Reading with Marie-Claire

		Reading with Marie-Claire Tom Conley

Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier was the keenest and most devoted mentor a student could ever have. A selfless leader, a critic of conscience and commitment, her writings and teaching are of a force of life that drives us ahead. As much or more than anyone associated with Theory – be it Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard – it was she who most effectively mobilised and practiced its principles. And it was she who worked through it with unequalled care and acumen. It might even be said the history of theory can be understood in view of her career with which this person became familiar, alas, at a moment after it had begun.

With a group of innovative scholars bearing strong political and ethical stakes, at the time of the War in Vietnam and of untenable social contradictions in France, in the aftermath of May 1968 she formed part of the nucleus that founded the University of Paris-VIII: Vincennes, the University at the edge of Paris, destined to put malcontents and upstarts outside of the city, soon changed what we know of literature, philosophy and the human sciences. As the ferment of 1968 settled, and as Vincennes became more of an outpost than the beacon it had been, when it moved to Saint-Denis Marie-Claire was responsible for keeping its spirit alive. Still at the outskirts of Paris – not far from the great sculpted tombs of the kings of France in the side-aisles of the celebrated basilica – through her efforts it retained the memory of its beginnings. She assured that it would be remembered both in name, in ‘L’Université de Paris-VIII: Vincennes-à-Saint-Denis’, and in the labours of the faculty she had gathered. To the contrary of colleagues who opted to return to Paris – as we will note below, to elect to teach in a place rather than to create a space – and lead classes within the urban periphery, or whose vision of the common cause of Vincennes began to blur, Marie-Claire remained lucidly faithful to its calling. She embodied Vincennes at Saint-Denis.

She later directed the Presses de l’Université de Vincennes, in which some of the most daring and rigorous, unfettered (and often unpublicised) work in the humanities continues to be published. As teacher, as leader of seminars, or even as administrator her charisma and charm defy description. During one of her lecture-tours to America in 1973, Lucette Finas, one of her teachers and a co-founder of Paris-VIII, spoke admiringly of her to colleagues and students. When, in the following year, news circulated by word of mouth to the effect that she was to lead a seminar for the American Film Studies Center in Paris (under the guidance of the CIEE) on Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes (1969), I hastened to the Rue de Fleurus in the role of a timorous auditor. I sat at the edge of a table at whose edges a mix of French and American students pushed their bench-like chairs to obtain elbowroom enough to take notes. The three hours she devoted to close analysis of the first four minutes of the film were an epiphany. With a surgeon’s care she delimited the problem of choosing to work on a ‘segment’ of the film in view of the impossibility of applying linguistic principles of segmentation to the fluid form in which voice was embedded but impossible to situate. She studied the areas where the screen both enhanced and occulted depth of field. She drew our attention to the director’s panoramic shots of windows and walls along the street of an isolated Brazilian village located between a space unknown, inland, and urban areas beyond, somewhere off, beyond the right-hand edge of the frame. She let the title bleed into the image so as to make the political dimension of the film resonate through the present moment – the hic et nunc – of the analysis itself. She drew attention to the spectator’s investment in images, she added relentlessly, that called the film into question and that summoned further and closer analysis.

1. Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 35-45. English translation: The Infinite Conversation (University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

2. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986), p. 124. English translation: Foucault (University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

3. Ibid. In what may be one of the last and most compelling of her published studies, ’La pensée du dehors dans L’image-temps (Deleuze et Blanchot)’, Cinémas, Vol 16 No 2-3 (2007), pp. 13-32, she shows how the space that Blanchot engages in his writing subverts the taxonomic project Deleuze undertakes in Cinéma 1 and Cinéma 2 (Paris: Minuit, 1983 & 1985). It will soon appear in English translation in D. N. Rodowick, ed., Deleuze@20 (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). When its major stage of production was completed Jacques Ropars sent news of Marie-Claire’s passing. With grace and generosity the editor – and Marie-Claire was the living proof of these very virtues – dedicated the volume to her. We await it not as a monument but as ongoing work that we hope to do to continue to honour her.

4. ‘L’Instance graphique dans l’écriture du film: À bout de soufflé, ou l’aphabet erratique’, Littérature, no. 46 (May 1982), pp. 59-82. English translation: ‘The Graphic in Filmic Writing: À bout de souffle or The Erratic Alphabet’, Enclitic, no. 5/6 (1982), pp. 147-161.

5. D. N. Rodowick has shown how and why in Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). A central chapter on her reading of the film indicates that the interpretation is prescient for what concerns the advent of cinema based on digital technology.

Her audience, no doubt belonging to generations formed by the inherited but great tradition of the explication de texte, bore witness to a reading that finally did what its creative theorists (but not always its best practitioners) would soon advocate through affiliation with Maurice Blanchot’s division of speech and sight: ‘Parler, ce n’est pas voir’ [‘to speak is not to see’]. (1) From Blanchot Michel Foucault had written of the need to ‘effract’, to ‘fissure’, to break words apart, to divide them into their audible and visual components. The remarks were such that Foucualt’s best reader, Gilles Deleuze, would soon remark, ‘penser, c’est voir et c’est parler, mais penser se fait dans l’entre-deux, dans l’interstice ou la disjonction du voir et du parler’ [‘To think is both to see and to speak, but thinking happens between the two, in the interstice or disjunction of seeing and speaking’]. (2) Bearing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, also in light of Blanchot, the same author noted that the interstice ‘or disjunction of seeing and speaking’ was the site where an interlacing is begun, where an ‘arrow of the one’ is shot at the ‘target of the other’; or, in an extended metaphor, where the interpretive act would ‘faire miroiter un éclair de lumière dans les mots, faire entendre un cri dans les choses visibles’ [‘cause a lightning bolt to flicker in words, to cause a shriek to be heard in visible things’]. (3) What was advocated in 1984 (in Foucault’s L’Usage des plaisirs) and in 1986 (in Deleuze’s Foucault) Marie-Claire had already done with remarkable precision and clarity a decade before, both in the crowded classrooms at Vincennes and in places innocuous as the Alliance française, and in writings that appeared as articles or, now and again, as books from a variety of publishers in different places.

It may be her work left its greatest impact in North America, in 1981, on the occasion of a conference on film and theory that graduate students in French and Comparative Literature had organised at the University of Minnesota. Specialists of different stripe and chevron came to debate the state of ‘theory’. As one of the three featured speakers (with David Bordwell and Peter Wollen) Marie-Claire delivered a paper titled ‘The Graphic Instance in the Writing of Film: À bout de souffle, or The Erratic Alphabet’. She argued that the composition of Godard’s first feature betrays a classical cinematic tradition. Twelve units or chapters are neatly distinguished by eleven fades or iris-shots into black and one lap-dissolve (that indicates the simultaneity of the sequences between which it is placed). The transitions impose the appearance of an order that the ciné-écriture undoes at all times. She clarified, as it had never been before, Derrida’s principle of dissemination, in which the linguistic sign, given to transcribe spoken language, is complicated by the metaphor of the hieroglyph, in which figuration – the shape, form, drawing – of the written letter causes the meaning of what is being transcribed to scatter in different directions. Then she put it to work: ‘[o]pen to multiple readings [parcours], each sign bears the trace or the call of divergent associations that break its unity.’ (4) She studied the film both as writing and as a site in which writing is inserted or, as it were, takes its place. Drawing attention to Godard’s quotation – in his own voice – of a poem by Aragon, Au biseau des baisers (Aragon the author better known among most viewers of the film for the romantic proverb, ‘il n’y a pas d’amour heureux’ [‘there is no happy love’], also cited in the film), Marie-Claire showed how the title of the feature refracts through its form. ‘À bout de soufflé, A(u) bout de(s) sous, A b d s, ‘Au biseaux des baisers’ ... All of a sudden À bout de souffle, read in ways it had never known, bore new force through the rigour of an informed, patient, meticulous and effractive intervention. At once surgical and illuminating, the analysis changed the reception of what may be the keystone film of New Wave cinema. (5)

The performance of the paper was proof of its writing. Rather than delivering the paper in English, by ‘transcribing’ its meaning in reading aloud a text in the manner of a communication, she opted for a ‘figural’ presentation of the critical language she was implementing. She supplied typescript copies of an English translation (‘The Erratic Alphabet’) that members of the audience were invited to read or to see as they heard the French text which she read in a slow and crisp delivery. As a result both the English version intervened as a graphic form that caused the tenor of the spoken French to vacillate, and so also as the French broke, fissured, or ‘cracked [itself] open’ through the intervention of the visible text in English, so also the meanings of the words of typescript began to scatter through the French. Insofar as À bout de souffle was about or drawn out of – about, a bout de – the non-meeting of one erotic and linguistic surface and another, one French and one American, one male and the other female, the double character of the paper did more than graphic justice to the idea of the film. It embodied it, it exceeded it in its own terms and on its own grounds.

Those who were present at the conference are well aware of the impact of the reading and its presentation. In the years that followed her work became known for the orientation that marked a project that bore the name of a modestly produced film journal, Hors cadre, issued through the press at Vincennes. Some of the most probing and powerful applications of film theory in cinema and other disciplines appeared in its pages. Its task, to use film as a way of reading across different disciplines, engaged interdisciplinarity before the term gained currency. Yet when she felt that its work had done its work after a decade, for the last number she composed a simple but compelling cover. The title, ‘Arrêt sur recherches’, set below Hors cadre, stood above a detail from the last shot of Le Mépris, in which (after a voice-off utters ‘silenzio/silence’) Odysseus, his arms raised, is seen from the back looking at the vast blue space of the Mediterranean before our eyes. With the end of Le Mépris Marie-Claire ended the labours of the journal. She realised, it seemed, that over ten great years ample and various work in theory had run its course, and that other projects needed to be engaged from different angles and by different means and modes.

6. François Cusset makes no mention of her in his otherwise comprehensive French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2003).

7. Marie-Claire Ropars, Écrire l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2002), p. 17.

The irony for Anglophone readers is that much of the work that followed Hors cadre has been the product of seminars and collaborative endeavors. (6) Her work seems to be best known to those who knew her. One of the most powerful and (for this reader) compelling of her books may never reach an Anglophone public. Écrire l’espace (2002) remains one of the most dense and poetically charged of all of her writings. It treats of space, the most abstract yet palpable of all things, that is shown discerned when disappearing in and through writing. Writing engages space within its own figural form, but only in order to have its evanescence witnessed in the sites or lieux that take its place. Writing that fails to be riddled with space does not quality as writing. She ultimately seeks to understand ‘how space can be all at once, and in contradiction, the work [l’oeuvre] of art and the abandonment [le désoeuvrement] of writing’. (7) A poem in itself, Écrire l’espace is written in mute dialogue with Blanchot and Mallarmé, but it is also of a signature that extends from the work on literature and cinema.

8. Ibid, pp. 77-78. A Hegelian echo marks the last words of the sentence. Relève or synthesis of a dialectic is congealed in the turn of the verb that arches back on the play of énonciation (expression) and énoncé (statement): ‘Mais si l’espace touche à l’écriture, et se forme avec elle, c’est en mobilisant une réécriture qui en déplace les paramètres au moment où il les met en place. D’où le caractère inépuisable d’un recensement, dont les composantes ne cessent de changer en se reformant. C’est en cela que l’espace ne peut s’énoncer, parce qu’il procède d’une énonciaton modifiant l’énoncé dont elle relève.’

In two remarkable pages that engage modes of transport – or figures of speech – common to Michel de Certeau and Jacques Derrida, Marie-Claire engages what the former calls the ‘spatial story’ and the latter a difficult ‘logic’ of space. If ‘space touches upon writing and is formed with it, it is by mobilising a re-writing that displaces its parameters at the very moment it puts them in place. Whence the inexhaustible character of an inventory whose components are endlessly changing by being reformed: in that way space cannot be stated because it proceeds from an expression modifying the statement from which it is drawn’. (8) She notes that for Certeau, in a famous chapter of the first volume of L’Invention du quotidian, a politics intervenes where an oppositional logic distinguishes place from space. Space is a place ‘practiced’ or punctuated by dialogue. The person who speaks through or about places can inhabit them in ways that society or ideology does not entirely control. The practitioner has to become a stranger in the places where he or she speaks and passes. A delightful delinquency ensues. It is a writing of space, that of a cartographer of the imagination, drawn from errant amblings in often familiar areas. But for Certeau it is nonetheless built upon the binarity of stasis and movement, and indeed is of the same character as that which Derrida calls ’dance’ in the platonic khôra, a space (in opposition to a place) where the binary figure that makes the movement possible in all events imposes its order.

9. Ibid, pp. 78-79.

Marie-Claire does not impugn either of their reflections but notes that indeed the metaphor that inspires them, exhilarating as it may be, is indeed their condition of possibility. For both the figure of errancy and roguishness (it suffices to recall Derrida’s Voyous that appeared after Écrire l’espace) ‘causes space to be what drives unruly trajectories whose force of subversion impedes demarcating the place that they have nonetheless grounded’. Subversion becomes the ‘constitutive rule of a spatial principle, grasped in the movement of exteriority that alone can define it’. (9) The movement of exteriority is no doubt that of writing when understood in its most polymorphous and figural senses, as a carto-graphic process insofar as a stable space is constructed, mapped out, but also both traversed and altered in the same gesture.

10. I have tried to note the importance of Écrire l’espace in a broader context in ‘A Writing of Space: On French Critical Theory and its Aftermath’, Diacritics, Vol 33 No 3-4 (2003), pp. 189-203.

She complicates further the concept of the sign that had informed her studies of cinema. The ‘metaphorical gesture’ that would plot or allocate a site to the sign now is shown to be in movement, without resolution, and not tied to a specific place. ‘Erratic trajectories’: for place, as shown by Certeau and Derrida, cannot be stabilised because writing intervenes to dislocate where it locates. It overrides the metaphors it carries. Echo of the ‘erratic alphabet’ whose combinations had caused meaning to bifurcate, regroup, and scatter over and again in À bout de souffle is heard in the figure of the trajet erratique. The sign itself promotes that type of travel because it is at once nominal (it names a referent) and figural (its shape makes appeal to myriad connotations associated with it, what might be its graphic unconscious). Wherever the sign and its figure are seen in a relation to one another the force of the form of writing becomes manifest: not as the signature of an author, but as tension at the edge or border of the ‘field’ that would otherwise be associated with it. (10) Throughout the study, in the context of a variety of authors and works of different time and place, from Balzac to Borges, she shows that the singular energy of works of art owes to the spaces they write through the means of diverse media they use.

Of all of Marie-Claire’s writings, Écrire l’espace, drawn with consummate grace and force, may be the work that leads her readers to where creation and interpretation are of the same sign. Projective without being a project, its own style, like the performance of the ‘erratic alphabet’, is in absolute harmony with what it does with space and place. At the outset of the early chapter on ‘Pluralités’ she studies the title of Georges Perec’s Espèces d’espaces (1974). Spaces are heard in the singular while seen and also heard in the plural.

11. Écrire l’espace, p. 21.

[T]he s has slipped into space, and its multiple species will require classification: a matter of places, thus, for a book taken to be an inventory. But the passing [la passe] is that also of the letter itself, on which the one can slip beneath the other, such the a under the e [espèce/espace]: a passage of letter, as it is said of relays. Prior space is written in the singular, even if plural: thus the inaugural page of the book will decline, in the manner of a tree with dissymmetrical branches, the plurality of syntagms to which a place can be assigned to the unique word space [espace], indefinitely repeated, isolated, from one line to the next. Closed upon itself by the recurrence of the e (espace), yet broken by the inner adjunction of the s (espace), that is reflected in a phonetic trompe-l’oeil (espace); with an immutable center – es-pa-ce – where there can be seen the first mark of peace or of a tomb [pace, pa(x)] – but possibly a veering toward either side ... Space is ‘discovered’, ‘broken’ or ‘lived’ – on the right, where epithets bloom; space is the object of ‘discovery’, of a ‘promenade’ or of an ‘odyssey’, on the left where the substantives that order the clichés (whose space would be the required complement) are aligned: genitive on one side, or at least substantial, generative on the other, or in every case a substance with variable qualities. (11)

In thus deciphering (and reciphering) Perec’s beguilingly simple title, Marie-Claire presents her study in abysme, in the difference and identity of species, espèces, at once the classification and the coinage, if not the semantic money, of espaces. What Blanchot wrote of space with classical elegance in L’Espace littéraire Marie-Claire brings forward with precision and graphic force. Today it is difficult to read Écrire l’espace after her passing. With the crushing news of her death her admirers and friends cannot fail to see in the space she opens a vibrant pleasure and force of passage. We grieve in wishing her a peace of space. We share it with her hearing her through her words. We mourn her passing but celebrate the life and force of Marie-Claire whom we love and will follow.

		© Tom Conley and Rouge July 2007. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.