Foyer

The latest Derrida movie, Love in the Post (2014, directed by Joanna Callaghan), is an intriguing mix of documentary and love story based on “Envois” in The Post Card. At one point in the film J. Hillis Miller remarks that “Derrida was superstitious enough to know that the quickest way to raise a ghost is to say, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’”¹ Miller’s words invite us to recall Derrida’s interest in superstition, especially apropos of psychoanalysis, including his contention that “some sensitivity to superstition is perhaps not a useless goad for deconstructive desire.”² What would be the right measure of superstition (“superstitious enough”) when it comes to cinema?

The interview titled “Cinema and Its Ghosts” foregrounds the almost unnerving intensity with which Derrida identifies film and spectrality. At the same time, it highlights film’s peculiarity vis-àvis the experience of belief: “If I were to write about film, what would interest me above all is its mode and system of belief. There is an altogether singular mode of believing in cinema. … At the movies, you believe without believing, but this believing without believing remains a believing.”³ “Superstition” is understood to entail irrational or unfounded belief: in the Oxford English Dictionary, which lists some seven senses of the term, it is variously defined as “irrational” or “unfounded belief,” belief “based on fear or ignorance,” the “excessively credulous,” “extravagant,” “unreasonable,” and “groundless.” There is something slightly uneasy about this characterization—as if it were, by definition (thanks to the explicit remarking of the irrational or unfounded), a “believing without believing.” It recalls the force of Derrida’s meditation in “My Chances” (which forms an implicit point of reference for the remark from Hillis Miller): “to believe in chance … can mean that one believes in the existence of chance, but just as well that one does not, above all, believe in chance.”⁴ Superstitious and non-superstitious thinking cohabit; they share what Derrida calls “the hermeneutic compulsion.”⁵

How might thinking about superstitious thinking—for example, regarding supernatural agency, omens, divination, premonition, possession, ghosts, telepathy, clairvoyance, déjà vu, the double, and the omnipotence of thoughts—relate to this “altogether singular mode of believing in cinema”? On the one hand, “Cinema and Its Ghosts” emphasizes the links between film and psychoanalysis: “hypnosis, fascination, identification, all these terms and procedures are common to film and to psychoanalysis. … You go to the movies to be analyzed, by letting all the ghosts appear and speak.”⁶ On the other hand, if more obliquely, it intimates the rapport between film and madness. Derrida declares: “I am not at all a cinephile in the classical sense of the term. Instead I’m a pathological case.”⁷ A certain madness must watch over cinema. “Cinema and Its Ghosts” projects fascinating shades and reflections on other works by Derrida as well as on any prospective “writing on cinema.” As with his conception of psychoanalysis more generally, so too, we may suppose, that in the context of cinema his interests lie not in “the large Freudian machines,” such as “the unconscious,” “the id,” “the ego,” “the superego,” and so on but rather in what he calls “the most venturesome soundings”—the “breaches and openings” that are to be discovered in Freud’s more “partial, regional and minor analyses,” for example, in relation to superstition, telepathy, magical thinking, mystic writing pads, chance, ghosts, and the uncanny.⁸

You come out at the cinema. You go to see a movie and come out. The movie has come out. It comes out to meet you coming to see it. It’s a queer experience.

After you come out you come out: into the foyer. It’s as if you’ve already forgotten. As Derrida stresses, “I have not the least memory for cinema. It’s a culture that leaves no trace in me.”⁹

Coming out into the foyer, all the aloneness of the cinema is already being burned out of you. It is the dissolution of a cinematic solitude that Derrida describes, in “Cinema and Its Ghosts,” as a “‘singularity,’ which displaces, undoes the social bond, and replays it...