The Forms of the Affects

The Forms of the Affects

  • Author: Brinkema, Eugenie
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822356448
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822376774
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2014
  • Month: May
  • Pages: 368
  • Language: English
What is the relationship between a cinematic grid of color and that most visceral of negative affects, disgust? How might anxiety be a matter of an interrupted horizontal line, or grief a figure of blazing light?

Offering a bold corrective to the emphasis on embodiment and experience in recent affect theory, Eugenie Brinkema develops a novel mode of criticism that locates the forms of particular affects within the specific details of cinematic and textual construction. Through close readings of works by Roland Barthes, Hollis Frampton, Sigmund Freud, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke, Alfred Hitchcock, Søren Kierkegaard, and David Lynch, Brinkema shows that deep attention to form, structure, and aesthetics enables a fundamental rethinking of the study of sensation. In the process, she delves into concepts as diverse as putrescence in French gastronomy, the role of the tear in philosophies of emotion, Nietzschean joy as a wild aesthetic of repetition, and the psychoanalytic theory of embarrassment. Above all, this provocative work is a call to harness the vitality of the affective turn for a renewed exploration of the possibilities of cinematic form.

  • Contents
  • Preface: Ten Points to Begin
  • Chapter One. A Tear That Does Not Drop, but Folds
    • Crying Is Structured Like a Language
    • Tears Without Bodies
  • Chapter Two. Film Theory’s Absent Center
    • Emotion, Feeling, Excess, Affect
    • Affective Fallacies
    • Reading for Affect
    • Mise-n’en-Scène: Formalism after Presence
    • Interval: Solitude
  • Chapter Three. The Illumination of Light
    • Visible Darkness: Optics According to Augustine
    • Light, the Peculiar
    • Ongoing Dialogues with Loss
    • Grief Without Sublation
  • Chapter Four. Grief and the Undialectical Image
    • Ma mort indialectique
    • Extra Missing Things
    • Acedia and the Pose
    • Where Being Would Have Been
    • A Still and Heavy Pain
  • Chapter Five. Aesthetic Exclusions and the Worse than the Worst
    • Philosophy of the Retch
    • Aesthetics’ Tastes
    • What Is Worse than the Worst
    • Objects, Abjects, Close-ups
    • Laura Dern’s Vomit
    • Wild Hearts, Sick Figures
  • Chapter Six. Disgust and the Cinema of Haut Goût
    • Gastronomy According to Peter Greenaway
    • Dissecting Qualities
    • Rot’s Progress
    • On Having an Excellent Palate
  • Interval. Formalism and Affectivity
  • Chapter Seven. Intermittency, Embarrassment, Dismay
    • These Things That Creep, Stir, and Squirm
    • Heksebrev
    • Interruption or the Interval
    • Esmoi, Esmais, Émoi
    • Treading Red Blue Water
  • Chapter Eight. Nothing/Will Have Taken Place/But the Place: Open Water Anxiety
    • Something or Nothing
    • A Shark Is a Form of Time
    • A Shark Punctures a Line
    • Death Is a Turn of the Color Wheel
    • Nothing But the Place
  • Chapter Nine. To Begin Again: The Ingression of Joyful Forms
    • Affirmable Modes of Recurrence
    • (Shall we) Let x =
    • Putting One’s Faith in Form
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

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