Book: Jean-Paul Martinon, The End of Man

Jean-Paul Martinon teams up with Punctum Books for this eloquent and  personal (or "bio-graphical", as suggested by the author) offering, The End of Man, just published this month. Discursively probing at the black box of "masculinity", Martinon reinscribes the term with corporeal possibilities, refusing to wear the divides of man-woman, male-female, masculine-feminine, virile-effeminate.

 

With nods to Levinas, Derrida, Nancy, and a plenitude of current queer materialist scholars, Martinon weaves between discussions such as those of the mandates of language, the male body's eschatological existence, and contingent relations between gendered bodies. And all the while he choreographs an elegant dance over, between and around the threads of masculine failure.

"But hush, this male body is slowly stirring, turning over, progressively regaining consciousness ... the need for mastery steadily clenching ‘its’ grip. This slow turn reveals his many sides, angular, hairy, robust, smelly, warm, delicate, graceful. An abyss in every crevice, a mass at every turn, this male body can reach neither a plenitude of meaning nor a truly stable referent. His language, like his body, betrays him at every turn: never quite masculine, ever more virile/effeminate, never enough feminine."

The End of Man is available from Punctum Books as an open-access ebook downloadable for free or in print for a small fee. We are also fortunate to have Jean-Paul Martinon's response to Catherine Malabou at our recent BiM event archived on our site (available for streaming on the player to the right or from our recordings page).

 

Conferences: Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance, Plymouth, 13 April 2013; and Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture, Manchester, 25-26 April 2013

For the brave amongst us, April 2013 presents a cornucopia of UK conference choices to whet the appetite of the serious horror buff. On 13 April, Plymouth University hosts a one-day symposium entitled Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance, designed "to explore, interrogate and celebrate zombies as a cultural phenomenon through the paradigms of performance, as well as models of performance through the quintessential zombie activities of eating and walking". Contributors are asked to focus on the contemporary (rather than historical) zombie mythos, and are encouraged to take an interdisciplinary approach to a wide range of topics from the ethics of survival in zombie landscapes to zombie gaming and acting dead.

The deadline for proposals to this symposium is set for 30 November of this year. All delegates will also be invited to a zombie film festival which takes place the evening of 12 April and will have the option to participate in an "early morning performance, Just after Dawn of the Dead, in the streets of Plymouth, followed by a conference breakfast".

Manchester-based creative writing and literature collective Hic Dragones follows up zombie marches with a like-minded conference focus, Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture, on 25-26 April 2013. Not quite as specifically concentrated on contemporary modes, this two-day conference seeks papers from all disciplines which address cannibalism in any setting, "from contemporary horror film to Eucharistic devotion, from Freudian theory to science fiction" and beyond. It seeks proposals on topics such as theorisations of cannibalism, maternal infanticide and eating the enemy. The deadline for proposal submission is set at 31 December 2012.

Article: Eugenie Brinkema, "Vomit, or, Kant and Derrida in Oz"

Eugenie Brinkema's contribution to the most recent volume of Film-Philosophy (volume 15, issue 2 of 2011) has very little to do with The Wizard of Oz but, rather, has a quite a lot to do with David Lynch and vomit – and, chiefly, its visual representation and where this might intersect with a theory of unrepresentable and non-aesthetic disgust.

"Vomit tempts; it solicits," Brinkema asserts. It compels the construction of metaphor, narrative, materiality. Analysing one of Lynch's early works entitled Six Figures Getting Sick (or sometimes Six Men Getting Sick) (1967) – an animation loop featuring six smudged and distorted figures connected to increasingly glutted stomachs which finally disgorge in white streams of paint – she neatly expurgates earlier scholarship on the role of vomit and regurgitation in Lynch's piece. Denuding the figures in Six Figures Getting Sick of the narrative and fleshy metaphors pushed upon them in previous readings of the vomiting depiction, Brickema turns the assumption of form around: "in Lynch's work, the Figures do not vomit; the vomit Figures".

All this seems to – and does – prepare the article for an intelligent update on Lynch and vomit; however, the author's larger ambitions extend towards laying the groundwork for a different kind of ethics: "an ethics of the worse than worse". Hinging on a critical engagement with Jacques Derrida's reading of Emmanuel Kant in his essay "Economimesis", Brinkema turns to a much-ignored part of Lynch's oeuvre, Wild at Heart (1990), in order to position vomit as the gesture towards an unspeakable, undigestible, certainly unviewable and always deferred disgust of that which can only be described in tautological terms as "something more disgusting than the disgusting".

"My argument follows from the way in which disgust is figured by Derrida, reading Kant, not as a compendium of its possible provocations (dirt, the corpse, feces) – each of which might suggest that a relation to its object and cause would be possible – but as the form of the possibility for something more disgusting than the literally disgusting."

The articles in Film-Philosophy are available for free download from their website. The most recent issue which includes Brinkema's piece is a fascinating special issue edited by Tina Kendall dedicated to exploring the exigencies of disgust. It includes a tasty piece by Steven Shaviro entitled "Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema: Györgi Pálfi's Taxidermia". Previous volumes can be found here.