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Life-Destroying Diagrams
In Life-Destroying Diagrams , Eugenie Brinkema brings the insights of her radical formalism to bear on supremely risky 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.
496 pages, Hardcover
Published February 15, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 20, 2023
Less "erudite" (as the blurbs insist) than clever, this book is nonetheless generous with local insights about a number of films. I appreciated in particular a longish discussion of Pascal Laugier's Martyrs (2008) found in the middle of the book or thereabouts. Brinkema also finds interesting things to say about determinedly bland, multiplex fare like the Final Destination films. Having said that, the book is also peppered with a number of (seemingly) wrong-headed, or anyway cavalier, assertions that somewhat dampen the fun. To pick just one such head-scratcher, Brinkema writes, "In place of the cardinal drive of much horror (the accumulated body count; piles of the dead or dying)," the Final Destination films express "an ordinal drive, one obsessed with the progression and succession of things, ranks, positions in a sequence" (59). Maybe I'm misreading her point here, but I'm hard-pressed to name a horror film or text that manifests a "cardinal drive" as described. All of the tropes and cliches of the genre--from "the black dude dies first" to "the final girl"--suggest just the opposite: that the horror genre is self-consciously routinized and episodic, invested in a series of escalating atrocities and/or revelations that unfold according to well-established formulae. I'm sure counter-examples exist, but I'd never go so far as to say they are representative of "much horror." Even in disagreeing with her here (or misunderstanding her), I very much agree with her broader point about horror having less to do with the manipulation of affects and more to do with the manipulation of forms. In this general assertion she is not alone, either in terms of a reading of horror or of film as such.
January 16, 2024
Holy shit. If you are into horror films and have a penchant for difficult theory this book is worth the effort. As a formalist contribution to questioning ontologies of presence it opened up new ways of non representational thinking for me. With respect to horror movies it reinvigorated my interest in some of my favourites and gave suggestions for further watching. I'm excited to watch more horror and think with this approach
November 27, 2022
Brinkema’s writing is such a joy. Experimental and complex and challenging as someone not familiar with philosophy. Inspires new ways to read film and altogether a text containing so much energy that i see myself returning to.
June 30, 2023
Really fuckin' rad. I could read Brinkema all day!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews