembly, an encounter, or a reunion that is predicated on
an imposed or otherwise predetermined duration in which atten-
tion is given, extended, and exchanged from a party to someone
or something else. If its time tends toward constraint, its effects
hold the potential opening of an untimely dimension. The term
initially designated a governmental assembly, but in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries its usages multiplied to refer to the dura-
tion of a medical treatment as well as the time that a subject poses
before an artist, such as in the production of a painted or photo-
graphic portrait (une séance de photo). Séance is also the term used
for the duration of a film projection (une séance de cinéma), a psy-
choanalytic session (une séance de psychanalyse), and the name for
an appointment or encounter with ghosts mediated by a spiritualist
Double Exposures 7

(une séance de spiritisme), a usage that seems to have originated in an

English appropriation of the term “séance” that was subsequently
reimported to French (its strangeness and status as a loanword
in English is demarcated by the retention of its “e” with an acute
accent).10 A séance is a fixed appointment with precise spatiotem-
poral frames, but its events remain open to encounters with unex-
pected, strange, and heterogeneous phenomena as well as with
scenes elsewhere.
In “Cinema and Its Ghosts” Derrida’s use of the term “séance”
and its regulatory temporal connotations emphasizes one of the
overlaps between psychoanalysis and cinema: “[A] screening ses-
sion or séance [une séance de cinéma] is only a little longer than an
analytic session [une séance d’analyse]. You go to the movies to be
analyzed, by letting all the ghosts appear and speak. You can, in an
economical way (by comparison to an analytic session [une séance
d’analyse]), let the specters haunt you on the screen.”11 Cinematic
and psychoanalytic séances are fused precisely in their spiritualist
sense for Derrida; instead of costly psychoanalysis, one can save
money by heading to the movies for a séance. Psychoanalysis and
cinema address a similar urge, compulsion, or drive: a necessary
meeting or session with ghosts, a time to sit with them as they reap-
pear and speak through projection and a medium. One of the
primal links between psychoanalytic and cinematic séances is the
séance itself—a communication with ghosts—for as Derrida points
out in the interview, the medium also absorbs the transference,
projects, and projections of the audience.
Derrida, following Walter Benjamin, emphasizes the strong
connections between psychoanalysis, cinema (and other technical
media), and spectrality. As part of a lengthy response to Pascale
Ogier’s question “do you believe in ghosts?” in the film Ghost Dance,
the philosopher improvises a mathematical formula linking them:
“Cinema plus psychoanalysis equals a science of ghosts.” Convers-
ing with Bernard Stiegler about this exchange a decade later, Der-
rida admits that this must be revised, since ghosts do not allow for
such a stable arithmetical formula. Ghosts, rather, introduce an
element of heterogeneity into any scientific discourse. As Colin N.
Bennett conceded in 1911, “There are no tame ghosts, even in the
most up-to-date film producing studios.”12 Unlike simple arithme-
tic, wherein the two terms combine into a single sum, the pairing
of cinema and psychoanalysis, or of ghosts and capital, which Der-
rida also believes necessary for understanding cinema, does not
necessarily form a synthesis with calculable results. For this reason,
in “Cinema and Its Ghosts” he describes psychoanalysis and cin-
ema as engaged in a “thinking together” that is nothing short of
8 James Leo Cahill and Timothy Holland

“primordial” in their engagements with haunting, hypnosis, fasci-

nation, identification, and scrutiny of the detail (whether through
the interpretive queries of the analyst or through the filmic close-
up, both of which produce scalar amplifications as well as access to
an elsewhere within the field of perception).13
One of the significant contributions of cinema to critical the-
ory is its capacity for heterology, what Georges Bataille described
as an impossible science of the heterogeneous.14 Cinema has the
ability to bring together heterogeneous elements into a nondialec-
tical copresence and unresolved tension. The film theorist André
Bazin, under the influence of psychoanalysis, ghosts, and surreal-
ism, called this capacity of photographic media “une hallucination
vraie”—a true hallucination—and this paradoxical pairing could
also be described, in the spirit of Derrida, as a form of “thinking
together.”15 Cinema is thinking together. Akira Mizuta Lippit shows
this logic at play in the very basic material of film, its sensitive emul-
sion, which is formed from “the mixture of two immiscible liquids”
capable of producing a “synthesis without synthesis” or a technique
of critical suspension.16 Film’s primary techniques, such as mon-
tage, superimposition, and shooting in depth, further material-
ize this assembly of heterogeneous elements into a constellation
of relationships, comparisons, and juxtapositions. The elemen-
tary doubled exposure of opening the camera to the world and
then that world’s images to an audience also allows for the double
exposures of a thinking together across time and space. Thinking
together with différance is another way of describing the séance.
So what do the séances with Derrida and cinema in this issue,
this gathering of voices, hope to call forward, call back, awaken, or
invent? By evoking the French and English uses of the term “séance”
as they pertain to cinema in “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” we hope to
establish what this Discourse issue will offer for debate within and
between film and media studies and to the paths of thinking opened
by Derrida. For film and media studies we do not seek to simply
inject or apply deconstructive thought as another, albeit less trod-
den, theoretical avenue. Nor do we wish to uncritically advocate for
Derrida’s relevance or reverence in the field as a legitimating effort
by means of an important proper name.
The decision behind translating and publishing Derrida’s
2001 interview with Cahiers du cinéma as well as gathering contribu-
tions about it “grew out of some collective wondering about why
Derrida’s thought seems to have had comparatively little impact on
film theory,” as Peggy Kamuf states in her interview with Samuel
Weber.17 Kamuf goes on to say that while Derrida did not directly
address cinema with a written text, this does not sufficiently explain
Double Exposures 9

Screen Grab from Derrida (2002), directed by Amy Kofman Ziering and
Kirby Dick.

his relative absence from film and media studies scholarship when
compared with its cognate fields. If our first impulse was a con-
templation of the history of this “comparatively small impact,” our
second was and is more speculative or theoretical. In short, has the
time not come for film and media studies to turn more explicitly
to Derrida? The thinker who rigorously analyzed concepts such
as trace, storage, archive, dissemination, and invention casts an
uncanny yet timely shadow on the milieu of “new” digital technolo-
gies, rapid media obsolescence, and ubiquitous screens. Who, in all
seriousness, could argue that the key questions that catalyze Der-
rida’s works aren’t bound to those pursued by contemporary film
and media studies? The overlap between the themes and concerns
populating Derrida’s oeuvre and cinema and media archaeology,
as well as other forms of cinema historiography and theory, is, we’d
like to suggest, indisputable. Given this timeliness and uncanni-
ness, is now, in all its senses, not the time to address our supposed
postfilm and postcinema conditions and their theoretical implica-
tions by conjuring Derrida’s thought for film and media studies?
What can deconstructive thought offer film and media studies as
it considers its history and itself, as well as its objects, past, present,
and future, and negotiates a necessary shift from a sense (however
10 James Leo Cahill and Timothy Holland

phantasmic) of disciplinary coherence to polyform and interdisci-

plinary approaches?
For purposes of economy, we will but briefly outline three
paths of inquiry that the authors in this issue examine but that also
remain open to debate and further inquiry and refinement. (1)
What was cinema for Derrida? What is Derrida’s cinema? These
questions require an approach that is historical and biographical
but also speculative and theoretical. (2) What is Derrida’s thought
for cinema and for film and media studies? Here one may parse
both Derrida’s remarks about photographic media and the manner
in which his work not directly addressed to cinema may neverthe-
less offer a valuable path for thinking with and through media. (3)
What is cinema and what is film and media studies for Derrida and
deconstruction? Or put another way, what would deconstruction
be if, in a serious and sustained manner, its practitioners read film
and media theory and critically engaged with cinematic media?
Since the contributors address these first two questions with great
care, we will offer but a few additional words in this introduction
on the way to considering the third.

Derrida’s Cinema

Jackie—not Jacques—was his first name, his proper “given” name,

to the extent any name can be proper and can belong to oneself
while referring to others, to the one and more than one that haunts
identity in the form of a revenant: the return of the other through
one’s proper name. Was Jackie Coogan, best know for his role in
Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) but who also played such parts as Tom
Sawyer and Uncle Fester, the inspiration for his parents’ choice of
an Anglophone (and rather American) name? He remained elu-
sive on this point. Derrida lost or repressed this fundamental key
to his name when, upon arriving in France as a young student, he
adopted the nom de plume Jacques. As Hélène Cixous eloquently
muses, he traded a homonymic qui for a que, a “who” for a “that”
or “what.”18 Yet the secret star sign of cinema would continue to
haunt him, to be a part of and apart from him, a role to play (as
“Jackie,” as “Jacques”), at work even while out of sight. Cinema was
an unclaimed inheritance.
The late Derrida turns and returns to cinema. Derrida’s
responses to the questions posed by de Baecque and Jousse in “Cin-
ema and Its Ghosts” offer a surprising glimpse into what cinema
meant to the philosopher, into what was his cinema. Here read-
ers encounter the self-portrait of the scholar as a “pathological”
Double Exposures 11

cinephile for whom moviegoing afforded him an erotic initiation,

an “uneducated escape, the right to wildness,” and “a hidden,
secret, avid, gluttonous joy—in other words an infantile plea-
sure.”19 Whether as a sedentary child in the Vox, Caméo, Midi-
Minuit, and Olympia cinemas in the suburbs of El Biar, Algeria,
as an anxious young student at the Le Champo on the rue des
Écoles in Paris’s Latin Quarter, or as an internationally renowned
philosopher sneaking off to the unnamed multiplexes of New
York and Laguna Beach, Derrida insists that his interest in cinema
is squarely with its popular forms.20 Cinema, for him, must be a
mass medium. He describes his moviegoing as an experience of
absence, aporias, and repression that leaves no trace in him—“I
have not the least memory for cinema”—and yet produces a phan-
tom cinema, “virtually recorded,” in such a manner that at the
cinema he has “forgotten nothing” even if he cannot quite recall
it.21 Unremembered and unforgotten, Derrida’s experiences at
the movies evoke a cinema haunted by a virtual archive of screen
memories. Cinema and its ghosts.

Derrida for Cinema

Even as Derrida modestly resists a formal theoretical discourse on

the cinema in his interview with Cahiers du cinéma, he introduces
in the conditional tense—“If I were to write about film”22—a set of
terms, concepts, and figures for a theory of cinema to come. These
include spectrality, amnesia, mourning, grafts, anacoluthon (inter-
ruption and rupture), technicity, credit, and belief. Together they
form a constellation of ideas about film and cinema that we may
provisionally develop here under the heading “cinematograft,” to
speak of the specificity of the haunted technics and the graphic/
grafted writing and new systems of belief, credit, and speculation
that the cinema and its thinking together perform.
Media historians and theorists are well aware that ghosts have
long been a primal element of the earliest experiences with pho-
tography, film, and their conceptualization: spirit photographers
such as William Mumler, inventors such as Thomas Edison, and
critics and theorists such as Maxim Gorky, Otto Rank, Siegfried
Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Roland Barthes, and
more recently Jeffrey Sconce, Karen Beckman, Tom Gunning,
Bliss Lim, Stefan Andriopoulos, and Murray Leeder, to name but
a few, have all given serious consideration to the phantoms haunt-
ing technical reproducibility and optical media.23 Derrida’s writ-
ings contribute to this tradition, and he returns to the question
12 James Leo Cahill and Timothy Holland

of ghosts again and again, and ghosts, for their part, repeatedly
emerge from his thought. Regarding the spectral nature of photo-
graphic media in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” Derrida writes of
ghosts as “the concept of the other in the same.”24 Ghosts manifest
forms of inassimilable difference that stir and disturb homogenous
conceptions of space, time, and identity or impregnable distinc-
tions between life and death, perception and hallucination, pres-
ence and absence, self and other. The haunting of photographic
media is not an abstract concept or simply a rhetorical trope or
metaphor (it can be those, but it is always more), nor is it a species
that can be generalized or reduced to a categorical, singular “the
ghost”—something Derrida critiques with respect to the violence
and impossibility of saying “the animal” but does not always follow
in his discussion of specters.25 All the same, Derrida’s ghosts bear
traces of singularity and historical specificity. They have names
such as Pascale Ogier and Jacques Derrida and can even speak in
the first person (a voice already indicative of a series and even a
chorus of voices), as a spectral Derrida proclaims in Ghost Dance:
“Here, the ghost is me.” But, at once a “who” and a “what,” a “here”
and an “elsewhere,” the ghost’s singularity as specificity or locality
is unmoored and out of joint. Haunting is a non-self-identical expe-
rience of being and time that, for Derrida, is always already at work.
Derrida speaks of two registers or layers of spectrality in his
interview with Cahiers du cinéma. The first is the “elementary spec-
trality” rooted in the ontogenetic aspects of the cinematic appara-
tus and its photographic base.26 All cinematic impressions are by
their very “nature” spectral. From the processes of inscription and
storage that preserve luminous traces of the bodies and decisive
moments that pass before the camera’s lens to their temporally
displaced reanimation and representation at the scene of projec-
tion, cinema generates a series of ghosts and spectral relations.
The second register or layer issues from the “staged” or fictional
spectrality of an image’s content, be it a supernatural narrative or
a reference to specters of history, such as the victims of state repres-
sion and the martyrs of revolutionary struggles.27 Derrida admits
that this interplay of spectral registers, these “‘grafts’ of spectral-
ity,” which multiply beyond the first two (there is always another
graft, another within the one), would be what interested him, were
he a film theorist.28 Through methods of splicing, superimposition,
juxtaposition, cuts, and sutures, these cinematografts, this form of
ghost writing, produce the phantom body of the completed and
projected film, which Derrida also refers to as a ghost for its absent-
presence onscreen and for its manners of haunting spectators
through its séances.
Double Exposures 13

The cinematograft may designate not only the heterogeneous

structure of the cinematic text but also the way that cinematic
experiences rework conceptions of authorship, ownership, and the
integrity of the subject as a series of parts and departures, comings
and goings whose primary integrity is the spectral trace. The passage
into and through cinema in fact clarifies or adds new dimension to
key concepts of Derrida’s thinking, such as the manner in which
photographic inscription and the work of montage effect a notion
of the trace. In a discussion accompanying a screening of D’ailleurs
Derrida at l’Institut National de L’Audiovisuel in June 2002, Derrida
addresses the experience of watching himself onscreen, as a projec-
tion, and the narcissistic pleasures, little wounds, and uncanny sen-
sations he experiences when confronted with images, words, and
ideas that are and are not his, that do not belong to him alone, and
that draw out the status of the trace as a threshold:

As for me, I can die at any moment, but the trace remains there. The cut
is there. It is a part of me that is cut from me and that thus parts from me
in both senses of the term: it proceeds, it emanates from me, but does so
by separating, by cutting, by detaching from me [elle procède, elle émane de
moi mais en même temps en se séparant, en se coupant, en se détachant de moi].
And so this part of me, I gain it, I recover it narcissistically, but I lose it
at the same time. . . . As I said at some point in the film, I love things
that have no need for me, the traces that part from me. And that is the
definition of the trace.29

The cinematic image is a space of both loss and recovery, of parts

and part-objects that occasion partings and departures from the
self. One may hear in Derrida’s “this part of me” [cette part de moi]
a simultaneous parting, slicing, and separation (the third-person
singular of partir is also part), a point of departure from the self that
the filmic traces in movies make possible. Whereas Roland Barthes
frets at the experience of “truly becoming a specter” when posing
before the camera, Derrida affirms photographic media’s spectral
embrace for its losses and gains, its wounds and supplements: the
sites of splicing and grafts.30
Although it lies beyond the scope of this introduction, we
might note here that this brief passage on what we call the cine-
matograft offers possible grounds for a response to a series of theo-
retical debates that emerged in the late 1960s through the 1970s in
the journals Cahiers du cinéma, Cinéthique, and Screen and continue
to haunt film theory. We are thinking in particular of the lines of
inquiry concerning the basic effects of the cinematic apparatus,
its subject effects, and theories to identification, including the
14 James Leo Cahill and Timothy Holland

consequent and important challenges of the presumed universal

conditions of cinema and its idealized spectator by feminist schol-
ars, critical race theorists, and historians of media technology such
as Laura Mulvey, Manthia Diawara, and Anne Friedberg. Derrida’s
evocation of the grafted subject in cinema, consisting of both self
and others, divided and supplemented by the technics of cinema
in its multiple iterations, offers an approach that renegotiates both
the fundamental relationships and the entanglements of apparatus
and subject.
Cinema is a speculative instrument as much as it is an instru-
ment of speculation. When Pascale Ogier asks Derrida in Ghost
Dance “Do you believe in ghosts?” she animates a conversation and
inquiry into the suspension of disbelief (a concept that the authors
of this issue return to at several junctions) and of the emergence
of new forms of belief, credit, investment, and returns put into
play by cinema and its ghosts. Derrida reanimates this conversa-
tion early in his interview with de Baecque and Jousse when he
notes that if he were to write about film, he would examine its
“mode and system of belief.”31 What interests Derrida about cin-
ema’s ghost belief is the way in which spectators temporarily and
incompletely invest in images, stories, and icons while also accept-
ing their production and staging. This investment, a “believing
without believing,” unifies for Derrida the psychical interior of
emotion and the global marketplace in ways “that no other art
can equal.”32 Derrida reminds us that the “success” of cinema’s
ghosts is the credit that they automatically elicit, and it is this
automaticity of belief and faith in the spectral, in something non-
present, that provides the basis for film’s mondialisation: its dupli-
cation (not only film reels but also, we might add, generic codes,
clichés, and stars), distribution, and massive financial stakes—the
gains and losses, risks and returns—and art of speculation that
constitute commercial cinema as a worldwide industry and eco-
nomic activity. To think cinema, to understand its functioning in
the world and as a world, “one has to think the ghost together
with capital, the latter being itself a spectral thing.”33 Taken a step
further or, more specifically, reversing the order of this phrasing,
one must also look to the ghosts of cinema to understand the gen-
eral abstraction of capital, which also relies on the satisfaction of
certain psychical drives and impulses through spectral and specu-
lative returns. The ethicopolitical and cinematic knot (another
cinematograft, this time “ideological”) in Derrida’s corpus is
woven through a circuit of phantoms, a “fantômachie (a battle or
clash of ghosts or phantoms), if you wish,” as he tells it to Ogier
in Ghost Dance.
Double Exposures 15

A spectral circuit or network would also characterize the

impact of Derrida’s thought within film and media studies. As
soon as one risks an overview of the literature where scholars have
engaged Derrida and deconstruction in addressing problems of
film and media theory and questions of cinema, examples begin
to proliferate like the ghosts and doubles in Freud’s “Uncanny.”
An inventive group of scholars have addressed questions of cine-
matic writing, the language of film, and theories of representation,
mimesis, and form, including Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier,
Peter Brunette and David Wills, Tom Conley, and Miriam Hansen
(who places the German tradition of critical theory into conver-
sation with Derrida while challenging Derridean film theorists to
better account for and historicize the institutional conditions of
cinema’s hieroglyphic inscriptions and mass media contexts).34
Akira Mizuta Lippit’s Electric Animal, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics),
and Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video maintain
a conversation with Derrida on topics including the confluence
of spectrality, animality, and technics; visuality and avisuality; and
the thresholds of cinema as an experimental form.35 The thinking
together of animals and cinema by Donna Haraway, Jennifer Fay,
Raymond Bellour, and Anat Pick engage and critically extend Der-
rida’s speculations on animal life, vulnerability, and singularity.36
Nicholas Royle, Louis-Georges Schwartz, and Michael Bachmann
have explored the uncanny qualities of cinema and its relation to
spectrality, life, and sincerity.37 D. N. Rodowick, Eugenie Brinkema,
and many of the participants of the World Picture Conferences
have engaged with Derrida on questions of philosophy, form, poli-
tics, and cinematic media.38 Scholars working at the threshold of
theory and historiography, such as Mary Ann Doane and Bliss Lim,
have critically engaged Derrida in their theorization and historici-
zation of the relationships of cinema to contingency, modernity,
indexicality, the event, the archive, and temporal critique and its
relationship to anticolonial thought.39 At the same time, the impact
of deconstruction on the field remains largely implicit, tactical,
and rarely called by name—as if its ghost finds no proper place, even
within the margins of reading and analysis.

Cinema for Derrida

This is the area least touched on in the pages that follow and is
perhaps the horizon of this project that remains most open.
Directly and indirectly, the work of deconstruction has inspired
and informed three generations of scholars in careful protocols
16 James Leo Cahill and Timothy Holland

of innovative reading, writing, research, and thinking. Perhaps

most exciting and surprising in this context are the possibilities
of engagement between film and media studies and deconstruc-
tion where one might least expect Derrida to haunt: work on his-
tory and historiography. In this respect, the critique of ahistoricism
and idealism aimed, sometimes with good reason, at the small field
of Derridean film theory (such as by Hansen) no longer holds as
much weight. The so-called returns to classical film theory that
have energized many film scholars in the past decade have cer-
tainly benefited from a style of deconstructive engagement that,
even when not invoking Derrida’s name in direct citation, has
come to carefully rethink and reengage with texts, phenomena,
and lines of thought once considered fully accounted for and
exhaustively read.40 Within film and media studies, a number of
scholars working at the intersections of historiography and theory
have begun rereading and reanimating the works of such figures
as André Bazin, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, and Siegfried Kra-
cauer, both on their own terms and with an interest in the com-
plex afterlives and untimeliness of these corpuses of thought.41 The
protocols of deconstruction and critical historiography frequently
complement and extend each other, as can be seen at play in the
refusal of scholars to reduce or reify the thought of certain restless
and wide-ranging thinkers from the first two generations of film
criticism and theory, whose work, on further inspection, reveals
itself to be anything but homogenous, rigidly systematic, or naive.
One finds in André Bazin’s “Ontology of the Photographic
Image,” to take one example, a forceful examination of precisely
the issues Derrida recapitulates in his comments on film: an
account of photographic media that addresses its implications with
psychoanalysis, ghosts, and a new system of belief, a new credo, that
emerges from its ontogenetic and profoundly hauntological process
of capturing and re-presenting traces of the world. Suddenly very
different theories of ontology and cinematic realism emerge that
are not based on presumptions of essence preceding existence or
simple one-to-one correspondences between image and world. To
contemporary eyes, all of this can be seen as present in Bazin’s
writing. And yet this Bazin, this reading that counters his supposed
naïveté, has developed like a photograph and only recently come
to fuller light. Perhaps it required a certain deconstructive rigor
to take seriously such forces and read against a presumed stasis of
thought.42 One can and should also reverse this scenario and ask
how deconstruction would have been different, and how it can still
be different, if it read film theory and took seriously the challenges
of cinematic media. As a final question, admittedly unanswered in
Double Exposures 17

what follows, it is worth asking what the study and theorization of

cinema and the cinematic offers deconstruction.
More than simply initiating an opening of cinema and film and
media studies to Derrida’s thought, “Cinema and Its Ghosts” shows
us that cinema has always, already been in the heart of deconstruc-
tive thought. Despite its overt nonappearance in the form of a writ-
ten text, the specter seems indissociable from an idea or version
of cinema, and this cinema is at play in the thinking together of
deconstruction. Speaking of cinema’s specific affinity with ghosts,
Derrida says: “This solitude in the face of the ghost is a major test
of the cinematic experience. This experience was anticipated,
dreamed of, hoped for by other arts, literature, painting, theater,
poetry, philosophy, well before the technical invention of cinema.
Let’s say that cinema needed to be invented to fulfill a certain
desire for relation to ghosts. The dream preceded the invention.”43
With these words Derrida not only draws an intriguing parallel with
Andrè Bazin’s 1946 evocation of cinema’s idealist history as pro-
gressing toward its own founding fantasy in “The Myth of Total
Cinema” but also proposes a link between what he thinks cinema
accomplishes and what he says deconstruction pursues in Specters
of Marx and other publications more or less “about” the specter:
a desire and responsibility to allow the ghost to come back and to
receive it as a singularity.44 It seems plausible too that deconstruc-
tion also owes its “invention” to this desire of relating to ghosts, to
responding as responsibly as possible to their calls, to invoking the
work of a séance and refusing to exorcise these spirits. This work of
haunting is still to be done, but it begins by taking up the respon-
sibility to cinema and its ghosts, to which Derrida and Ogier, at the
end of their exchange, pledge a hearty double affirmation (“yes,
yes”) to the past and to what comes:

derrida: I do not know whether I believe in ghosts or not, but I say “long
live ghosts”! And you, do you believe in ghosts?
ogier: Yes, certainly. Yes, absolutely. Now, absolutely.

Acknowledgments

We thank Marguerite Derrida for granting permission to publish the translation of

“Le Cinéma et ses fantômes,” Peggy Kamuf for her generosity with nearly every aspect
of this issue, and each of the contributors for their inspiring scholarship. We also
thank Thomas Russell, Emily Siu, and Miriam Siegel for their editorial assistance in
the preparation of this issue.
18 James Leo Cahill and Timothy Holland

Notes

The epigraph superimposes two sources: the first line is from Andrew Payne and
Mark Lewis’s interview of Jacques Derrida in “The Ghost Dance,” Public 2 (1989): 61
(translation modified), and the second line is from Derrida’s improvisation in the
film Ghost Dance (1983, directed by Ken McMullen).
1.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning, and
the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.
2.
Jacques Derrida, “Aletheia,” translated by Pleshette DeArmitt and Kas Saghafi,
Oxford Literary Review 32, no. 2 (2010): 177; Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse,
“Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” translated by Peggy
Kamuf, Discourse 37, nos. 1–2 (2015): 26, originally published as Antoine de Baecque
and Thierry Jousse, “Le Cinéma et ses fantômes,” Cahiers du cinéma 556 (2001): 74–85.
On technical media’s spectral structure, see Derrida, “The Ghost Dance,” 61.
3.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 9. The French version of this
text appeared in 1967.
4.
Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” translated by Jeffrey
Mehlman, Yale French Studies, no. 48, French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis
(1972): 74–117; Derrida, The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoffrey Bennington
and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Derrida, “The Deaths
of Roland Barthes” (1981), in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, edited by Peggy
Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 264–98 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2007); Derrida, Copy, Signature, Archive: A Conversation on Photography, edited by Ger-
hard Richter, translated by Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010);
Derrida, “Aletheia”; Derrida, Athens, Still Remains, translated by Pascale-Ann Brault
and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Derrida, “Videor,” in
Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, edited by Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg,
translated by Peggy Kamuf, 73–77 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, translated by Jennifer Bajorek
(Malden, MA: Polity, 2002); Derrida and Safaa Fathy, Tourner les mot: Au bord d’un
film (Paris: Éditions Galilée/Arte Éditions, 2000); Derrida, “Trace et archive, image
et art” (2002), in Penser à ne pas voir: Écrits sur les art du visible, 1979–2004, edited by
Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas, 79–127 (Paris: La Différence, 2013);
Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996).
5.
In a conversation at the Institut National de L’Audiovisuel held on June 25,
2002, Derrida also mentions a never realized film he dreamed up with Nourit Aviv
and Samuel Weber in which the trio would travel to various “realms of memory” from
Derrida’s childhood and improvise a set of political commentaries on Algeria. See
Derrida, “Trace et archive.”
6.
De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 22.
7.
Ibid., 23.
8.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix, 224n5.
9.
Photographic supplements are intimately entangled with haunting and the
constellation of ideas related to specters, spectrality, and hauntology that become
more pronounced in Derrida’s later work. In his discussion of Roland Barthes’s Camera
Double Exposures 19

Lucida Derrida writes of the “ghostly power of the supplement” as an “unlocatable

site that gives rise to the specter.” Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” (1981), in
Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 271.
10.
See the entries for “séance” in Le Grand Robert de la langue française and the
Oxford English Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary places the initial use of “séance”
in a spiritualist context to 1845. Le Grand Robert takes its French example, contem-
poraneous with the emergence of film, from the preface to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s
Là-bas (1891).
11.
De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 27.
12.
Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 118; Colin N. Bennett, Handbook
of Kinematography: The History, Theory, and Practice of Motion Photography and Projection
(London: E. T. Heron and Kinematograph Weekly, 1911), 124. For more on Bennett
and early filmic and cinematic ghosts, see James Leo Cahill, “How It Feels to Be Run
Over: Early Film Accidents,” Discourse 30, no. 3 (2008): 289–316.
13.
De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 26.
14.
Georges Bataille, “The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade (an Open Letter to My
Current Comrades),” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–39, edited with an
introduction by Allan Stoekl, translated by Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald
M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 91–102.
15.
André Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma,
vol. 1: Ontologie et Langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), 18; Bazin, “The Ontology
of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, translated by Timothy Barnard
(Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 10. Barnard translates this line as “a really existing hal-
lucination,” but “a true hallucination” retains Bazin’s allusion to the surrealist’s appro-
priation of Hippolyte Taine’s formulation of perception in De l’Intelligence (1870).
16.
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005), 111.
17.
Peggy Kamuf, “Double Features: An Interview with Samuel Weber,” Discourse
37, nos. 1–2 (2015): 157 (our emphasis).
18.
Hélène Cixous, “The Keys To: Jacques Derrida as Prometheus Unbound,”
translated by Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 30, nos. 1–2 (2008): 71–122. The question of
Derrida’s name is also raised when the film crew visits his childhood home in D’ailleurs
Derrida, where a poster from The Kid clearly hangs in the parlor. For more on D’ailleurs
Derrida and Derrida’s name, see Peggy Kamuf, To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida
(Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
19.
De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 23–25.
20.
Ibid., 24–25.
21.
Ibid., 23.
22.
Ibid., 27.
23.
See Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William
Mumler, Spirit Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Octave
Uzanne, “Sensations d’Amérique: Une Visite Chez Edison,” Le Figaro, May 8, 1893,
1; Maxim Gorky, “Maxim Gorky on the Lumière Programme, 1896,” in Jay Leyda,
20 James Leo Cahill and Timothy Holland

Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 407–9 (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1960); Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, translated and edited by Harry
Tucker Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971); Siegfried Kracauer,
“Photography (1927),” in The Past’s Threshold: Essays on Photography, edited by Philippe
Despoix and Maria Zinfert, 27–44 (Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2014); Walter
Benjamin, “A Little History of Photography” (1931), in Select Writings, Vol. 2, edited
by Michael Jennings et al., 507–30 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005); Bazin, “The
Ontology of the Photographic Image”; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, translated by
Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981); Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted
Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000); Karen Beckman, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Tom Gunning, “To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of
Mediated Vision,” Grey Room 26 (2007): 94–127; Bliss Lim, Translating Time: Cinema,
the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Stefan
Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media
(New York: Zone, 2013); Murray Leeder, ed., Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality
from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
24.
Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” 272.
25.
Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” translated by
David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 369–418.
26.
De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 27.
27.
Ibid.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Derrida, “Trace et archive,” 105 (our translation).
30.
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 14.
31.
De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 27.
32.
Ibid., 27–28.
33.
Ibid., 28.
34.
Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “The Graphic in Filmic Writing: À bout
de souffle or the Erratic Alphabet,” Enclitic 5, no. 2/6, no. 1 (1982): 147–61; Peter
Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1989); Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006); Miriam Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing:
Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique 56, special issue on Theodor W.
Adorno (1992): 43–73.
35.
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Lippit, Atomic Light; Akira Mizuta Lippit, Ex-
Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2012).
36.
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008); Jennifer Fay, “Seeing/Loving Animals: André Bazin’s Posthumanism,”
Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 1 (2008): 41–64; Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma:
Hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009); Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality
and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
37.
Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003);
Double Exposures 21

Louis-Georges Schwartz, “Introduction to the Meaning of ‘Life,’” Discourse 28, nos.

2–3 (2006): 7–27; Louis-Georges Schwartz, “Deconstruction avant la lettre: Jacques
Derrida before André Bazin,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife,
edited by Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (New York: Oxford, 2011),
95–103; Michael Bachmann, “Derrida on Film: Staging Spectral Sincerity,” in The
Rhetoric of Sincerity, edited by Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 214–29.
38.
D. N. Rodowick, “The Figure and the Text,” Diacritics 15, no. 1 (1985): 34–50;
Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
39.
Mary Anne Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the
Archive (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 2002); Lim, Translating Time.
40.
See Dudley Andrew, Anton Kaes, Sarah Keller, Stuart Liebman, Annette
Michelson, and Malcolm Turvey, “Roundtable on the Return to Classical Film Theory,”
October 148 (2014): 5–26.
41.
See, for example, Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer,
Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2011); Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, eds., Opening Bazin: Postwar
Film Theory and Its Afterlife (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sarah Keller
and Jason N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2012); Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Le Sommeil Paradoxale:
Écrits Sur André Bazin (Paris: Éditions de l’Oeil, 2014); and Naoum Kleinman and
Antonio Somaini, eds., Notes pour une histoire générale du cinéma (Paris: AFRHC, 2014).
42.
It is unclear if Derrida was directly familiar with Bazin’s ontology essay, he
does cite it at the outset of his February 23, 2003, session of his seminar “The Beast
and the Sovereign” through his reading of a letter written to him by Tim Bahti on
the question of Veronica, the icon, the index, and the trace. Jacques Derrida, The
Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2, translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011), 172.
43.
De Baecque and Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” 29.
44.
André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, 13–20.