Emoke Simon

There is no difference between fiction and documentary, more precisely “they are the same thing” claimed Jean-Luc Godard in one of his latest interviews.In questioning what does a movie show, one is bound to discover with Slavoj Zizek, that there is a screen behind the screen, that from a psychoanalytical perspective, films reveal their stripped version of the way they deal with, for instance, power relations. One could then assert with Zizek and prolonging Godard’s observation that any fiction film carries a screen which could be read, for instance as another version of what the film shows, or as the negative of a reality, a philosophical documentary or non-fiction. This study proposes to explore the possibility of such perspective in analyzing the way »Burn After Reading« deals with the question of the coding and decoding as the fundamental operations of constructing a shared reality and communicating it. Inscribing the study in the Zizek re-reading of the Lacanian real, we will question the position humor would occupy in the well-known triangle of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic.

Emoke Simon completed her PhD Dissertation about rhythm and identity in November 2014 at the Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is a member of the research group »VORTEX« as well as of the artistic association »Minitremu«. Her research topics are intermediality, alterity and identity, serial narratives, poetics and politics as well as performance.