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To Complete Mourning by Becoming Specters: The Mutualized Coming-to-Be in The Red Violin
YANG Shu-han
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2017.08.008
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
This essay enacts a dialogue between François Girard’s film The Red Violin (1998) and Jacques Derrida’s contemplations on “memory,” “spectrality” and “the work of mourning” to envision the possibility of opening a hopeful condition of being for those who suffer from loss. In The Red Violin, Girard’s cinematic experiments apply techniques of montage and of repetitive musical theme, practicing intertextuality of non-chronological stories by paralleling various memories of each individual character, blurring the biological and metaphorical boundaries between the living and non-living, and highlighting the fateful interrelations among time, space and different characters’ life experiences. In this vein, the memories and beings of both the living and the dead are tightly woven together while reproduced—or further, relived—in temporal, spatial and trans-individual dynamics. Reversing the negative imaginaries of loss and death, both Derrida and The Red Violin agree with a messianic work of mourning by exploring the powerful potentiality of spectrality that manifests a way to mutualize the subject/ other, the living/non-living, into a promised being, thus gesturing towards an infinite future.
The Red Violin, the work of mourning, memory and temporality, spectrality, Derrida
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