RaveAstra... 597 heady pages ... What Daney’s writing grants us that was so often absent among many of his better-known, more doctrinaire peers, is a prolonged view onto both the inseparability and the perpetual uneasiness between the demands of art and those of politics ... wonderfully translated ... To think hard about cinema is something that all of Daney’s texts do admirably, even where his language, especially in earlier reviews, can fall into a vaporous and annoying big-paradoxes idiom of mid-century continental theory that cascades through enigmatic citations from Nietzsche, Blanchot, Bataille, or Lacan ... Nearly every one of Daney’s many (many) reviews reveals a profound sensitivity to the cinematic medium and an encyclopedic knowledge of its history. Improbably, the ability to carefully draw out the structural properties of individual films and to insist on their particularity emerges as the source for his politics.
