The anarchitectural mediality of Céline Sciamma’s <i>Portrait de la jeune fille en feu</i> : staying with the debris

This article reads Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019) through the lens of anarchitecture, a concept from art history recently elaborated by Jack Halberstam. It describes practices of creative destruction that work through negation and undoing, refusing to rebuild the world as long as heteropatriarchal structures of property, possession and creativity remain firmly in place. In this vein, the article argues that Portrait de la jeune fille en feu adopts an ‘anti-anti-utopian’ stance that stays with the debris of aesthetic, bodily and affective orders, rather than mobilising queerness as a means of repairing or redeeming the past, a move evident in some other forms of queer neo-historical cultural production. At the same time, the article goes beyond past approaches that have centred either the ‘lesbian gaze’ or lesbian desire, instead foregrounding the multiple ways in which the film’s aesthetic-cum-political practices create a void of negation, thereby resisting reconciliation with a broken system.