Cinema without Reflection traces an implicit film theory in Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, especially in his frequent invocation of the myth of Echo and Narcissus. Derrida’s reflections on the economies of image and sound that reverberate in this story, along with the spectral dialectics of love, mirrors, and poiesis, serve as the basis for a theory of cinema that Derrida perhaps secretly imagined.

Following Derrida’s interventions on Echo and Narcissus across his thought on the visual arts, Akira Mizuta Lippit seeks to return to a theory of cinema adrift in Derrida’s philosophy.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Akira Mizuta Lippit teaches film and literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012), Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minnesota, 2005), and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minnesota, 2000).

"As media historians seek to understand familiar notions of realism and spectatorship in terms of ethics, participatory relations, and other such criteria, this excavation of Derrida's thinking on and through cinema by Lippit makes a timely and excellent contribution."—Film Quarterly