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2007 NYU Cinema & Media Student Conference

Kimmel Center / King Juan Carlos Center
February 16 & 17




Panel Topics and Events

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Problematic Historicizations and Historiographies

Moderator: Juan Monroy (Cinema Studies)

Friday, 10:00-11:15 in Kimmel 914

Carolina Larrain - Framing National Cinema: The Pursuit of an Unobtainable Object of Desire

This presentation reviews the concept of “national cinema” distinguishing the problematic use it has for cinema studies from a conceptual, historical and cultural point of view. Carolina attends to the creation of unifying national fictions that exclude many groups and tendencies in the benefit of an abstract, but reassuring, fictional concept. She also reviews the definition of national identity through film analyzing the pertinence of its study and conceptualization in relation to sequenciation, historical distance and closure for the attribution of meaning and significance.


Paul Fileri - Traversing the 20th Century Media Archive: or Seizing the Historical Detail in Chris Marker's The Last Bolshevik

This presentation focuses on Chris Marker's 1993 video The Last Bolshevik (Le Tombeau d'Alexandre) as an exemplary instance of a more and more significant tendency within historical essayistic documentary filmmaking practice that undertakes a sweeping reexamination of how one particular history of cinema is intertwined with a larger history of the twentieth-century and how these histories themselves are constructed in personal and cultural memory. Through a textual analysis of a series of important moments in Marker's video, this paper considers the work as such a postmodern history film, which shapes its engagement with history through a central critical and reflexive strategy of privileging the historically revelatory detail in archival images.


Anoosh Tertzakian - Lack and Denial: A Portrait of the Inheritance of Memory in Armenian Cinema Goudsouzian's My Son Shall Be Armenian

Any discussion concerning the Armenian Genocide by default includes a discussion of the modern Turkish government's denial that its forefather, the Ottoman government, perpetrated the atrocities as part of an officially planned and executed policy of extermination in 1915-1917. Secondary to that denial, but still a major point of contention, is the refusal of certain major world powers to recognize the genocide as a genocide for political reasons. What I am mainly concerned with in this essay, though, is the link between the way knowledge of the event is transmitted-inherited-and this ever-present and overarching issue of denial: more specifically how this link is related to cinematic depictions. When approaching the portrayal of the Armenian Genocide on film as a subject of inquiry, however, one encounters an overwhelming sense of lack: not only of modern-day mainstream representations, but also of archival footage taken during the actual event, which is practically non-existent.



Inter-Media Connections and Comparisons

Moderator: Greg Zinman (Cinema Studies)

Friday, 11:30-12:45 in Kimmel 914

Kurt Shulenberger - DJ Godard: Music and Postmodernism in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard

This paper examines Godard's use of music in his work, using an intertextual framework to discuss the implementation of both musical scores and incidental diegetic sound, as well as exploring the radical way with which the musical "cog" operates inside Godard's greater cinematic machine. Specifically, this paper draws connections between Godard's use of sound and other musical techniques found in modern popular music, such as improvisation, fragmentation, and the "mixing" and "sampling" used by disc jockeys and producers. By using a present contextual lens to analyze the musical themes prevalent in Godard's work, the author hopes to further the notion of the filmmaker as one of the first "DJs," freely drawing upon different media to comment on and/or create new meanings from their combinations and juxtapositions.


Rachel Shields - The New Television: Television, the Internet, and Alternatives to Traditional Passive Watching

Television shows cannot escape trailing online texts in their wake; even  shows from decades ago--shows in permanent hiatus--are widely accessible for viewing because of video and dvd releases and have websites in their honor.  Far from causing an end to reading and writing, nearly all television shows spark an endless amount of writing--indeed, it is really much more common for a show to have various online extensions than to not have them, more the rule than the exception.  Is this continual expansion of critical discourse and fan-dom part of the nature of the medium called television?  Though fans and re-cappers might be reading things into these shows that are not actually within the intentions of the writers and directors, there must be something about television that allows, even encourages, these kinds of interpretations;  even if the original show lacks depth, the creative responses to it make it somehow more worthwhile (the show is provoking thought, perhaps in spite of itself). Can a person learn to read television 'deeply'?  Is television something that can be deeply engaging?  The extensions of television, whether an academic film critic or an online forum, can both enrich and reflect upon medium. Focusing on the television show "Veronica Mars" and various re-capping websites (such as Televisionwithoutpity), this paper explores the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Henry Jenkins and others in an attempt to document the interractive nature of television today--and the manner in which viewers have inserted themselves into the reality of the shows they watch.  Moreover, does this level of interraction with the medium mean that what we knew as television is now something essentially different than it once was?


Ben McCormick - The Ephemeralist:  Time, Rhythm, and History in the Comics of Chris Ware

Chris Ware, the American independent comics artist and creator of "The Acme Novelty Library," has been widely recognized as one of the most formally innovative figures in his medium today.  This presentation will examine Ware's treatment of time in his major work to date, the 2000 novel Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth.  It will investigate his experiments with narrative rhythm and chronology, as well as his representation of American history, and suggest some of the ways the reader’s experience of time in comics relates to the experience of time in other narrative media.



Time, Space, and Memory in Hollywood Cinema

Moderator: Professor Dana Polan (Cinema Studies)

Friday, 1:00 - 2:15 in Kimmel 914

Lydia Storie - Structure and Temporality in Groundhog Day

About two-thirds of the way through Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Connors attempts to accomplish the one thing he hasn't yet tried to do—to convince his colleague, Rita, that his existence has inexplicably stalled on February 2nd. The narrative up to this point portrays the contemptuous and egocentric Connors first taking advantage of his situation, reliving the same day over and over again, characteristically as an opportunity to act without consequences and to get what he wants. Then, when this grows tiresome, the weary Connors tries repeatedly to break out of the circumstances through suicide. Of course, escaping does not prove to be that simple; the narrative has condemned Connors to perpetually relive the worst day of his life until he makes a fundamental change in his personality. The day he sits down in the diner to relate his story to Rita marks the beginning of his ultimate transition from being a self-absorbed, disparaging quasi-celebrity to a more content, more compassionate human being. This particular sequence in the diner essentially mirrors the arc of the entire film, as well as the reality it creates, on a minor scale. The premise of Groundhog Day only works if we believe that Connors continues to experience the same day on every day of his life, and the filmic structure functions to ensure this is the case. This conventionality of structure is precisely what works to persuade us that Connors' initially unbelievable circumstances are real within the world of the film, and it is the acceptance of that fact which ultimately makes his personal transition matter to us.


Adam Irving - Location, Location, Location: Forrest Gump's Urban-Rural Dichotomy as a Reflection of America's Political Divide

Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) presents two Americas-one urban and one rural. I will demonstrate how Gump portrays the former as a festering hole of exploitation, intoxication, and godlessness, while it connects the latter with plentitude, modesty and order. Forrest Gump's urban-rural dichotomy mirrors America's liberal-conservative divide, but this mirror distorts and accentuates traits that favor the lifestyle and values traditionally associated with the Right.


Liz Stephens - Cinematic Methods and Modes of Historicizing the Holocaust: The Lenses of Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick

Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick approach their subjects in diverse cinematic and narrative methods. Their disparate approaches to solving the problem of the Holocaust in history contain a common underlying consideration of memory as an inscription on film and the medium as a public history. Schindler's List and The Shining both depict a total breakdown of norms, socio-political structure, and the family network to illustrate the magnitude of human suffering. These films represent a reality--a reality that documents from World War II cannot portray. The result of their works is an aestheticism, which provides a tangible grasp of the traumatic depths of the Holocaust. Both disparate works inquire into the nadir of representation and attempt to work through its horrors. Spielberg and Kubrick become historians by reintroducing the complex events of the Holocaust and examining human behavior in the reaction and action it has with trauma. With the Holocaust epic and horror film, both directors successfully achieve working through the Holocaust using an aesthetical mode to create a historical filmic text.



Representations of Community and Self in Documentary

Moderator: Professor Marita Sturken (Culture & Communication)

Friday, 2:30 - 3:45 in Kimmel 914

Carolina Larrain - Chilean University Documentary Cinema 1957-1973: Towards an Intensification of Reality

In the 1950s two of Chile’s major universities opened film institutions as part of their curriculums. Documentary film experiences a re-birth in this new scenario becoming an accomplice and participant in various historical processes, re-thinking its role as a medium and transforming the nation’s audio-visual imaginary. The presentation will refer to the results of a research project developed in Chile last year on documentary cinema in two of its major academic institutions and will explain the relevance of this type of film making as well as reviewing a few of its aesthetic uses and cultural and ideological determinations.

Tori Wunsch - Native American Representation in Mainstream: The American Indian Movement, Self-representation, and Urban/Rural Identities

Tori examines the effects of various social, cultural, and political factors of the 1970s on the representation of Native Americans in the "Mainstream" (1977) episode of "The Real People" television series. In particular, she explores the complexities of the American Indian Movement (AIM), self-representation, and rural versus urban identities. The American Indian Movement allowed television to introduce mass audiences to contemporary Native Americans as activists, and it paved the way for the possibility of self-representation. "Mainstream" also provided one point of view about rural versus urban life, a point of view which favored the environment of the reservation to that of a city. Furthermore, the "Mainstream" episode was significant because it is one of the first American television shows with a Native American director, Larry Littlebird (Laguna/Santo Domingo Pueblos), and a Native American film crew.


Martin Johnson - The Cameraman Has Visited Your Town: Tracing the Path of H. Lee Waters and Other Local Filmmakers in the 1930’s

H. Lee Waters was a studio photographer from Lexington, N.C., who from 1936 to 1942 used a 16-mm motion picture camera to make "Movies of Local People." He would visit a town, reach an agreement with the local theater manager to show the film, and proceed to film the people of the town. After a few weeks, he would return to show his short film, from twenty to sixty minutes in length, at the local movie theater before the feature film. In this six-year period, Waters visited 118 towns in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. In the late 1980s, his films were re-discovered and collected at Duke University. In 2005, Waters's film of Kannapolis was named to the National Film Registry. Based on original research, including access to the family's personal archive, this paper uses evidence from Waters's practice as well as newspaper and magazine research from the period, I argue that Waters's 'Movies of Local People' were not sui generis, but rather part of a phenomenon of people using home movie equipment to show local films in movie theaters in the 1930s. Waters faced competition from other local filmmakers, both itinerant entrepreneurs like himself and hobbyists who thought that their films would better represent their community than those made by an outsider. In addition, these local filmmakers laid the groundwork for 16-mm local and archival film exhibition in churches, schools, civic clubs and other non-theatrical spaces in the 1930s and beyond. Though Waters ended his filmmaking practice in 1942, he started a 16-mm film distribution company several years later, and continued to rent and exhibit his own films and others for decades. The recent rediscovery of Waters's films has also raises historiographic issues, particularly the role of these films in constituting shared memories of places that have fundamentally changed or, in some cases, no longer exist due to the closing of the factories that sustained the towns where he filmed. While the quality and availability of Waters's films have secured his place in the film canon, I argue that the recent excavation and preservation of his films should instead be seen as the starting place for inquiries into local film, 16-mm exhibition, and the role of film in social memory. As emergent media sites, such as YouTube, merge public and private spheres of film production and exhibition, the history of local film provides important insight into how this material may be conceptualized and analyzed.



Protecting and Promoting the American Ideal in the Postwar Era

Moderator: Professor Robert Sklar (Cinema Studies)

Friday, 4:00 - 5:15 in Kimmel 914

Nate Brennan - New York’s Motion Picture Division and the Problem of Subjective Film Censorship, 1950-1965

This presentation examines the history of the New York state film review board, the Motion Picture Division, and pays particular attention to the review and censorship procedures concerning foreign films. The goal of this 
presentation is to examine the difficulties of the review board as they tried to mediate community morality 
standards, legal precedent and personal ideals of art. What I’d like to attempt is to renegotiate the figure of the state censor as a conflicted subject: that is, not necessarily a shadowy figure intent on curtailing art, but one 
attempting to follow the strictures of law balanced with a desire to cultivate film as an art. By looking at both reports of state censorship in the media as well as reports and memoranda of the MPD itself, this paper considers the conflicting discourses of film censorship in the 1950s in response to the decline of the classical Hollywood cinema and the challenged posed by European and Asian national cinemas. Thus I hope to show how 
state censorship and review—in New York in particular—was shaped and ultimately dismantled as a means of 
censoring objectionable material as well as mediating new narrative forms.


M. Zeynep Dadak - Literally Military: Americanism and Turkification through 1950's Cinema in Turkey

The beginning of the new alliance between the U.S. and Turkey, which did not really share any history together, was symbolized in Turkish history by the visit of the American battleship Missouri in 1946, bringing home the body of Munir Ertegun, the Turkish Ambassador to the United States. At the turn of the1950s, parallel to the developments taking place in the political arena, ‘Americanism’ was becoming fashionable in the everyday life of Turkey. It could be argued that the ‘American dream’ or ‘the American way of life’ owes its impact among Turkish society of the 1950s to Hollywood movies more than any direct US economic or military aid. To understand better the nature of this fantasy space, mainly generated by Hollywood, it is crucial to look at the founding metaphor that establishes the relationship between Turkey and the United States in the first place. At what levels the circulation of Hollywood films in Turkey can be free of that military metaphor? How can the ever-present militaristic relationship with the United States be traced beyond the limits of the representation of war and military in films, as in the case of censorship?


Sueyoung Park-Primiano - Road to Seoul: Exchanging Hollywood and the American Way of Life in Postwar South Korea, 1945-1962

This paper attempts to explore the impact of Hollywood and the United States military's overseas campaign to promote democracy and the American way of life (i.e. against communism) in South Korea through the exhibition of motion pictures in the postwar period, from Korea's liberation in 1945 and subsequent occupation by the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) through 1962.

 

Reality's Influence on Fiction

Moderator: Alice Black (Cinema Studies)

Friday, 5:30 - 6:15 in Kimmel 914

Jeff Richardson - Beyond the Bison: The Creative Obstructions of Lars von Trier

Danish director Lars von Trier has compared the art of cinema to the art of painting: “Cinema is a mere hundred years old and we’ve just worked out how to draw a bison.  There’s a long way to go.  That’s why I’m very optimistic about the future.”  This presentation examines von Trier’s body of work by discussing his unique creative method and linking it to his childhood upbringing.  In all of his films, von Trier has set rules for himself, purposefully restricting his creative control.  Raised to create his own rules and rebel against others, von Trier uses self-imposed obstructions to force himself to think of film in new ways, to look beyond the bison.

Myles David Jewell - Jean-Luc Godard: An Ethnographer of Cinema

Based on excerpts from a longer essay, this paper attempts to link Jean-Luc Godard to Ethnographic filmmaking in intention, and in form and content.  If the goal of Ethnography is to achieve better cultural understanding, Godard should be regarded as one of the leading filmmakers to achieve these ends, although he worked in the realm of fiction.  By pushing the modes of filmmaking (as represented by Bill Nichols) to their breaking point, I conclude that Godard can also be thought of as a Ethnographer of cinema as well. 


Dan Gwinnell - TV Terrorism and Narrative Convergence

When trying to understand the state of a nation, there is no better place to look than the narratives it is currently producing. And if narratives are sites of cultural production and conflict, then there is certainly no better place to look than television narratives. A test case: watch 24 and you will begin to notice some rather striking visual similarities between the show and the outlets through which many Americans receive their news. Given the change in the political landscape after 9/11, as well as the corresponding televisual shift that this new landscape reflects, it is not entirely surprisingly to find a fictional narrative mimicking a news narrative. Furthermore, it is also not surprising to find that the news has mimicked in turn some of the narrative strategies of the modern terror fiction genre that was birthed  five years ago. This is a study in convergence and ultimately what these narrative similarities contribute to: an ahistorical culture invested in spectacular violence.


Terror, Torture, and Atrocity: (Un)Making Reality in American Cinema and Media

Moderator: Professor Nicole Rizzuto (Draper Interdisciplinary Program)

Saturday, 11:30 - 12:45 in Kimmel 914

Jesse Gant - Cold Mountain: Torture, Violence, and Forgetting

Charles Frazier’s popular novel Cold Mountain narrates the odyssey of a wounded Confederate veteran making his way home to North Carolina in the waning months of the American Civil War--in 2003, the novel was adapted for the big screen by director Anthony Minghella. This presentation investigates how scenes of war violence and torture operate throughout both Frazier’s novel and Minghella’s film adaptation.  I am particularly interested in the extent to which representations of guerilla violence, civilian torture, and combat in both the novel and film work to advance what historian Eric Foner has called America’s “Romance with Reunion.”  By situating Cold Mountain historically alongside other “epic” cinematic treatments of the American Civil War, I will interrogate how Cold Mountain works to recycle thematic and narrative motifs of the Confederate “Lost Cause.” 


Jenny Kelly - Cruel and Usual Punishment:  The Making and Maintaining of Empire within U.S. Domestic and Foreign Prisons

In order to address the relationship between media and reality and the social effects of media as an historical document, this paper focuses specifically on the media representation, as well as the governmental and jurisprudential treatment, of the events at Abu Ghraib and the way in which these representative practices have rendered entirely invisible the routine use of torture and violence in both U.S. domestic and foreign prisons. Representations of the acts at Abu Ghraib as shocking, abhorrent, and ultimately anomalous have served to eclipse the “cruel” and also exceedingly “usual” nature of the punishment that characterizes both foreign and domestic U.S. prisons.  The disavowal of the acts at Abu Ghraib as aberrant, and the simultaneous disappearance of comparable torture in domestic prisons, has enabled, and continues to facilitate, the sustained operation of both American imperialism and American exceptionalism.  As such, the rhetoric and policy of both the “War on Terror” and the “War on Crime” are not without historical precedent and are tied explicitly to specific colonial legacies. 


Maggie Riggs - Representations of Atrocity in Hotel Rwanda and the American Spectator

This presentation will examine the representations of acts of atrocity in Terry George’s 2004 film, Hotel Rwanda, and the ways in which these images affect the American cinematic spectator.  Maggie uses Susan Sontag’s arguments in Regarding the Pain of Others and Judith Butler’s arguments in Precarious Life as her primary sources in analyzing the ways in which Americans who view this film might – and should – respond to these images of genocidal torture and brutality. While Sontag argues that it may be dehumanizing, morally wrong and politically inefficacious to view images of atrocity and acts of violence unless one can  take some direct action to aid individuals in crisis, Butler alternately argues that dehumanization occurs with the censorship and erasure of these images at the level of discourse.



Theories of Reality and History

Moderator: Wyatt Phillips (Cinema Studies)

Saturday, 1:00 - 2:15 in Kimmel 914

Dana C. Gravesen - The Unfinished Historical Narrative and the Theory of the Implant

In Philip Rosen's _Change Mummified_, the author argues the presence of a series of referents as important elements in the definition of a film text as historical document through the indexical trace. For fiction film, the filmic elements constructed for diegetic consumption present a first referent; for historical film, the second referent is the preexisting historiography of the film's objects of representation.

Dana argues that another category of film--the unfinished historical narrative--creates a third referent: the self-referent. Through a process described in the essay as the theory of the implant, the unfinished historical narrative's dependency on the preexistent historiography to which it refers implants the unfinished historical narrative into the historiography itself. Elements of the film's overall story must be explained through research of its historiography, thereby situating the film within the second referent of the preexisting historiography while collapsing boundaries of reference. The importance of the theory hopefully lies in its ability to illustrate how the structure of the unfinished historical narrative further positions and cements a specific form of cinematic text as document, as opposed to myth or construct.


Marta Hafner -The Persistence of Errol Morris: A Camera 'I' to Behold

To examine the historiographic significance of the form and content of First Person (2000), one is faced with the challenge of defining it. Morris resists the moniker "documentary filmmaker." He prefers to describe his films as non-fiction. Some of his rejection of documentary classification may stem from rejection by industry powerhouses such as the MPAA, who did not allow The Thin Blue Line (1988) consideration in the documentary category due to the re-enactments. Morris also rejects documentary mores such as the concept of cinema vérité, or “truth cinema,” which is largely based on stylistic notions of authenticity like hand-held cameras and natural lighting. To the claim that these techniques equal vérité (truth), Morris is unconvinced: "To me, it's utter nonsense. Who could have ever made such a claim? On the basis of what?" And the self-righteousness can certainly be justified by the fact that it was his unconventional “non-fiction” film that actually discovered a truth long-concealed, and in doing so got an innocent man out of a life sentence; and Morris has proclaimed The Thin Blue Line "a triumph over vérité" and "anti-vérité."

The Thin Blue Line was not nominated for best documentary due to re-enactments within the film. How do the re-enactments make a documentary any less authentic than an oral history? For these memories are certainly as subjective, if not more so, than a re-enactment that is potentially based on the accounts of more than one person. Whose eye, or vision, can determine the documentary status of a "true story?" In Senses of Cinema, Jon Conomos emphasizes that it is important to note that the reenactments "aren't constructed to illustrate what the filmmaker may believe the world is, but rather they illustrate how images themselves don't embody truth." According to Morris, "They’re illustrations of lies. They’re all ironic." Nevertheless, rather than problematize the filmic discourse, the nature of the reenactment actually serves to clarify the narrative search for the relative truth between fact and fiction.


Jacob Gaboury - Post-Human Roleplaying in the Digital Space: Warcraft as New Media Desire

The relationship between “reality” and various media is complex, but while 
questions of cinema and 
reality have been debated for ages, this presentation concerns the debate over reality and realism within new media that 
draw from and work within cinematic conventions. It seeks to analyze the 
differences and 
merits of massive online multiplayer texts in the creation and reflection of reality and lived experience. It argues for the creation of new media texts that more properly reflect a contemporary post-modern narrational
mode that conflicts with the linearity of modern storytelling. Rather, these texts draw from a
rhizomatic narrative
frame in an attempt to articulate post-human yearning and anxiety. Through an analysis of multi-user spaces from a media studies perspective this presentation will analyze what 
makes these new media important and distinct, and will create a new analytical framework from 
within which we may interpret new narrative modes.



Depictions of Queer (Sur)Reality

Moderator: Elena Gorfinkel (Cinema Studies)

Saturday, 2:30 - 3:45 in Kimmel 914

Ben Horner - The Function of Dreams in Transgender Film Narratives

For the transgendered individual, identity is often a problematic contradiction between the body one is born into and the opposing gender that one identifies as. Films like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, along with more recent fair such as Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto the Spanish film 20 Centimeters, have sought to explore and carve out a space for the transgendered individual in the filmic medium. Though sharing the common element of a transgendered protagonist, all three films also share a distinctive narrative tool: the dream sequence. This presentation explores the the function these dream sequences serve as cinematic depictions of the sex/gender difference of the transgendered individual.

Robert Lightning - Brokeback Mountain:  Generic Roots, Past and Present

"Brokeback Mountain:  Generic Roots, Past and Present" examines the film Brokeback Mountain in relation to contemporary films of similar narrative structure which can be categorised as Gay Romantic Tragedies.  This paper will also examine the film in relation to classical Hollywood genres, specifically the western, the woman's film and the horror film.

David Harvey - Stars Get in Our Eyes: The Gay Male Spectator and Barebacking Pornography

Whether by principle, accident or indifference, "barebacking" is the term that classifies unsafe anal sex between men.  The surrender and acquiesce of gay men in relation to the epidemic has become infused with connotations of choice, power and will.  Elaborating on previous work done some years past, I tarry before the obvious: asking why (do it), yet foreclose judgment.  Instead, we consider gay: culture, identity, sexuality, guilt, melancholy and mourning (in bolds stroke of theory mottled by history).  We follow death as it drives subjects strangely toward the light of community and collective re/identifications (jouissance  inverted as directive.)   Indeed, the orienteering positions more than a subculture; it also defines a new breed of gay porn set apart from the rest: barebacking pornography.  Whether on websites or porn stores, visions of sex undone and fantastical surrender have their own quite popular section.

Empathetic toward the practice, the paper ultimately struggles to condone an erotics of lethal (re)infection.  Yet, what benefits do these texts imagine and, moreover, do their obvious dangers actually imperil spectators or merely rankle critics?  Having refracted phenomenological modes of communal identity (queer) and complicated medicalized bodies absent of discourse (people with AIDS, people with AIDS?); we watch selves arising through shattered egos.  What do we see in these porn (shooting, falling, nameless) stars?  We look at the porn, to cinema and queer studies, psychoanalysis, Leo Bersani and Tim Dean and wonder (spellbound):  'Can to Be be to Lack?'