Chrysanthi Nigianni - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Chrysanthi Nigianni

Studies in the Maternal, Jul 1, 2009

This exciting collection of work introduces a major shift in debates on sexuality: a shift away f... more This exciting collection of work introduces a major shift in debates on sexuality: a shift away from discourse, identity and signification, to a radical new conception of bodily materialism. Moving away from the established path known as queer theory, it suggests an alternative to Butler's matter/representation binary. It thus dares to ask how to think sexuality and sex outside the discursive and linguistic context that has come to dominate contemporary research in social sciences and humanities. Deleuze and Queer Theory is a provocative and often militant collection that explores a diverse range of themes including: the revisiting of the term 'queer'; a rethinking of the sex-gender distinction as being implied in Queer Theory; an exploration of queer temporalities; the non/re-reading of the homosexual body/desire and the becoming-queer of the Deleuze/Guattari philosophy. It will be essential reading for anyone interested not just in Deleuze's and Guattari's philosophy, but also in the fields of sexuality, gender and feminist theory.

Departing from the concept of ‘suspension’, a rather ambiguous and polyvalent concept with a rang... more Departing from the concept of ‘suspension’, a rather ambiguous and polyvalent concept with a range of definitions such as, abrogation or cessation, temporary debarment, postponement and/or prolongation, this article wishes to argue for the cinematic image of suspension as a thinking-image that politicizes the notion of ‘time’ and ‘temporality’. By giving time an ontological priority, the suspended image breaks away from a valorisation of visuality which has historically enhanced the privileging of space over time (psychoanalytic concepts of ‘scopophilia’, ‘voyeurism’, ‘gaze’ are still dominant and key terms in order to think of the cinematic image), assuming instead a different ‘perception’ and ‘thinking’ that break away from the norms of representation. Hence, an image that does not serve (re)cognition and command/action, but persists and endures as the power to be affected. It will be suggested that the latter constitutes the essence of the suspended image. This will be further explored through Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of passive vitalism, defined in their work What is Philsophy? as “a force that is but does not act – that is therefore a pure internal awareness”. The paper will argue for a new cinematic aesthetics of vitalism, in which we can find different possibilities for the conception of political bodies and their relation to images outside representation and recognition. This new aesthetics will be sought in Chantal Akerman’s film La-bas ( Down There , 2006) ; a film that with its stillness and stubborn fixedness, constitutes a suspension-film: a film made as a refusal to the aboutness of the film (a film ‘should’ always be about something); a film that negates film as representation, film as command, film as action. At the heart of one the most debatable political spaces (Tel Aviv) Akerman creates a film of the seer and not of the agent. By bringing out the inhuman powers of duration, as internal differentiating, change and transformation, the film runs still, expressing an undecidability between prolongation and cessation, postponement and debarment; an undecidability that in turn puts forward a politics of vitalism, not as representation and belonging but as negotiation of the multiple affections and attachments that compose the body-behind-the-camera and the image-as-body. A vital body precisely because of its radical passivity and of its distinction from the ‘I’ viewpoint’ that commands. La-bas produces a true ‘foreign body’, a body that eschews self-recognition mainly because it does not possess its time or its space. On the contrary, the ‘I’ is always a second comer, one caught in suspension: not a messianic body-to-come as the self-righteous Subject, but always the ‘second’ coming of the ‘I’, as a radical counter-messianism and falsification. In La-bas to come second, to be this highest point of evolution, progress and rational development is not to have an existential priority; it is to be belated.

Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Oct 2, 2019

dialogue between queer theory and psychoanalytic practice. The book provides a wide range of inte... more dialogue between queer theory and psychoanalytic practice. The book provides a wide range of interesting intersections and in doing so illustrates how queer concepts can be accommodated in the clinic. As prudently noted by Gherovici (this volume), psychoanalysis and queer theory may converge but do not overlap. In that sense, any response to their complex encounter should not so much focus on what has already been chartered or explored, as on bringing to the fore the elisions and illuminations this convergence may produce. In order to do so one must remain faithful to the spirit of the queer; one must speak, in jest and in earnest, from a 'different' perspective; you may assume that today we are Deleuzians in our questions. Question one: play, dramatis personae and key metaphors(?) Queer is giddiness. The injunction to the analysts to not remain somber (Farina 2017: 96) is attractive, but does it challenge the sobriety of psychoanalysis in general? Farina invites the analyst to be drunk on love and to remain at a remove from the erotic object of analysis (2017: 96) Multiple possibilities open between the words 'not', 'remaining', 'drunk', 'remove' 'object'. But can queer theory radicalise the clinic, or is the latter so settled by its practices that can withstand the shocks of a queer interrogation? 'Queer' can be comfortably accommodated in the psychoanalytic realm by either being closely aligned with jouissance, or by being situated in the broad realm of identity as failure. But, is it enough to say that jouissance is queer (Farina 2017: 94)? Reducing a philosophical and political mode of interrogation (queer) to affect or indeed locating 'it' in the realm of Real deterrotorialises significant debates into the realm of the ineffable.

This exciting collection offers a range of perspectives from some of the most prominent feminist ... more This exciting collection offers a range of perspectives from some of the most prominent feminist voices of our time, including Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, and Jack Halberstam. Employing experimental modes of thinking and writing, the contributors remain faithful to the feminist tradition of subversion and resistance, while refusing to submit to its political tradition of a loving sisterhood or dutiful daughterhood. Through productive disagreement and cognitive dissonance, the essays presented here reflect the specific circumstances of our present, and attempt to dream and envision possible alternatives for the future. The volume thus invites us to think of the becoming of feminism itself, and the possibilities of future feminisms-to-come.

In 'The Taste of Living' the author discusses Clarice Lispector's novel The Passion A... more In 'The Taste of Living' the author discusses Clarice Lispector's novel The Passion According to G.H. (1964) in engaging with key themes of the non-human, animality, a-human love and the feminine as the forces that resist and transform the straightjacketing of humanism

Deleuze and Queer Theory, 2009

I felt wrapped in its atmosphere, folded in its mood. Toute une nuit (1982) is a film about what ... more I felt wrapped in its atmosphere, folded in its mood. Toute une nuit (1982) is a film about what happens between two. Happening as repetition. Repetition as stylisation. A stylisation of affect. Affect as image. Sentimentality as aesthetics. Chantal Akerman's film feels like a choreography of twos, a dance of portraits of intimacy, a diagram of love. 55 dramatic encounters, embraces and separations involving 75 nameless characters, usually couples, lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes, all arranged in Toute une nuit: all night long, all in a single night.1If we could find a plot or a subject in this film it would be as Catherine Fowler (2003) comments "love, loneliness, eroticism and insomnia," and throughout its 90-minute duration the film seems to be asking, acting and re-enacting persistently the same question: what is a rela-tion? A question that acquires a heightened tension by being repeat-ed in time, in just this time, in the whole of one night, Tout...

Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism, 2019

Studies in Gender and Sexuality

Film Philosophy Conference 2012, Sep 7, 2012

New Formations, Sep 22, 2009

Studies in the Maternal, 2009

In her work, The Matrixial Borderspace, Bracha Ettinger presents us with a founding image: foundi... more In her work, The Matrixial Borderspace, Bracha Ettinger presents us with a founding image: founding in both senses of grounding and revealing. This means grounding difference differently, on a non-phallic prenatal level, and revealing a difference that has passed unnoticed: the matrixial difference as the sexual difference that derives from the feminine, with the Ettingerian feminine being antithetical to the phallic concept of the masculine-feminine binary. Contrary to phallic sexual difference, the matrixial feminine sexual difference puts difference at the heart of same-sex relationality; a move that radically deconstructs the binary of sameness-difference in which subsist reactive and negative definitions of difference, as mainly a 'difference from'. Quoting Ettinger: