Life-Destroying Diagrams, by Eugenie Brinkema

Abstract

Life-Destroying Diagrams builds on Brinkema’s previous polemical work The Forms of the Affect. There, she proposed a formal investigation of affect, arguing against Laura Marks’s The Skin of the Film that affect is not to be found in the way the spectator’s body encounters and responds to film but directly in the film’s own shapes, lines, and diagrams. This argument opens Brinkema’s Life-Destroying Diagrams, which finalises the rupture between affect and body by launching an assault on horror’s neck, fracturing it in half. For Brinkema, horror’s only relation to the body is in its formalization of the body in so far as horror considers all possible bodily configurations. Returning to Spinoza and Leibniz, Brinkema’s question is not what can a body do but in what ways can a body be assembled.