Recorded Lecture: Akira Mizuta Lippit, "Like Cats and Dogs - Cinema and Catastrophe"

Ever since 'Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture' announced its open research program, it has been hard to dismiss its excellent line-up of speakers, both academics and artists. Amongst the names is that of Akira Mizuta Lippit, whose presentation "Like Cats and Dogs - Cinema and Catastrophe" at The Museum of Kyoto on 21 June 2013 was expanded into an essay published digitally in both Japanese and English.

Broaching such classic subjects as mixing metaphors, catastrophe and kitlers, Lippit performs his hallmark critical analysis with gusto on the films of D. W. Griffith, Leni Riefenstahl and Alain Resnais, quite cheekily linking catachresis, cats and filmic representation, and suggesting by the end, "Isn't every film image ultimately a cat?"

"But does a real cat (and cats are always real, it seems) have to be in every scene of catachresis? Is this the way to underscore the rhetoric as if there were some natural and thus non-catachrestic relation between the image of the cat and the trope of catachresis? Are cats the real figures of catachresis? Is a scene of catachresis without a cat incomplete, a catalexis?"

The essay can be found on the Parasophia website, available for download in ePub and pdf formats.

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.

The Bodies in Movement Seminar Series presents Scott Wilson, 25 May, Edinburgh, 2-6pm

Bodies in Movement, supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), is extremely excited to present Scott Wilson as the first academic speaker in our Spring-Summer 2012 Seminar Series, taking place at IASH, Edinburgh from 2-6pm on 25 May 2012.

A member of both the London Graduate School and the School of Humanities at Kingston University, London, Wilson will join us for a half-day, in-depth discussion of his work. Wilson's current research in psychoanalysis, influenced by cultural theory – particularly within the areas of cinema and music – both tests the limits of psychoanalysis as a discipline and seeks to revise its contemporary social bases. Be prepared for dashes of game theory, Aphex Twin, David Lynch, psychosis and more in this fascinating and dynamic afternoon of discussion.

This is a free event, but booking is essential. Participants are asked to read the following texts in advance, which will be provided by the organisers upon confirmation of attendance:

• "Making Numbers Speak: John F. Nash Jr. and the Madness of Neoliberalism." Culture/Clinic 1.1 (forthcoming): 1–17.
• "The Braindance of the Hikikomori: Towards a Return to Speculative Psychoanalysis." Paragraph 33.3 (2010): 392–409.
• "Neuracinema." David Lynch in Theory. Ed. François-Xavier Gleyzon. Prague: Literaria Pragensia Press, 2010. 70–86.
• Extract from Chapter 6, "Surprised by Joy" in The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment. New York: SUNY, 2008. 117–129.

To secure a place at the seminar, please email one of the conference organisers. Further details on the BiM Seminar Series is available here.

Karin Sellberg (k.j.k.sellberg@gmail.com)
Lena Wånggren (l.e.wanggren@sms.ed.ac.uk)
Kamillea Aghtan (kamillea@hotmail.com)

Order of events:

2:00-2:15pm  Introduction2:15-3:15pm  Scott Wilson presents his work
3:15-3:45pm  Tea and coffee break
3:45-4:45pm  Three responses (15 minutes each) by Michael O'Rourke, Douglas Clark and Christos Hadjiyiannis
4:45-6:00pm  Open discussion

Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH)

2 Hope Park Square

Edinburgh EH8 9NW

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.

Conferences: Dis-Placing the East/West Binary, Cardiff, 2 November 2012; and Sensualising Deformity, Edinburgh, 15-16 June 2012 (program)

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Film and Visual Culture Research at Cardiff University plays host to the one-day international symposium, Dis-Placing the East/West Binary: Aesthetic and Cultural Crossover in Film and Visual Culture at the tail end of this year. Taking place over the course of a full day from 10am to 6pm on 2 November 2012, the symposium examines and interrogates "contemporary displacements and transformations of relations between East Asian and Euro-American film and visual culture", with an emphasis on exploring the loaded concept of "place" in East/West visual culture.

The event features a keynote from Jane Chi Hyun Park, whose book, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2010. The organiser is currently inviting presentation proposals for the event.

On a slightly different note, the Edinburgh-based conference Sensualisng Deformity: Communication and Construction of Monstrous Embodiment (which we blogged about before) has now released their provisional programme, packed with a full schedule of talks and with keynotes by Margrit Shildrick, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Peter Hutchings and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.

Book: Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl

After a somewhat protracted hiatus and recovery period, we are happy to be back in the digital flesh with the newly translated book by Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl. Published in English this year with the University of Minnesota Press, Saitō's original Japanese text released in 2000 was pivotal in shaping the decade of scholarship to come on otaku culture.

The significance of the book as a genealogy of the eroticised fighting girl theme in East Asian media, and particularly Japanese animation, may now be seen as somewhat dated given the rapid expansion of the convention, the growing tendency towards intertextual and parodic play within (and without) the anime medium and the increasingly experimental blending of genre, type and character. However, Saitō's final analysis of the economy of sexual desire involved in the Japanese otaku-animated character relationship - set against the backdrop of a furiously evolving motif of the beautiful fighting girl and interwoven with his strangely self-revealing analysis of the outsider art of Henry Darger - climaxes in an almost cinematic manner. Identifying a Japanese environment oversaturated with media codes to the detriment of depth and multiplicity of meaning, Saitō non-critically positions otaku sexuality as a powerful adaptive strategy for negotiating the realities of an informationalised world.

"For us who live this fantasy of an informationalized everyday, there is nothing at all surprising about the existence of something like a fiction more real than reality ... When our desire comes into contact with these spaces, it comes naturally to us to boot up the beautiful fighting girls. I am trying to read into this process an unintended inversion of desire. Why is it that we are so captivated by these phallic girls who will never exist in actuality? Are they not a strategy for resisting the informationalization of society, in other words, the flattening fictionalization of the entire world?"

Article: Karin Sellberg and Michael O'Rourke, "John Cameron Mitchell's Relationscapes"

Live as of the last day of January, Sellberg and O'Rourke's post "John Cameron Mitchell's Relationscapes" offers the first of several comment-and-reply style pieces devoted to the films of this popularly embraced champion of queer cinema on the online platform In Media Res this week.

The matter of choice for this particular encounter is the changeable landcapes of human relations upon which his 2006 film Shortbus charts its course. These innumerable heterogeneous connections shape not merely the faces of selves and others, but also the spaces occupied; it encompasses people, envelopes rooms, enfolds structures and expands endlessly in vast networks of urbanity.

"We argue that Shortbus invents with what Erin Manning calls 'relationscapes', a complex of embodied and embodying 'biograms', propulsively becoming bodies. The heterotopic hive – 'the motherboard'– is characterised by the eponymous salon where people of all races, ages, genders and sexes come to talk, fuck, watch and convene to generate new 'ecologies of experience'."

Further posts for this curated theme week include Kristopher Cannon's "Hedwig leaves her stain on the Shortbus", Cynthia Barounis's "Queerness Meets Disability in Shortbus" and Robert Summers's "Reading Hedwig and the Angry Inch Otherwise: A Reparative Reading on the Art of Enacting Middle". They can all be found on In Media Res.

Book: Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality

It seems as if the pivotal role of the screen image cannot be emphasised enough in the disruption and regeneration of the body concept - especially in an entertainment climate which heralds concepts like the mesmerising mastery of the body beautiful/grotesque (for instance, the recently released Black Swan or the absolutely brilliant Taxidermia) and the terrifyingly compelling living/dead body (un)recognisable (the thematic umbrella under which nearly every zombie-horror flick finds itself at some point), not to mention the first [born-again] generation of visual three-dimensional technology that has redirected the image to literally caress the viewer's skin.

Thus it is that Patricia MacCormack's Cinesexuality (Ashgate, 2008) offers its own particular translation of the image experience and the transformative potential of the viscerally visual. And, in a play of affects between and around all this relation to the image and the spectating self, MacCormack finds desire, pleasure, love.

As she states in an introductory interview with Eye for Film:

"...in a way I wanted to write a love poem to cinema, while also addressing crucial philosophical issues of gender and ethics which emphasise why spectatorship is not only challenging but important as an act of philosophy, activism and desire. I also, like most others, found I loved certain actors/actresses, then realized it was what cinema did to their faces, then what cinema does to everything, so objects in space (nouns) moving in time (acts, narrative) were less important than saturation of colour, timbre and rhythm of sound, gesture, the twitch of a muscle, and so on. These things cannot be good/bad, beautiful/ugly, they resist binaries and evaluations and so potentially our pleasure is contagious to the extent that, put simply, we resist binarising pleasure, objects and so forth outside of spectatorship."