D. N. Rodowick is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (also published by Duke University Press), The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory and The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory.

“A stunning accomplishment in the theorization of the visual. By situating developments in photography, film, and digital media on multiple hinges between philosophy and history, France and Germany, and visual theory and practices, Rodowick delivers a breathtaking overview of modernist aesthetics and an exciting excursion into transformations on the digital frontier.”-Timothy Murray, author of Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy of Screen, Camera, and Canvas “Rodowick shows us that the labor of theory is vital and ongoing and that figural thinking is a crucial element for what remains of creative activity and micropolitics in a world where agency appears to be close to extinction.”-Tom Conley, author of The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing

• Preface Acknowledgments One. Presenting the Figural The Idea of the Figural Lyotard’s Leap into the Void: The Aesthetic before the New Media Paradoxes of the Visual, or Philosophy after the New Media Two. Reading the Figural Rehearsing the Figural Foucault through Deleuze, or The Diagrammatics of Power Reading the Figural The End of Modernism Three. The Figure and the Text Film and the Scene of Writing “With dreams displaced into a forest of script” Hieroglyphics, Montage, Enunciation

D. N. Rodowick is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (also published by Duke University Press), The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory and The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory.

“A stunning accomplishment in the theorization of the visual. By situating developments in photography, film, and digital media on multiple hinges between philosophy and history, France and Germany, and visual theory and practices, Rodowick delivers a breathtaking overview of modernist aesthetics and an exciting excursion into transformations on the digital frontier.”-Timothy Murray, author of Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy of Screen, Camera, and Canvas “Rodowick shows us that the labor of theory is vital and ongoing and that figural thinking is a crucial element for what remains of creative activity and micropolitics in a world where agency appears to be close to extinction.”-Tom Conley, author of The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing

• Preface Acknowledgments One. Presenting the Figural The Idea of the Figural Lyotard’s Leap into the Void: The Aesthetic before the New Media Paradoxes of the Visual, or Philosophy after the New Media Two. Reading the Figural Rehearsing the Figural Foucault through Deleuze, or The Diagrammatics of Power Reading the Figural The End of Modernism Three. The Figure and the Text Film and the Scene of Writing “With dreams displaced into a forest of script” Hieroglyphics, Montage, Enunciation