Description
Book SynopsisWhat happens when forms fall apart? And how do affects such as fear, shock, fascination, and desire drive and shape formal disturbances in modern literature, cinema, and contemporary art? Opening an interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural affect theory, media philosophy, and literary studies, Tomáš Jirsa explores how specific affective operations disrupt form only to generate new formations. To demonstrate the importance of the structural work of mutually interacting affects,
Disformations provides close readings of four intermedia figures stretched out across modernist fictions, contemporary video art, and posthuman visual experimentsthe faceless face, the wallpaper pattern, the garbage dump, and the empty chair. Analyzing a wide range of texts, images, and audiovisual works, from Vincent van Gogh and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Rainer Maria Rilke, Gaston Leroux, and Richard Weiner, to Francis Bacon, Michel Tournier, Ingmar Bergman, Eugène Ionesco, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph
Trade ReviewThrough a series of intriguing examples from literature, cinema, and contemporary arts, Jirsa’s book takes readers on a delightful cross-disciplinary journey into affectively driven generative deformations. Passionate and erudite,
Disformations’s claim about the performative force of affects will be much debated in the contemporary media theory. * Pietro Conte, Associate Professor in Aesthetics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy *
In this astonishingly inventive and wide-ranging book, Jirsa expertly traverses the domains of literature, painting, cinema, and video art for figures that push the formal limits of representation—the face destroyed by war, wallpaper patterns, the garbage dump, the empty chair—and thus reveal the dynamic force of affect at work in the secret heart of all formation. Arriving in the turbulent wake of the so-called affective and formal turns, Jirsa’s media-philosophical concept of
disformation brilliantly shows us a new way through the all-too familiar impasses of both. This book should be read by anyone interested in thinking deeply about the affective operations of form in our contemporary mediated moment. * Abraham Geil, Senior Lecturer of Film Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands *
The central project of
Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature is to reactivate the vital question of the affective operations of aesthetic objects. Through close readings of a range of fascinating figures—from empty chairs to wallpaper patterns—Jirsa insists on treating representational limits neither as ineffable nor as deficient, but instead as generative processes that expose the speculative potential of disturbances to form. * Eugenie Brinkema, Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA *
Disformations is admirable for its erudite close readings and unexpected comparisons that illuminate one another in a manner likely to engage both specialized and nonspecialized readers with different degrees of familiarity with literary and media studies, art history, and cinema. * Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture *
Table of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgements
When Forms Fall Apart: An Introduction Disformations Open Form to New Formations Formal Disturbances Are Grounded in the Affective Operations that Rewrite Form Aesthetic Forms Think with and through Intermedia Figures
Chapter 1 Facing the Faceless: Modernism, War, and the Work of Disfiguration Shattering the Face in Modernism Toward the Affective Work of the Formless Inflicting Wounds upon Language: Gueules Cassées Rewriting the Faceless Experience
Chapter 2 Curves that Break the Frame: On the Relentless Absorption of the Wallpaper Pattern Nabokov’s Unruly Geometry of Wallpaper Rococo, or the Broken Frame Boredom, Fascination, and the Screen of Hallucination For a Morphological Reading of Gilman’s Wallpaper Between Excess and Absence: The Patterns of Madness
Chapter 3 How Text Becomes Diatext: Gemini and Performativity of the Garbage Dump Speaking for Rubbish: Tournier’s Dandy Garbage Man versus Waste Studies The Media Archaeology of Garbage Reading a Figure, Trashing the Subject From Metatext to Diatext
Chapter 4 The Portrait of Absence, or When the Empty Chairs Get Crowded Chairs without Sitters: Weiner, Kosuth, and the Missing Subject Tracing the Present Absence with Van Gogh, Derrida, and Nancy Chairing Not Sharing, Shifting Not Sitting: A Media Swap in Ionesco’s The Chairs Decentered, Not Vanished
Coda: Affective Compounds Make a Media Excess Notes Bibliography Index
