Futures of the Flesh

Domietta Torlasco is a critical theorist, filmmaker, and professor of comparative literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of four books, including The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure. Her video essays have screened at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Kino Arsenal in Berlin, among others.

"Drawing on the most radical insights from Black Feminist scholarship, Torlasco's audacious breading of creative and scholarly genres of film writing takes to task some of the most threaded modes of film theory. Futures of the Flesh is difficult work of extraordinary beauty and accomplishment." —Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State University "Futures of the Flesh is a tour-de-force, offering powerful and convincing arguments that do not look away from phenomenology's blind spots." —Shane Denson, Stanford University "'There are words, sounds, images that keep returning, like refrains, breaking out of context, creating new context,' Torlasco tells us. In tracking such words, sounds, and images, Torlasco has presented us with a powerful and demanding gift: a courageous book that breaks out of clichéd academic writing, ossified disciplinary conventions, reified scholarly thought; a poignantly lyrical book that creates new forms of writing and thinking about racial and sexual difference in the cinema and outside of it; a book of rare, holographic, beauty, that keeps turning around, returning to, and being diffracted by the vertigo crossroads where the Flesh and the Black Mother met, still meet, shall meet again, in joyful entanglement, in catastrophic torsion, and in hope." —Cesare Casarino, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

• Prologue Part I. More Life, Fucker Script Fragment 1: Oona Part II. Quantum Cinema Script Fragment 2: Brittlestar/Madame Part III. For a Psychoanalysis of the Flesh Script Fragment 3: Sea Point Acknowledgments Notes Index