Eugenie Brinkema, Life-Destroying Diagrams, reviewed by Marissa C de Baca

Abstract

Akin to the teardrop that opens Eugenie Brinkema’s first work, The Forms of the Affects (2014), her latest book, Life-Destroying Diagrams, commences with another signifier bound to the body: the neck. Through the neck, Brinkema critiques how established scholarship such as Linda Williams’s (1991) body genres, Noël Carroll’s (1990) aesthetic philosophy of horror, or James Twitchell’s (1985) Dreadful Pleasures has thought through horror exclusively as a bodily affect: the sensations of a shiver or the goosebumps on skin. ‘I am done with the neck’, Brinkema states as her opening salvo against privileging the body and thus limiting affective interpretations of horror (p. 1). Brinkema’s ingenious solution to the body problem – or otherwise, when affective teleology is only thought through the body – is to rethink horror through form. Therefore grids, charts, diagrams, hexagons, lines, circles, or tempo are deployed to activate affective potential. Yet, as the author makes clear, this book is not about horror, but about reading affect from form. Consequently, Life-Destroying Diagrams reinstitutes Brinkema’s theory of radical formalism, which demands ‘a return to the speculative ground or roots of what thinking can claim’ by launching a text’s potential through ‘readings that proceed without guarantee’ (p. 21). What results in Life-Destroying Diagrams is 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.