Miranda Mellis on Visceral Poetics

"Justine’s regression to moaning inarticulateness, to apolitical idiolect, is like a detoxification from the suspect health she is surrounded by, which is predicated on the exclusion of the entire world from the single setting of the film. A rich citadel, until a world arrives to destroy it. Justine’s woundedness that cannot understand itself nor make its meaning known is arguably the very site of and condition of possibility for beginning to make meaning at all. Health, on the contrary, seems to entail, Stecopoulos argues, the paradoxical absence of a body altogether: the erasure of the body not only as mortal impingement and somatic vicissitude, but also as a poetic or hermeneutic agent. Justine is limited to being the unwilling, symptomatic recipient of unwelcome messages. She is not a hermeneut with no object; she is an object subjected to hermeneutics."
--Miranda Mellis on Eleni Stecopoulos' Visceral Poetics at The Believer Logger