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.
- Cover
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Exordia
- Color Plates
- Chapter One ◆ Horrēre Or
- Four Ways of Looking at a Shudder
- Cervical Fractures
- As Many Comparisons as Possible (Zickzack)
- Chapter Two ◆ The Ordinal (Death by Design)
- The Way Deaths Go: Possibility :: Impossibility :: Certainty
- How the Next Thing Happens
- Dasein versus Design, and the Work of Reading
- Interlude I ◆ Abecedarium
- Interlude II ◆ Rhythm & Feel
- Lapsus
- Interlude III ◆ Objects, Relations, Shape
- Chapter Three ◆ Grid, Table, Failure, Line
- the bureaucrat’s unconceived child
- infinite possible contingencies (extension)
- 1. the grid (GPS & the bee as geometer)
- Two Violences
- Chapter Four ◆ Middle-Term Notations: Letter, Number, Diagram
- A to B to C
- A Further Aside on the Topology of Different Types of Lines
- I Is I
- 814326 814327 814328
- The Humiliation of Metaphysics
- Postscript ◆ ars formularia: Radical Formalism and the Speculative Task
- The Violence of a (Certain) Fascination with Form (And what thereby introduces a potentially fatal late-stage complication, requiring a reimagining of formalism as process)
- Love and Measurement
- The Geometral
- Length; or, Love . . . . . ???? . . . . . . !!!!!!!!!!
- Negative Space (On no longer being loved)
- Similitude
- Incremental Love
- Acknowledgments ◆ (On The Erotics of the Colleague)
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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