Eleanor Kaufman will consider the way in which Derrida’s autobiographical writing and archival and pedagogical engagements are seized by two dimensions of California that might be said to be at odds with each other [...]. Derrida’s 1989 Circumfession, composed as his mother is dying and at the beginning of his longstanding affiliation with the University of California at Irvine (UCI), is not only his first explicitly autobiographical writing, detailing his fraught history as an Algerian born Jew, but is also a specific mirroring of Augustine’s Confessions, down to Augustine’s poignant description in book nine of the death of his mother Monica in Ostia, far from her North African home. In this conjuncture, the place of Circumfession’s composition—Santa Monica, CA, north of Irvine—is sutured [...] to the Christian Augustinian history from which its name derives. By contrast, Derrida’s Archive Fever and his actual archive established at UCI, are in different ways oriented to the future [...]. Both dimensions of Derrida as focalized by Los Angeles and Orange counties will be considered as forms of anti-production that might be aligned with Baudrillard’s critiques in The Mirror of Production.
Likewise, Thomas Corbani will contrast two Californian cities. When he publishes À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie in 1990, [...] Hervé Guibert taught his booming French public to think of Foucault’s death as une agonie—i.e., an AIDS death—whose association to San Francisco’s bathhouses is immortalized in the novel. [...] While the tone of “Muzil”’s “frasques” here in the Bay jolts readers to look past the pseudonym [...], these same readers reel at the narrator’s friend Bill assuring him that a cure awaits in Los Angeles. This promise which we know must be a lie makes LA the place where the novel’s opening line, in its famously fantastical past perfect, might hold true: “I had AIDS for three months.” [...] Arguing that not just Foucault, but the California he so loved, came to haunt a certain thread of French AIDS writing, Corbani will illustrate how the narrative motif came to shape French understandings of the crisis.
Through Agnès Varda’s documentary fiction Documenteur (1981), Marcus Dominick will add a new facet to the theoretical portrayal of California. Alongside other immigrants also estranged from their pasts, the film’s protagonist, Émilie must negotiate a recent rupture with her husband and what it has bequeathed to her: a fractured relationship to others, herself, and language. Through the lens of ordinary language philosophy, Dominick will examine Émilie’s drama as that of attempting to rediscover her voice, in Stanley Cavell’s sense of the term, and reintegrate the weave of ordinary life and language. Varda foregrounds Émilie’s relationship with language as occupying the crux of the film through scenes of dictation, transcription, composition, narration, and instruction. [...] In doing so, Émilie begins to remember how to tame the pain which the film calls her “mal blanc”: her depression, but also her inability, faced with the blank page of the California shore, to find her own voice and to risk herself in meaning.
A second paper on Varda by Aubrey Gabel will create a dialogue between Californian and French landscapes. In what Criterion now labels her “Californian” films”—Uncle Yanko (1968), Black Panthers (1970), Murs murs (1981) and Documenteur (1981)—Varda produced a series of experimental and documentary shorts [...]. As a 2013 LACMA exposition noted, these films constitute a “love letter” [...]. This paper will examine how Varda figures various cities and landscapes of California, as well as how these Californian dreams come to influence other, less explicitly “Californian” works in her corpus, like Les plages d’Agnès. The paper will address an underlying question about Varda’s “californiphilie”: how do the utopian possibilities of California come to oppose the limiting landscape of postwar French cinema? Why and how was California—as landscape, as industry, and as source of inspiration—essential to the creation of her particular Franco-Belgian avant-garde?