{"product_id":"lifedestroying-diagrams-9781478013433","title":"LifeDestroying Diagrams","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThrough readings of works of film, literature, and philosophy, Eugenie Brinkema shifts understandings of the horror genre away from bodily gore and the spectator's shudder and toward how the genre's sequencing, order, diagrams, and treatment of bodies forces readers to confront ethical questions of the limits of thinking and being.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Eugenie Brinkema's unbounded erudition is matched only by her creativity, startling capacity for thought, and her inimitable writing. In \u003ci\u003eLife-Destroying Diagrams\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eLife-Destroying Diagrams\u003c\/i\u003e is an event.” -- Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of * Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift *\u003cbr\u003e“Though it mentions Kubrick only once, \u003ci\u003eLife-Destroying Diagrams\u003c\/i\u003e is the \u003ci\u003e2001 \u003c\/i\u003eof 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 *\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eLife-Destroying Diagrams \u003c\/i\u003eis spectacularly original and entirely unique . . . very much its own totalizing system, a diagram of how to think cinematic form.\" -- Rosalind Galt * Film Quarterly *\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eLife-Destroying Diagrams \u003c\/i\u003eis 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 *\u003cbr\u003e\"As \u003ci\u003eLife-Destroying Diagrams\u003c\/i\u003e 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 *\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eLife-Destroying Diagrams\u003c\/i\u003e probes deep into the viscera of what form means . . . to an extent that no-one quite has before.” -- Caroline Bem * Screen *\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eLife-Destroying Diagrams \u003c\/i\u003edemonstrates 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 *\u003cbr\u003e“This book is not about horror, but about reading affect from form. . . . What results in \u003ci\u003eLife-Destroying Diagrams \u003c\/i\u003eis 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 *\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eLife-Destroying Diagrams\u003c\/i\u003e 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 *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Brinkema’s latest book, \u003ci\u003eLife-Destroying Diagrams, \u003c\/i\u003eoffers 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.\" \u003c\/p\u003e -- Archie Wolfman * Film Philosophy *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eList of Illustrations  xi\u003cbr\u003e Exordia  xv\u003cbr\u003e 1. \u003ci\u003eHorrēre\u003c\/i\u003e Or  1\u003cbr\u003e 2. The Ordinal (Death by Design)  36\u003cbr\u003e Interlude I. Abecedarium  81\u003cbr\u003e Interlude II. Rhythm \u0026amp; Feel  101\u003cbr\u003e Lapsus  119\u003cbr\u003e Interlude III. Objects, Relations, Shape  125\u003cbr\u003e 3. Grid, Table, Failure, Line  145\u003cbr\u003e Two Violences  193\u003cbr\u003e 4. Middle-Term Notations: Letter, Number, Diagram  202\u003cbr\u003e Postscript. \u003ci\u003ears formularia\u003c\/i\u003e: Radical Formalism and the Speculative Task  251\u003cbr\u003e Love and Measurement 289\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments (On the Erotics of the Colleague)  371\u003cbr\u003e Notes  379\u003cbr\u003e Bibliography  421\u003cbr\u003e Index  443","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49408993132887,"sku":"9781478013433","price":84.15,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781478013433.jpg?v=1730505005","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/lifedestroying-diagrams-9781478013433","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}