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This thesis examines the films of Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis, two celebrated French filmmakers who exhibit a profound and sustained engagement with questions of the political through their cinematic work. In particular, both Duras and Denis are attentive to subjects who exist at the edge of sites of political inclusion. Yet both filmmakers display challenging, often extreme or problematic approaches to their representation of these marginalised subjects, which frustrate and interrupt monolithic, optimistic political readings of their work. Chapter One examines the ways in which Duras seeks to bring to representation the unarticulated suffering and censored histories of colonial and postcolonial subjects. Drawing on Jacques Rancière's politics of aesthetics, I suggest that Duras's formal strategies in her treatment of subjects of colour might be read optimistically as cinematic interventions in the sensible. At the same time, the films examined here invite critique, as their radical formal strategies risk reproducing representational modes associated with erasure, tokenising gestures, ethnographic distancing, and silencing. This chapter attends to these risks, drawing on Jonathan Beller's reflections on the racist violence of the ontology of the photographic image. This critical reading of the image, predicated on the violence of visibility and concomitant objectification, informs the chapter's turn to postcolonial theory. Édouard Glissant's theory of opacity, and Brandon LaBelle's model of sonic agency, offer ways of thinking the non-white subject's withdrawal from view and from comprehension. At the same time, Glissant's poetics of Relation provides a means of reading sound as the basis of a community not predicated on sameness or comprehension - and thus offers a means of thinking community beyond Rancière's demand for mutual intelligibility as the basis for political inclusion. Chapter Two examines Denis's exploration of themes of dispossession and exclusion via marginal ethical and erotic assemblages. In particular, I focus on the recurrent motif of father-daughter incest in her work, which often emerges as a site which exceeds the domination of violent political regimes. The chapter addresses the opposition of hostile public topographies and intimate, domestic spaces, and draws on Rosalind Galt and Sara Ahmed in order to examine the phenomenological and spatial investments of normative narratives versus the disruptive trajectories and blockages of incestuous desire. Turning to philosophers of biopolitics - Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe - as well as Jackie Stacey's concept of the "genetic imaginary", and Laura Marks's "haptic visuality", the chapter also explores the ways in which Denis makes visible vectors of power and domination, which are positioned in opposition to the tender visuality of care and devotion which marks the closed, incestuous community. Yet at the same time, the closed, marginal community grounded in incestuous desire is shown to be haunted by the threat of violence from within. Thus, via Sianne Ngai's affect theory, Julia Kristeva's figure of the abject and Georges Bataille's reflections on eroticism, the chapter examines the implications of Denis's strategy of positioning her political critique from within an ethical model which constantly asserts its potential for rupture and violation.

Over the past two decades, Édouard Glissant's writings have gained ever-increasing prominence in the fields of post-colonial theory, Caribbean studies, and Francophone literature. They have also been widely used in art and exhibition practice as a 'tool-kit' for the display of works relating to themes of globalisation, migration, and diaspora. Glissant was interested and engaged in the arts during his lifetime, but it is not, however, this work that has gained in popularity. Instead, short quotations from his theoretical texts, or isolated terms, including 'opacity', 'relation', and 'creolisation', are utilised in extraction. This thesis returns to the conceptual possibilities of Glissant's geo-poetic terms for the analysis of art that conveys the Caribbean landscape. Although it is undeniable that Glissant's writings have a global resonance, his central and repeating tropes are fundamentally embedded in the imagery and experience of the Caribbean archipelago. Against the aims of a colonial project that rationalises and stabilises through the instrumentalisation and control of nature, Glissant's concept of the Otherwhere - a space that is simultaneously lived and imagined - is proposed throughout this research as a lens through which to incorporate post-colonial discourse within the analysis of identity, ecology, and visual art. In so doing, my work exposes the limits of schemas of visibility and representation that preclude multiplicity and performativity, and offers imaginative ways of figuring relations between individuals and their encounters with landscapes. Under the chapters 'The Sea', 'The Archipelago', 'The Spiral of Return and the Common-Place', 'Retaining Opacity while Communicating with the Tout-monde', and 'The Unrealised Museum', works by well-known practitioners including John Akomfrah, Janine Antoni, and Coco Fusco are read alongside those of lesser-known artists who work within, from, and between islands of the Caribbean, including: Nadia Huggins, Stacey Tyrell, Ewan Atkinson, and Annalee Davis. In media ranging between photography, moving-image, and performance, these artists share a concern with environmentalism, climate change, community, and the experience of personal identity in relation to the specificities of place. Relational post-colonial ecologies framed through landscape imagery therefore call for analysis and modes of display that are carefully positioned between the aesthetic and the political - a process that is destabilising to perception, and which raises timely questions about precarity, progress, (in)visibility, and belonging.

This dissertation focuses on the intellectual history of a particular strand of European-Martiniquais political and philosophical writing on guilt between 1927 and 2007, combining archival work with intellectual historical analysis to reconceive the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant. More specifically, I consider guilt and moral responsibility, using archival research to trace the unusual lineage of writing on moral responsibility that has lain unexamined in their work, and to undo scholarly misconceptions concerning their ethical and political theory. More broadly, my work suggests that in historically tracing this account of guilt and moral responsibility from Heidegger to Glissant, we might conceive a more grounded understanding of the relation of guilt to moral responsibility, in ways that allow us to rethink the moral illogic of certain democratic institutions, in particular certain Western penal structures. The first chapter offers an analysis of Heidegger, attempting via his engagement with Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse to rethink the nature of guilt, and the assumption that moral responsibility and guilt are intrinsically intertwined. By tracing Adorno's historically shaped position on guilt and its self-conscious relation to Heidegger, employing such sources as Adorno's unpublished 'Probleme' lectures and notes on Beckett, Heidegger's marginalia, and Marcuse and Heidegger's postwar letters, this section reexamines the nature of guilt as it stood in German debates of the 1920s through the 1960s. The dissertation then moves to a chapter on the reception in France of Heidegger's understanding of guilt between 1940 and 1961, centering on Merleau-Ponty's late adaptation of Heideggerian ontology. Engaging with such sources as Merleau-Ponty's manuscripts and schemata for his final, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, and his notes from courses in the 1950s, this section suggests a particular understanding of moral ontogenesis that has not been read in Merleau-Ponty's late work on nothingness and the inhuman. In the last two chapters, the dissertation then turns to more recent interpretations of this strand of thinking on guilt in Martinique, Algeria, and the U.S. in the work of Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant. Analyzing such sources as Fanon's library and marginalia, his coursework with Merleau-Ponty at the University of Lyon, and his 'Society and Psychiatry' lectures at the University of Tunis, as well as Glissant's personal writings on both Heidegger and Fanon, I attempt to show the ways in which Fanon's and Glissant's accounts of criminality and their indirect ethical understandings of guilt torque Heidegger's work, offering a more grounded understanding of the relation of guilt to moral responsibility. In a final section I suggest that this understanding might help us restructure the moral logic that underlies Western penal structures, and their self-subversive relation to guilt.

Ce projet de recherche offre une analyse sur le film de Fabienne Kanor, Des pieds, mon pied. Kanor une fille des parents martiniquais, venus en France métropolitaine pendant l’ère du BUMIDOM souffre d’identité ambiguë. Comme les autres qui font partie de la deuxième génération de la diaspora afro-caribéenne en France, elle cherche son identité qui est basée en France, en Martinique et en Afrique. Dans ce court métrage, Fabienne Kanor entreprend un voyage au cours duquel les pieds témoignent de l'histoire de l'oppression et de la domination de la France sur ses anciennes colonies ainsi que se conduise dans sa quête d’une identité. En se filmant, la cinéaste Kanor encourage le spectateur à entrer avec elle dans ce voyage.