Life-Destroying Diagrams

Eugenie Brinkema's Life-Destroying Diagrams explores the ethical extremes of horror and love through formal logics of torture and cruelty, violence and finitude, friendship and eros, debt and care, and the tensions, hazards, and speculative promise of formalism.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 496 pages
Publication date: 19 February 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press

Eugenie Brinkema's book, "Life-Destroying Diagrams," delves into the ethical extremes of horror and love through close readings of film, literature, and philosophy. She explores how diagrams, grids, charts, lists, abecedaria, toroids, tempos, patterns, colors, negative space, lengths, increments, and thresholds attest to formal logics of torture and cruelty, violence and finitude, friendship and eros, debt and care. Brinkema challenges the traditional understanding of horror, shifting it away from entrenched models of feeling towards impersonal schemes and structures. She then examines the relation between objects and affects, humiliation and metaphysics, genre and the general, bodily destruction and aesthetic generation, geometry and scenography, hatred and value, love and measurement, and the tensions, hazards, and speculative promise of formalism itself. "Life-Destroying Diagrams" is a model of reading without guarantee and a series of generative experiments in the writing of aesthetic theory. It is replete with etymological meditations, performative typography, and lyrical digressions.

Weight: 794g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478014348