This paper looks at the unique visuality of an eclipse, a penumbra in which a dark object is revealed in and sometimes by the darkness that surrounds. When darkness envelops darkness, is vision negated or does a new form visibility emerge from the double negation of the visible? At its early stages of thought, this paper seeks to explore the cosmic event of an eclipse as a uniquely disruptive but revelatory instance of a collapsing visuality.

About the Speaker
Akira Mizuta Lippit is University Professor of film and literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Cinema without Reflection: Jaques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016); Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012); Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005); and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000).
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History.
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