Poetics of Deconstruction: On the threshold of differences

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In Poetics of Deconstruction, Lynn Turner develops an intimate attention to independent films, art and the psychoanalyses by which they might make sense other than under continued license of the subject that calls himself man. Drawing extensively from Jacques Derrida's philosophy in precise dialogue with feminist thought, animal studies and posthumanism, this book explores the vulnerability of the living as rooted in non-oppositional differences. From abjection to mourning, to the speculative and the performative, it reposes concepts and buzzwords seemingly at home in feminist theory, visual culture and the humanities more broadly. Stepping away from the carno-phallogocentric legacies of the signifier and the dialectic, Poetics of Deconstruction asks you to welcome nonpower into politics, always sexual but no longer anchored in sacrifice.

Reviews

Lynn Turners exhilarating, elegant, and very important book overturns common conceptions about human exceptionalism, hospitality, the place accorded to the feminine, and animal intimacy. Turner shows how, at its heart, deconstruction entreats us to listen for the poetic rhythms that link the fundamental questions of life to the stereographic rhythms that speak to us from the heart of the other. * Elissa Marder, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Emory University, USA *
Lynn Turner brilliantly follows the trace of differencesanimal, sexual, racialin readings of film, text and flesh that prove the ongoing relevance and importance of deconstruction for our times. Her own poetics offers keen insights into the writings of Derrida, Freud, Cixous, Irigaray, and Haraway among others. * Kari Weil, University Professor of Letters, Wesleyan University, USA *
Immersive, subtle, illuminating, bizarre: these are a few of the adjectives that might be used to describe Lynn Turners compelling book. Poetics of Deconstruction focuses mostly on film and visual culture, but its concerns are multifarious and often surprising from Irigaray to Bjrk, from Haraway to von Trier, from cats and dogs to kisses and the death penalty. It is also an especially distinctive and welcome study for the ways in which it brings together Jacques Derridas writings on the performative with notions of performativity in gender and film theory. * Nicholas Royle, Professor of English, University of Sussex, UK *

Author Bio

Lynn Turner is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is the co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (2017); co-author of Visual Cultures As Recollection (2013); editor of The Animal Question in Deconstruction (2013) and an assistant editor of Derrida Today.