Poetics of Deconstruction von Lynn Turner

In Poetics of Deconstruction, Lynn Turner develops an intimate attention to independent films, art and the psychoanalyses by which they might make sense other than under continued license of the subject that calls himself man. Drawing extensively from Jacques Derrida's philosophy in precise dialogue with feminist thought, animal studies and posthumanism, this book explores the vulnerability of the living as rooted in non-oppositional differences. From abjection to mourning, to the speculative and the performative, it reposes concepts and buzzwords seemingly at home in feminist theory, visual culture and the humanities more broadly. Stepping away from the carno-phallogocentric legacies of the signifier and the dialectic, Poetics of Deconstruction asks you to welcome nonpower into politics, always sexual but no longer anchored in sacrifice.Immersive, subtle, illuminating, bizarre: these are a few of the adjectives that might be used to describe Lynn Turner's compelling book. Poetics of Deconstruction focuses mostly on film and visual culture, but its concerns are multifarious and often surprising - from Irigaray to Björk, from Haraway to von Trier, from cats and dogs to kisses and the death penalty. It is also an especially distinctive and welcome study for the ways in which it brings together Jacques Derrida's writings on the performative with notions of performativity in gender and film theory.