Life-Destroying Diagrams

Eugenie Brinkema is Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of The Forms of the Affects, also published by Duke University Press.

“Eugenie Brinkema's unbounded erudition is matched only by her creativity, startling capacity for thought, and her inimitable writing. In Life-Destroying Diagrams she mobilizes the history of philosophy while providing breathtaking and entirely unanticipated readings of individual films. Her virtuosity is on full display, resulting in a book that is itself as literary as it is scholarly. Standing to reshape the possibilities of film studies as a field and suggest new and thrilling ways in which one can practice it, Life-Destroying Diagrams is an event.” - Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of (Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida's Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift) “Though it mentions Kubrick only once, Life-Destroying Diagrams is the 2001 of critical theory: a dazzling, erudite, and trippy ride across millennia of human culture that leads us into a formalist space, beyond allegorical interpretation, to an encounter-horrifying and thrilling at once-with what, in human experience, remains ‘nonaffective, nonsignifying, and impersonal.’ Eugenie Brinkema, in this breathtaking escape from the gravitational pull of the ‘already-known,’ takes us, unflinchingly, beyond ourselves.” - Lee Edelman, author of (No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive) "Life-Destroying Diagrams is spectacularly original and entirely unique . . . very much its own totalizing system, a diagram of how to think cinematic form." - Rosalind Galt (Film Quarterly) "Life-Destroying Diagrams is a model of close reading as process, subject to the same contingency and sensitivity to difference as its objects. The book’s configuration and design approach the formal problems of staying faithful to what is most fragile, of losing inheritance, of provisional thinking without a guaranteed outcome. The fidelity of a close reading is sustained by the promise that there is no such thing as too close. That there is no exhausting a reading whose ground is uncertain, unsteady, and new. A close reading is never finished, only abandoned - so consider this a beginning." - Jorge Cotte (Los Angeles Review of Books) "As Life-Destroying Diagrams proceeds, the furious interconnectedness of plots, forms, scene descriptions, and etymologies makes for riveting but exhausting reading, leaving one to wonder who or what is really meant to be put to the test. As tests go, Brinkema bracingly refuses to spare the reader as much if not more than the films under discussion do." - Alexandra Kingston-Reese (Los Angeles Review of Books) “Life-Destroying Diagrams probes deep into the viscera of what form means . . . to an extent that no-one quite has before.” - Caroline Bem (Screen) “Life-Destroying Diagrams demonstrates that the language of form can reinvigorate the act of close reading and attend to the possibilities that are produced through the cinematic object itself.” - Jacob Carter (InVisible Culture) “This book is not about horror, but about reading affect from form. . . . What results in Life-Destroying Diagrams is a provocative and commanding intervention into aesthetic theory that can enliven what has already been preconceived within scholarship on horror and within the larger fields of Visual Culture Studies, Literary Studies, Cinema Studies, and Continental Philosophy.” - Marissa C de Baca (Journal of Visual Culture) "Life-Destroying Diagrams is a beautiful book. . . .  Although the book’s content is intricately structured, its physical form extends an invitation to leaf through it, browse for something that catches the eye, dip in and see where it takes you. And if one does so, there is at least one striking claim on every single page." - Dominic Lash (Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory) "Brinkema’s latest book, Life-Destroying Diagrams, offers a groundbreaking and distinctive conversation between cinema, film theory and Continental philosophy.  Another way of describing the book is as a radically innovative approach to academic writing about film in general, where there is as much possibility for interpreting the book’s very form as there is for interpreting the substance of its arguments. ... [A] fascinating, distinctive and challenging intervention." - Archie Wolfman (Film Philosophy) "Life-Destroying Diagrams expands Brinkema’s critical theory of affect and aesthetics by bringing the insights of radical formalism, first explicated in The Forms of the Affects, into the ethically risky territory of violence and love. She stuns again with a work of staggering insight and impassioned commitment to teasing out all possible meanings in what we should never have viewed as simple, constructing a groundbreaking book from individual sentences that are, in a word, exquisite." - Emily Naser-Hall (Journal of Cinema and Media Studies) "I have no hesitation in pronouncing Life-Destroying Diagrams to be as formidable, brilliant, and important as anything published in film studies and horror studies-or, for that matter, in the fields of ethics and aesthetics, literary theory, and cultural studies more generally-so far in the twenty-first century." - Steven Shaviro (Criticism)

• List of Illustrations  xiExordia  xv1. Horrēre Or  12. The Ordinal (Death by Design)  36Interlude I. Abecedarium  81Interlude II. Rhythm & Feel  101Lapsus  119Interlude III. Objects, Relations, Shape  1253. Grid, Table, Failure, Line  145Two Violences  1934. Middle-Term Notations: Letter, Number, Diagram  202Postscript. ars formularia: Radical Formalism and the Speculative Task  251Love and Measurement 289Acknowledgments (On the Erotics of the Colleague)  371Notes  379Bibliography  421Index  443