NO WORD MOVIE: CHANTAL AKERMAN AND SILENCE AS A COUNTER-ARCHIVE OF FEELING

Authors

  • Cecilia Macón Universidad de Buenos Aires

Keywords:

Chantal Akerman, archive, affect, silence

Abstract

What does silence mean? What are the challenges faced by people that decide not to talk about their traumatic past? Does this decision imply a skeptical attitude? These are questions usually posed by historians and political scientists dealing with witnesses that refuse to talk about the trauma they suffered. Chantal Akerman’s last movie, No Home Movie (2014), is precisely an inquiry into this issue. Through the chronicle of the final days of her mother, the director gives an account of her refusal to talk about her experience as an Auschwitz prisoner. This article explores how Akerman’s aesthic strategies introduce memory as a counter-archive of feelings. The rhetorical strategies here analyzed imply the possibility of conceptualizing the silence on trauma as having a particular affective thickness: silence, not just as pure void, but as result of a collision of affects allegedly inconsistent with trauma and devoted to the constitution of such counter-archives.

Author Biography

Cecilia Macón, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Cecilia Macón is Lecturer in Philosophy of History at the Department of Philosophy, University of Buenos Aires. She holds a B.A.and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (University of Buenos Aires), and a MSc in Political Theory (London School of Economics and Political Science).  Sexual Violence in the Argentinian Crimes Against Humanity Trials. Rethinking Vctimhood (2016) is her first authored book.She has compiled Pensar la democracia, imaginar la transición (2006), Trabajos de la memoria (2006), Mapas de la transición (2010) –the latter in collaboration with Laura Cucchi- and, together with Mariela Solana, Pretérito indefinido. Afectos y emociones en las aproximaciones al pasado (2015) devoted to the impact of the affective turn on History. She has published extensively in journals such as Historein, Journal of Romance Studies, Mora, E-Misferica, Clepsidra, Deus Mortalis, Debate Feminista, Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofía Política, Juridikum-zeitschrift im Rechtstaat, etc. Since 2009 she coordinates SEGAP, an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to gender, visual and memory studies based in the University of Buenos Aires, focusing on the issues stemming from the  theory of affect. Within this framework her research is devoted to the issue of agency, particularly on its impact regarding the ways of approaching the link among past, present and future. Since 1996 she has been working as a journalist for several national and international media.

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Published

2018-01-31

How to Cite

Macón, C. (2018). NO WORD MOVIE: CHANTAL AKERMAN AND SILENCE AS A COUNTER-ARCHIVE OF FEELING. 452ºF. Revista De Teoría De La Literatura Y Literatura Comparada, (18), 74–87. Retrieved from https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/452f/article/view/19792

Issue

No. 18 (2018): The Paradigm of the Archive in Contemporary Narrative and Visual Culture

Section

Monograph

License

All contents published in the journal are protected under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. This corresponds to legislation within Spain, and does not allow commercial use of the texts. It is not possible to modify the contents either.

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Comparative Literature magazine 452ºF [ISSN 2013-3294] is a publishing project coordinated by Asociación Cultural 452ºF, and developed by its Editorial board.



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