From Structure to Enigma and Back,Perhaps

Abstract

This article is concerned with reviewing the histories of structuralism and poststructuralism in their moment of redundancy as theoretical terms in order to unearth and instate some of the missing relations of writing and figure that we can read out of the work of the French writer Jean-Louis Schefer. Little read in the Anglo-Saxon university, his thinking on art, cinema and literature represents a unique intervention that, in its poetic denial of its own structuralist origins, offers a form of critical text that escapes the categories and methodologies of critical theory while remaining rooted in a series of different forms of profound scholarship. Schefer’s work invites us to configure images and to map out the surfaces that make them visible as the invention of an equal and amorous or sometimes unequal relation with them. He invites us to invent.