The predication of violence, the violence of predication: Reconstructing Hiroshima with Duras and Resnais

Dialectical Anthropology

Volumn 24, Issue 3-4, 1999, Pages 387-406

  Baker, Geoff ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 53149100112     PISSN: 03044092     EISSN: 15730786     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1007065428184     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. Virtually every discussion of Hiroshima mon amour begins with its own telling of this anecdote; I will lean primarily on the version in Roy Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais (New York: A.S.Barnes & Co., 1968), a seemingly authoritative account to which most others have referred.
2. John W. Moses treats these similarities in depth in his article, "Visions Denied in Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour," Literature Film Quarterly, 15 (1987), pp. 159-163.
3. Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1960), p. 31. All translations, in parentheses, are mine.
4. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity [hereafter EI], trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 78-79.
5. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 119.
6. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity [hereafter 77], trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 44.
7. Edith Wyschogrod, "Derrida, Levinas, and Violence," in Hugh J. Silverman, ed., Derrida and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 188.
8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 27.
9. Levinas is certainly not wrong to marshal a critique of Heidegger"s abstracting tendency, but it would be disingenuous to insinuate that Heidegger himself did not acknowledge this in some way: "Being is always the Being of an entity," he writes, a nod to individuality that suggests that he views abstraction more as a methodological necessity than as an end in itself.
10. It is important to note here a crucial distinction drawn by Levinas between ethical discourse and rhetoric: rhetoric "approaches the other not to face him, but obliquely." Rhetoric (propaganda, flattery, for example) corrupts the freedom of the other is thus a more-violent discursive form.
11. Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 79-153.
12. Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," p. 80.
13. Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," Ibid., p. 148.
14. Ibid., p. 147.
15. Ibid., pp. 147-148.
16. Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Langauge," in The Archaeology of Knowledge and "The Discourse on Langauge," trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 229.
17. I believe Hayden White ventures into this region in his essay, "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," in The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
18. James Monaco, Alain Resnais (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 20.
19. Interview with Richard Seaver in Jorge Semprun and Alain Resnais, Stavisky, trans. Sabine Destree (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), p. 151.
20. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 181.
21. John Francis Kreidl, Alain Resnais (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), p. 54.
22. M. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, p. 10.
23. Faced with the practical difficulty of referring to characters who remain anonymous throughout the screenplay, I will follow Duras' cue and refer to them by the names of the actors playing them.
24. Prédal, Alain Resnais, p. 129.
25. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, p. 41.
26. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, Ibid., p. 28.
27. Ibid., p. 41.
28. John Ward, Alain Resnais, or the Theme of Time (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968), p. 17.
29. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, p. 32.
30. John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Bantam Books, 1959), pp. 100-101.
31. Prédal, Alain Resnais, p. 191.
32. Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich and Susan Squier, from the introduction to their Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. xv.
33. Freddy Sweet, The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), p. 24, emphasis mine.
34. F. Sweet, The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais, p. 19.
35. J. Monaco, Alain Resnais, p. 35.
36. R. Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais, p. 36.
37. R. Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais, Ibid., p. 84.
38. Quoted in Bersani, Arts of Impoverishment, p. 222.
39. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, p. 90.
40. Jesus Carrascal, "El Sentido del amor en cuatro obras contemporaneas de la literatura francesa," Filologia moderna 15 (1975), p. 221. The translation, in parentheses, is mine.
41. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, p. 11.
42. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, Ibid., pp.36-37.
43. Marie France Etienne, "L'oubli et la répétition: Hiroshima mon amour," Romanic Review 78 (1987), p. 512.
44. Marie France Etienne, Romanic Review Ibid., p. 54.
45. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, p. 37.
46. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, Ibid., p. 60.
47. Ibid., p. 103.
48. Carrascal, "El Sentido del amor," p. 224.
49. Sweet, The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais, p. 28.
50. Etienne, "L'oubli et la repetition," p. 510.
51. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, p. 124.
52. Chesca Long-Innes, "Hiroshima mon amour: A Barthesian Reading," South Africa Theatre Journal 5 (1991), p. 90.
53. Alfred Cismaru, "Hiroshima mon amour-Revisited," Hartford Studies in Literature: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism, pp. 3, 43.
54. Sweet, The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais, p. 31.
55. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, p. 151.