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Life-Destroying Diagrams

Life-Destroying Diagrams

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In 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. Through readings of works of film, literature, and philosophy, Eugenie Brinkema shifts understandings of the horror genre away from bodily gore and the spectator's shudder and toward how the genre's sequencing, order, diagrams, and treatment of bodies forces readers to confront ethical questions of the limits of thinking and being. Eugenie 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. List 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  443

“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.”
“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.”
"Life-Destroying Diagrams is spectacularly original and entirely unique . . . very much its own totalizing system, a diagram of how to think cinematic form."
"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."
"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."

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Weight 2 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in