Have you registered as a member of our site? Sign up today.
"The Forms of the Affects makes an important intervention into what has been described as the 'affective turn,' asking what 'formal affect' involves, or, put another way, what remains of affect if it is not thought through the lens of the subject. As she traces, with humor and verve, the ways philosophers have thought about sympathy, pathos, moral sentiment, crying, disgust, grief, loss, anxiety, and failure, Eugenie Brinkema repeatedly considers what it means to consider these experiences as visual problems. Through close readings of an impressive range of texts drawn from film, poetry, and experimental music, and spanning ancient to modern periods, the book explores the aesthetic forms that affect produces, and how reading affect for form pushes us to rethink the nature of formalism itself."—Karen Beckman, author of Animating Film Theory
"The Forms of the Affects is an extraordinary book, brilliant, audacious, and breathtakingly original. I know of nothing else like it in film studies, or anywhere in theoretically-inspired critical writing across the humanities for that matter. It enters into some of the most vital and contentious debates in contemporary film theory and film studies; but it does this in an unprecedented way, giving surprising new answers where there have long been deadlocks. Eugenie Brinkema does not take sides in current disputes about the affective, cognitive, and formal dimensions of cinema; rather, she invents a new 'side' of her own."—Steven Shaviro, author of Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics
If you are requesting permission to photocopy material for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at copyright.com;
If the Copyright Clearance Center cannot grant permission, you may request permission from our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
If you are requesting permission to reprint DUP material (journal or book selection) in another book or in any other format, contact our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
Many images/art used in material copyrighted by Duke University Press are controlled, not by the Press, but by the owner of the image. Please check the credit line adjacent to the illustration, as well as the front and back matter of the book for a list of credits. You must obtain permission directly from the owner of the image. Occasionally, Duke University Press controls the rights to maps or other drawings. Please direct permission requests for these images to permissions@dukeupress.edu.
For book covers to accompany reviews, please contact the publicity department.
If you're interested in a Duke University Press book for subsidiary rights/translations, please contact permissions@dukeupress.edu. Include the book title/author, rights sought, and estimated print run.
Instructions for requesting an electronic text on behalf of a student with disabilities are available here.
What is the relationship between a cinematic grid of color and that most visceral of negative affects, disgust? How might anxiety be a matter of an interrupted horizontal line, or grief a figure of blazing light?
Offering a bold corrective to the emphasis on embodiment and experience in recent affect theory, Eugenie Brinkema develops a novel mode of criticism that locates the forms of particular affects within the specific details of cinematic and textual construction. Through close readings of works by Roland Barthes, Hollis Frampton, Sigmund Freud, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke, Alfred Hitchcock, Søren Kierkegaard, and David Lynch, Brinkema shows that deep attention to form, structure, and aesthetics enables a fundamental rethinking of the study of sensation. In the process, she delves into concepts as diverse as putrescence in French gastronomy, the role of the tear in philosophies of emotion, Nietzschean joy as a wild aesthetic of repetition, and the psychoanalytic theory of embarrassment. Above all, this provocative work is a call to harness the vitality of the affective turn for a renewed exploration of the possibilities of cinematic form.