Poetics of Deconstruction

Lynn Turner’s exhilarating, elegant, and very important book overturns common conceptions about human exceptionalism, hospitality, the place accorded to the feminine, and animal intimacy. Turner shows how, at its ‘heart’, deconstruction entreats us to listen for the poetic rhythms that link the fundamental questions of life to the stereographic rhythms that speak to us from the heart of the other. * Elissa Marder, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Emory University, USA *
Lynn Turner brilliantly follows the trace of differences—animal, sexual, racial—in readings of film, text and flesh that prove the ongoing relevance and importance of deconstruction for our times. Her own poetics offers keen insights into the writings of Derrida, Freud, Cixous, Irigaray, and Haraway among others. * Kari Weil, University Professor of Letters, Wesleyan University, USA *
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. * Nicholas Royle, Professor of English, University of Sussex, UK *