Issue 08: The Loop as a Temporal Form (2004) Margot Bouman  As a form, the loop contradicts the linear structure we typically associate with time. The common-sense formulation understands time as a progression forward from moment to moment to moment, with a clear division of past, present and future. Yet many theories contradict this apparent truism. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for example, organize time into chronos and aeon. Greg Hainge, a contributor to this issue, writes that the latter continually and simultaneously divides the event into the already-there and the not-yet here, while failing to settle on either. This describes a loop folding back on itself, while not returning to its place of origin. Elsewhere, Jacques Derrida uses this failure of origins to structure a system of ethics grounded in an attempt to elude the eternal return of the same. While Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida insist on this failure in their use of the loop as a temporal form, Sigmund Freud understands time in terms of telos and its failure. In other words, absent a forward progression …

Issue 08: The Loop as a Temporal Form (2004) Miriam Bankovsky He will have obligated (il aura obligé)1 The metaphor of the knotted thread is not a mere metaphor in Derrida’s homage to the work of Emmanuel Levinas. His own essay, “At this very moment in this work here I am,” is itself structured as a thread of textual knots.2 In this paper, I will ask three questions of this work in order to understand how Derrida’s work works to theorize “the loop,” the circle that loses its way, and why looping is, for Derrida, an ethical practice. First of all, what is Derrida’s aim, in threading this work of knots, or, in other words, what is the intended end of his work? How does Derrida work to achieve this aim, or, in other words, how does he tie his knots? Finally, to what extent is Derrida’s intended and final end achieved in this work of knots, or, in other words, why is it that Derrida’s work succeeds only inasmuch as he fails to fulfill his intention of …

Issue 08: The Loop as a Temporal Form (2004) Greg Hainge There are, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s formulation, two possible ways to conceive of time. There is, firstly, “Chronos: the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject,” and then the time of aeon, “the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there [un déjà-là] that is at the same time not-yet-here [un pas encore-là], a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened.”1 Whilst it sometimes appears in their work as though these two different times were two different possible models that could be used to describe time, it is rather the case that they describe not so much time itself as a relationship to time, a relationship that can be either, in the case of Chronos, transcendent, time being extensive, divisible into fixed and known measures and used to gauge finite periods, or else, as in …

Issue 08: The Loop as a Temporal Form (2004) Jaimey Hamilton1 In 1974 Nam June Paik placed a statue of Buddha in front of a TV that displayed live feedback of the figure and titled it TV Buddha (Fig. 1). The Buddha, an Eastern symbol of meditation and enlightenment, used in conjunction with the then-new technology of the closed-circuit loop, raises interesting questions about the relationship between subjectivity and media technology. Does the Buddha meditate upon itself or is it just another media effect, an eternal return of the simulated image of the self? Along with Paik’s other experiments with the new medium of video in the 1970s, TV Buddha reflected an early understanding of the control that media potentially had over the intellectual life of its viewers, while at the same time expressing Paik’s hope in its possibilities as an instrument of cultural exchange.2 The tension of TV Buddha resides in the precarious balance between meditation and mediation, between the consciousness and the constructedness of the self. Approaching the relationship between subjectivity and media from a background in minimalism and …

Issue 08: The Loop as a Temporal Form (2004) Alanna Thain The direct time-image is the phantom which has always haunted the cinema, but it took modern cinema to give a body to this phantom. —Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image1 David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway is haunted by the specter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), itself a ghost story on many levels.2 In Lost Highway, the spectralizing effects of recording and communication devices are rendered in graphic form; characters get “lost in the medium,” in the delay of the lost time. No longer simply the art of the index, Lost Highway puts the virtual observer into the scene, and characters are caught in the movement of affect, a vertigo of suspense that is not simply epistemological in nature. Inspired by the spiral form that dominates Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Lost Highway explores the effects of living in a world characterized by paramnesia. A form of déjà vu, paramnesia is a disjunction of sensation and perception, in which one has the inescapable sense of having already lived a moment in time, of being a witness to one’s life. …

Issue 08: The Loop as a Temporal Form (2004) Eric Sonstroem Healthy mourning for an individual undergoing grief is conventionally marked by teleology; one “goes through” mourning, but only as a finite process that reaches a definite end. When finished, one “moves on.” In Freudian terms, an individual’s mourning concludes when the libido has surrendered its attachment to the lost object, becoming free to form new attachments elsewhere. One moves, however painstakingly, from point A (attachment to the lost object) to point B (attachment to a new object). Healthy mourning risks becoming pathological melancholia when one is unable to make it to point B, when one cannot relinquish the lost object and continues to circle back to it. Therefore, tropes such as looping and repetition occupy a very suspect position in psychoanalytic theory about loss. Freud laid the groundwork for this distinction in his foundational essay “Morning and Melancholia.” Mourning is painful but fully above-board, a conscious process in which “respect for reality gains the day….When the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.”1 Melancholia …

Issue 08: The Loop as a Temporal Form (2004) Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudreault  This article is part of a larger research project on the different forms attraction has taken in the cultural series “animated pictures.”1 Here we will focus our attention on the first signs of the paradigm which we propose to call cinématographie-attraction, a paradigm in which the question of “thresholds” seems to us to be essential.2 Moving picture programs juxtaposed, one after the other, a long string of often disparate views. Viewers of the period, for that very reason, were called upon to enter into a dozen sometimes completely heterogeneous worlds, one after the other, at the same screening.3 The cinématographie-attraction experience was essentially an experience of discontinuity. Full of interruptions and sudden starts, this experience was a chain of shocks, a series of thresholds. The concept of the threshold will be particularly useful here, because it allows us to problematise the various kinds of discontinuity which punctuate the cultural series “animated pictures.” This punctuation took the form of one of two primary structuring principles running through …