A new book chapter by FILM AND DEATH's PI Susana Viegas is out now. Titled “Derrida on Cinema’s Spectral Images: Time, Repetition, and Belief”, this new chapter is published in Derrida and Film Studies, edited by Kamil Lipiński and Andrzej Marzec (Brill, 2025).
This chapter by Susana Viegas begins as a meditation on the relationship between film, death and time, developing into a comprehensive reflection on three interrelated dimensions: (1) film’s capacity to engage with the temporal dimension of death, exploring past/present/future dialectics; (2) the ontological interplay between presence and absence; and (3) the system of belief shaped by cinematic experience. Guided by Jacques Derrida’s insight that we “go to the movies to be analyzed, by letting all the ghosts appear and speak”, the chapter emphasizes cinema’s projection mechanism as a “haunting house,” where spectres exist in a liminal space “neither living nor dead,” challenging conventional notions of temporality and belief. Drawing on Manoel de Oliveira’s Visit, or Memories and Confessions (1982), she considers how cinema creates “spectre memories” and “lectosigns” (Deleuze), i.e. images that demand to be read and interpreted, exploring the paradox of temporal presence in moving images: how can a cinematic figure return from the past when it only exists in the present moment of projection? Through this analysis, the chapter demonstrates cinema’s capacity to rethink temporality, repetition, and belief, offering a philosophical account of the spectral image. It is of interest to scholars and students of film studies, philosophy, cultural theory, and Portuguese cinema.
The published version of the chapter is available here. The accepted version is available here.
