Life-Destroying Diagrams

by Eugenie Brinkema

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

496 pages, Hardcover

Published February 15, 2022

Reviews

[Thomas J S S · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Rubí · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Nick Bentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really fuckin' rad. I could read Brinkema all day!

[Chris Nagel · Rating 2 out of 5]

The butler did it.

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

super interesting!!