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OverviewIn Life-Destroying Diagrams, Eugenie Brinkema brings the insights of her radical formalism to bear on supremely risky terrain: the ethical extremes of horror and love. Through close readings of works of film, literature, and philosophy, she explores how diagrams, grids, charts, lists, abecedaria, toroids, tempos, patterns, colors, negative space, lengths, increments, and thresholds attest to formal logics of torture and cruelty, violence and finitude, friendship and eros, debt and care. Beginning with a wholesale rethinking of the affect of horror, orienting it away from entrenched models of feeling toward impersonal schemes and structures, Brinkema moves outward to consider the relation between objects and affects, humiliation and metaphysics, genre and the general, bodily destruction and aesthetic generation, geometry and scenography, hatred and value, love and measurement, and, ultimately, the tensions, hazards, and speculative promise of formalism itself. Replete with etymological meditations, performative typography, and lyrical digressions, Life-Destroying Diagrams is at once a model of reading without guarantee and a series of generative experiments in the writing of aesthetic theory. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Eugenie BrinkemaPublisher: Duke University Press Imprint: Duke University Press Weight: 0.794kg ISBN: 9781478014348ISBN 10: 1478014342 Pages: 496 Publication Date: 08 April 2022 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsList of Illustrations xi Exordia xv 1. Horrēre Or 1 2. The Ordinal (Death by Design) 36 Interlude I. Abecedarium 81 Interlude II. Rhythm & Feel 101 Lapsus 119 Interlude III. Objects, Relations, Shape 125 3. Grid, Table, Failure, Line 145 Two Violences 193 4. Middle-Term Notations: Letter, Number, Diagram 202 Postscript. ars formularia: Radical Formalism and the Speculative Task 251 Love and Measurement 289 Acknowledgments (On the Erotics of the Colleague) 371 Notes 379 Bibliography 421 Index 443ReviewsEugenie Brinkema's unbounded erudition is matched only by her creativity, startling capacity for thought, and her inimitable writing. In Life-Destroying Diagrams she mobilizes the history of philosophy while providing breathtaking and entirely unanticipated readings of individual films. Her virtuosity is on full display, resulting in a book that is itself as literary as it is scholarly. Standing to reshape the possibilities of film studies as a field and suggest new and thrilling ways in which one can practice it, Life-Destroying Diagrams is an event. -- Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of * Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida's Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift * Eugenie Brinkema's unbounded erudition is matched only by her creativity, startling capacity for thought, and her inimitable writing. In Life-Destroying Diagrams she mobilizes the history of philosophy while providing breathtaking and entirely unanticipated readings of individual films. Her virtuosity is on full display, resulting in a book that is itself as literary as it is scholarly. Standing to reshape the possibilities of film studies as a field and suggest new and thrilling ways in which one can practice it, Life-Destroying Diagrams is an event. -- Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of * Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida's Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift * Though it mentions Kubrick only once, Life-Destroying Diagrams is the 2001 of critical theory: a dazzling, erudite, and trippy ride across millennia of human culture that leads us into a formalist space, beyond allegorical interpretation, to an encounter-horrifying and thrilling at once-with what, in human experience, remains 'nonaffective, nonsignifying, and impersonal.' Eugenie Brinkema, in this breathtaking escape from the gravitational pull of the 'already-known,' takes us, unflinchingly, beyond ourselves. -- Lee Edelman, author of * No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive * Life-Destroying Diagrams is spectacularly original and entirely unique . . . very much its own totalizing system, a diagram of how to think cinematic form. -- Rosalind Galt * Film Quarterly * Eugenie Brinkema's unbounded erudition is matched only by her creativity, startling capacity for thought, and her inimitable writing. In Life-Destroying Diagrams she mobilizes the history of philosophy while providing breathtaking and entirely unanticipated readings of individual films. Her virtuosity is on full display, resulting in a book that is itself as literary as it is scholarly. Standing to reshape the possibilities of film studies as a field and suggest new and thrilling ways in which one can practice it, Life-Destroying Diagrams is an event. -- Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of * Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida's Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift * Though it mentions Kubrick only once, Life-Destroying Diagrams is the 2001 of critical theory: a dazzling, erudite, and trippy ride across millennia of human culture that leads us into a formalist space, beyond allegorical interpretation, to an encounter-horrifying and thrilling at once-with what, in human experience, remains 'nonaffective, nonsignifying, and impersonal.' Eugenie Brinkema, in this breathtaking escape from the gravitational pull of the 'already-known,' takes us, unflinchingly, beyond ourselves. -- Lee Edelman, author of * No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive * Life-Destroying Diagrams is spectacularly original and entirely unique . . . very much its own totalizing system, a diagram of how to think cinematic form. -- Rosalind Galt * Film Quarterly * Life-Destroying Diagrams is a model of close reading as process, subject to the same contingency and sensitivity to difference as its objects. The book's configuration and design approach the formal problems of staying faithful to what is most fragile, of losing inheritance, of provisional thinking without a guaranteed outcome. The fidelity of a close reading is sustained by the promise that there is no such thing as too close. That there is no exhausting a reading whose ground is uncertain, unsteady, and new. A close reading is never finished, only abandoned - so consider this a beginning. -- Jorge Cotte * Los Angeles Review of Books * As Life-Destroying Diagrams proceeds, the furious interconnectedness of plots, forms, scene descriptions, and etymologies makes for riveting but exhausting reading, leaving one to wonder who or what is really meant to be put to the test. As tests go, Brinkema bracingly refuses to spare the reader as much if not more than the films under discussion do. -- Alexandra Kingston-Reese * Los Angeles Review of Books * Life-Destroying Diagrams probes deep into the viscera of what form means . . . to an extent that no-one quite has before. -- Caroline Bem * Screen * Life-Destroying Diagrams demonstrates that the language of form can reinvigorate the act of close reading and attend to the possibilities that are produced through the cinematic object itself. -- Jacob Carter * InVisible Culture * This book is not about horror, but about reading affect from form. . . . What results in Life-Destroying Diagrams is a provocative and commanding intervention into aesthetic theory that can enliven what has already been preconceived within scholarship on horror and within the larger fields of Visual Culture Studies, Literary Studies, Cinema Studies, and Continental Philosophy. -- Marissa C de Baca * Journal of Visual Culture * Eugenie Brinkema's unbounded erudition is matched only by her creativity, startling capacity for thought, and her inimitable writing. In Life-Destroying Diagrams she mobilizes the history of philosophy while providing breathtaking and entirely unanticipated readings of individual films. Her virtuosity is on full display, resulting in a book that is itself as literary as it is scholarly. Standing to reshape the possibilities of film studies as a field and suggest new and thrilling ways in which one can practice it, Life-Destroying Diagrams is an event. -- Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of * Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida's Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift * Though it mentions Kubrick only once, Life-Destroying Diagrams is the 2001 of critical theory: a dazzling, erudite, and trippy ride across millennia of human culture that leads us into a formalist space, beyond allegorical interpretation, to an encounter-horrifying and thrilling at once-with what, in human experience, remains 'nonaffective, nonsignifying, and impersonal.' Eugenie Brinkema, in this breathtaking escape from the gravitational pull of the 'already-known,' takes us, unflinchingly, beyond ourselves. -- Lee Edelman, author of * No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive * Life-Destroying Diagrams is spectacularly original and entirely unique . . . very much its own totalizing system, a diagram of how to think cinematic form. -- Rosalind Galt * Film Quarterly * Life-Destroying Diagrams is a model of close reading as process, subject to the same contingency and sensitivity to difference as its objects. The book's configuration and design approach the formal problems of staying faithful to what is most fragile, of losing inheritance, of provisional thinking without a guaranteed outcome. The fidelity of a close reading is sustained by the promise that there is no such thing as too close. That there is no exhausting a reading whose ground is uncertain, unsteady, and new. A close reading is never finished, only abandoned - so consider this a beginning. -- Jorge Cotte * Los Angeles Review of Books * Eugenie Brinkema's unbounded erudition is matched only by her creativity, startling capacity for thought, and her inimitable writing. In Life-Destroying Diagrams she mobilizes the history of philosophy while providing breathtaking and entirely unanticipated readings of individual films. Her virtuosity is on full display, resulting in a book that is itself as literary as it is scholarly. Standing to reshape the possibilities of film studies as a field and suggest new and thrilling ways in which one can practice it, Life-Destroying Diagrams is an event. -- Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of * Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida's Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift * Though it mentions Kubrick only once, Life-Destroying Diagrams is the 2001 of critical theory: a dazzling, erudite, and trippy ride across millennia of human culture that leads us into a formalist space, beyond allegorical interpretation, to an encounter-horrifying and thrilling at once-with what, in human experience, remains 'nonaffective, nonsignifying, and impersonal.' Eugenie Brinkema, in this breathtaking escape from the gravitational pull of the 'already-known,' takes us, unflinchingly, beyond ourselves. -- Lee Edelman, author of * No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive * Author InformationEugenie Brinkema is Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of The Forms of the Affects, also published by Duke University Press. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |