Prof. Eugenie Alexandra Brinkema

Brinkema's work as a film theorist is situated within several broad rotations in the theoretical humanities: the “affective turn” and the “return to form” or “return to aesthetics.” Her first book, The Forms of the Affects (Duke University Press, 2014), invented a new approach to a vital and contentious debate in the humanities: how to grapple with the affective dimensions of aesthetic objects. One persistent critical trope of the transdisciplinary “turn to affect” was the positioning of affect as something that resists structure, form, signification and textuality. Brinkema's book functioned as a corrective to this tendency. Rejecting the emphasis on embodiment, emotion, feeling, and spectatorial experience that dominated theories of affect, the mode of criticism she invented located affects within the specific formal details of cinematic and textual construction. The Forms of the Affects makes a claim for the importance of close formal reading as a mode of generating new theoretical questions about sensation, intensity, and emotion’s vibrant disruptions -- and for regarding affects themselves as having form.

Since the publication of that book, Brinkema's research has complicated the implications of radical formalism in a series of concurrent projects: (1) her second book, Life-Destroying Diagrams; (2) a set of published articles comprising a project she calls “Speculative Pornography”; and (3) essays on affect and problems of feeling in the works of contemporary visual artists (Larry Clark, Sophie Calle, the street photographer Boogie) and their relationships to epistemologies of exposure. What this recent work has in common is an interest in “testing” the implications of radical formalism on increasingly controversial terrain -- after all, a conventional challenge to my work often takes the form of: What right does criticism have to abandon things, bodies, and worlds when those things, bodies, and worlds are being brutally destroyed? Grappling with that unease led to eight years of work on what became her second book, Life-Destroying Diagrams (Duke University Press, 2022), which brings the insights of radical formalism to bear on its riskiest terrain to date: the ethical and affective extremes of horror and love. Through close readings of works of film, literature, and philosophy, this book explores how aesthetic form and formal figures such as 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. Beginning with a wholesale rethinking of the affect of horror, orienting it away from embodied models of feeling towards impersonal schemes and structures, the book moves outwards to consider 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, ultimately, the tensions, hazards, and speculative promise of formalism itself.