Tuesday 27th October 2020, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

McNeil Taylor (St John's) - "Marcher au désert": Claire Denis' Perverse Ecologies

Summarizing Deleuze's aesthetic philosophy, Jacques Rancière states, "L'œuvre est marche au désert." The artwork reformulates time and relationality, as narrative desire for an object is replaced by an impersonal drift. Deleuze most strikingly outlines this orientation in the essay "Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui", in which the geographical isolation of a desert island enables the complete dismantling of Freud's anthropomorphic model of narrative desire. Cutting out the detour of desire for the Other, bodies regress to a perverse intertwining with the "Terre-Mère" as boundaries of self and other, animate and inanimate collapse.

This aesthetic mode is exemplified in Claire Denis' Beau Travail (1999) a film that stages its own literal and figurative march into the desert. The hermetic community of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti becomes a petri-dish experiment with new modes of inhuman desire, as subjective intentionality gives way to the distillation of deep ecological time. My reading will therefore bring together two approaches to the film -- psychoanalytic and ecological -- that have yet to be put in conversation with one another. I will argue that the legionnaires' diffusion into the landscape functions as an impersonal rebirth, as the snuffing out of neurotic, Freudian desire enables a new perverse sociality.