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Dreaming the Face, Screening the Death: Reflections for Jean-Louis Schefer on La Jetée

Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s reading of trauma in Lacan’s interpretation of the burning child dream in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, this article offers a feminist response to Jean-Louis Schefer’s study of Chris Marker’s canonical film on time and memory: La Jetée. The question of the trauma of life and awakening is shifted by a non-phallic, matrixial reading that attends to a haunting sense of presence. One vision sees the subject as traumatically quickened to a living that is forever haunted by what it cannot remember, trapped into a return that will take it forward to its death. A different vision senses some supplementary dimensions of the subject that is never a purely solitary One, outcast from an originary unity, but is co-emergent, traumatically (as any encounter with the real must be) in tune with, and witness to, all the burdens and hurts of the Other that must be shared. The article suggests, therefore, that the grace of this deeply fetishistic, psychically masculine film, nonetheless, lies at a psychic level only just emerging into theorization on the far border of Lacan’s poetic revision of psychoanalysis through the feminist attentiveness to, and desire to know of, a sexual difference in, of and from the feminine.