Eugenie Brinkema - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Eugenie Brinkema
Wiley-Blackwell eBooks, Mar 4, 2010
Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 2018
ing measurement from both labor as lived practice(s) and from human proportions. The resistance—s... more ing measurement from both labor as lived practice(s) and from human proportions. The resistance—stubborn, often brutally furious—to the metric system then (as now) suggests the diffi culty of nonanthropometric models in ways resonant with the dominant thinking of landscape explored herein and the diffi culty of severing conceptual bonds to human scale, sense, perspective, framing, and judgment. 7. Fabien Gris, “La solitude du silure et des petits poissons,” La vie des idées, July 24, 2013, http://www.laviedesidees.fr/La-solitude-du-silure-et-des.html. 8. Qtd. in Bérénice Reynaud, “The Gleaners and Varda: The 2013 AFI FEST & American Film Market,” Senses of Cinema 70 (March 2014), http://sensesofcinema. Horror and the Aesthetics of Landscape 381 com/2014/festival-reports/the-gleaners-and-varda-the-2013-afi -fest-american-fi lmmarket/. Original interview: “Alain Guiraudie im Gespräch mit Bérénice Reynaud,” kolik.fi lm 20 (2013): 64–73. 9. Nathan Friedman, “Diagram of the Amorous Search: Generating Desire with Guiraudie’s L’inconnu du lac,” Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy 9 (Winter/Spring 2015): 185. This excellent article treats the fi lm’s landscape in relation to affective mapping. Deploying the Deleuzian notion of diagram to account for how the rigorously partitioned space opens up multiple possible confi gurations of desire, Friedman’s article is powerfully attentive to the arrangement of bodies, elevations, and topologies in the fi lm, given a new shape in the form of elemental diagrams drawn by the author. 10. Jonathan Romney, “Dream Lovers,” Film Comment 50 (1) (January–February 2014): 64–67. Here, landscape is taken not only taken as affective and scenographic but also as integral to the project of thinking Guiraudie in relation to queer cinema. That his fi lms in general queer rural landscapes in the same bold way that they make objects of desire from unconventional bodies is a common refrain in the critical literature on his body of work. 11. Ariane Nicolas, “L’Inconnu du lac: Eros et Thanatos sont sur un bateau . . . ,” Contre Champ, June 19, 2013, https://blog.francetvinfo.fr/actu-cine/2013/06/19/ linconnu-du-lac-eros-et-thanatos-sont-sur-un-bateau.html. Nicolas appropriates all subsequent spectatorial anxiety to the question of the spectre of this fi sh: “Avant même la scène du meurtre, Guiraudie introduit une tension dramatique en la personne du silure, un poisson monstrueux long de 4 à 7 mètres (Henri ne sait plus bien). Dès lors, la moindre scène de nage devient source d’angoisse.” 12. Mark Wilshin, “My Summer of Love,” Dog and Wolf, February 21, 2014, http://www.dogandwolf.com/2014/02/stranger-by-the-lake-review/. 13. Pliny the Elder, The Historie of the World: Commonly called the Natural Historie of C. Plinius Secundus, trans. into English by Philemon Holland Doctor in Physicke, 2 vols., folio (London: Adam Islip, 1601), printed for the Wernerian Club (1847–1848), Book IX, chap. 15, 125.
Duke University Press eBooks, Jan 14, 2022
Duke University Press eBooks, 2014
Differences, 2011
... aim to achieve a state by having the musical language emulate qualities of a condition; for e... more ... aim to achieve a state by having the musical language emulate qualities of a condition; for example, having music become pure or ... Silence is thus a sticky leech, a stubborn, absorbent, renewable regime, to which aesthetics, philosophy, musicology, and critical theory are drawn ...
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2007
We begin with the radical muteness of the philosopher. Taking the skepticism of his teacher Herac... more We begin with the radical muteness of the philosopher. Taking the skepticism of his teacher Heraclitus to a distended extreme—one form, no doubt, of Oedipal rebellion—Cratylus of Athens, Aristotle’s Metaphysics tells us, “fi nally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his fi nger” (IV.5.745–46). Heraclitus’ philosophy of non-knowledge, which asserted that one could not step into the same river twice, for the ineluctable fl ow of Nature constantly changed and thus made impossible any notion of the same, was likewise refuted by Cratylus, this appraisal in language being exempted from his customary linguistic substitution of pointing: Aristotle again tells us that the student “criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once” (IV.5.746). For all the philosophical problems with skepticism, one has to admire the aesthetic dimension of Cratylus’s reaction to the instability of the world, a silent protest against the volatile fl ux that makes even language itself useless as a signifying order with any stable relation to fi xed meanings. Truth—or some sensible connection to the world—does not disappear in this account, however, but simply relocates itself on to the site of the body, much like a symptom. Contained within that pointing fi nger (or all such: God’s to Adam; the analyst’s wagging digit) is still a statement: Here, look. The attempt to summon into being an intersubjective economy of understanding—to persist in a relation to an insistently unreal real—takes the form of a visual imperative that, by Cratylus’ own account, itself is always in fl ux in relation to the meanings it may or may not partake of. Thus, even hysterical silence does not exempt one from the chaos of a spoken reality. He really ought to have been in analysis. In the same account of the errors of the skeptics, Aristotle writes of Heraclitus,
Duke University Press eBooks, 2014
Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Dec 1, 2012
Psychoanalysis and History, Apr 1, 2022
A Concise Companion to Visual Culture
Abjection Incorporated, 2020
Practical Aesthetics, 2020
Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster (2015) traffics in general and nominal categories of a dystopian di... more Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster (2015) traffics in general and nominal categories of a dystopian disciplinary society in which the Rules of the City are that Single people be transferred to a Hotel where they must find an amative Match within forty-five days; if they fail, they will be transformed into an Animal and released into the Woods—and it would be simple enough to treat Lanthimos’ formalism either film-historically, within the framework of “Greek weird wave,” or purely compositionally, as a study of enclosed space, natural light, and highly restricted and codified bodily gesture. However, The Lobster is, above all, a film about love, and my argument is that the film’s rigorous attention to forms of deadline and matching are in the service of an abstraction of the amative, a theory of love sustained by a tension between unity and dispersion. Unlike the philosophical dogma of love since Aristophanes as the yearning to be grafted together from halves, the fusing numerically offer...
JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2019
Wiley-Blackwell eBooks, Mar 4, 2010
Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 2018
ing measurement from both labor as lived practice(s) and from human proportions. The resistance—s... more ing measurement from both labor as lived practice(s) and from human proportions. The resistance—stubborn, often brutally furious—to the metric system then (as now) suggests the diffi culty of nonanthropometric models in ways resonant with the dominant thinking of landscape explored herein and the diffi culty of severing conceptual bonds to human scale, sense, perspective, framing, and judgment. 7. Fabien Gris, “La solitude du silure et des petits poissons,” La vie des idées, July 24, 2013, http://www.laviedesidees.fr/La-solitude-du-silure-et-des.html. 8. Qtd. in Bérénice Reynaud, “The Gleaners and Varda: The 2013 AFI FEST & American Film Market,” Senses of Cinema 70 (March 2014), http://sensesofcinema. Horror and the Aesthetics of Landscape 381 com/2014/festival-reports/the-gleaners-and-varda-the-2013-afi -fest-american-fi lmmarket/. Original interview: “Alain Guiraudie im Gespräch mit Bérénice Reynaud,” kolik.fi lm 20 (2013): 64–73. 9. Nathan Friedman, “Diagram of the Amorous Search: Generating Desire with Guiraudie’s L’inconnu du lac,” Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy 9 (Winter/Spring 2015): 185. This excellent article treats the fi lm’s landscape in relation to affective mapping. Deploying the Deleuzian notion of diagram to account for how the rigorously partitioned space opens up multiple possible confi gurations of desire, Friedman’s article is powerfully attentive to the arrangement of bodies, elevations, and topologies in the fi lm, given a new shape in the form of elemental diagrams drawn by the author. 10. Jonathan Romney, “Dream Lovers,” Film Comment 50 (1) (January–February 2014): 64–67. Here, landscape is taken not only taken as affective and scenographic but also as integral to the project of thinking Guiraudie in relation to queer cinema. That his fi lms in general queer rural landscapes in the same bold way that they make objects of desire from unconventional bodies is a common refrain in the critical literature on his body of work. 11. Ariane Nicolas, “L’Inconnu du lac: Eros et Thanatos sont sur un bateau . . . ,” Contre Champ, June 19, 2013, https://blog.francetvinfo.fr/actu-cine/2013/06/19/ linconnu-du-lac-eros-et-thanatos-sont-sur-un-bateau.html. Nicolas appropriates all subsequent spectatorial anxiety to the question of the spectre of this fi sh: “Avant même la scène du meurtre, Guiraudie introduit une tension dramatique en la personne du silure, un poisson monstrueux long de 4 à 7 mètres (Henri ne sait plus bien). Dès lors, la moindre scène de nage devient source d’angoisse.” 12. Mark Wilshin, “My Summer of Love,” Dog and Wolf, February 21, 2014, http://www.dogandwolf.com/2014/02/stranger-by-the-lake-review/. 13. Pliny the Elder, The Historie of the World: Commonly called the Natural Historie of C. Plinius Secundus, trans. into English by Philemon Holland Doctor in Physicke, 2 vols., folio (London: Adam Islip, 1601), printed for the Wernerian Club (1847–1848), Book IX, chap. 15, 125.
Duke University Press eBooks, Jan 14, 2022
Duke University Press eBooks, 2014
Differences, 2011
... aim to achieve a state by having the musical language emulate qualities of a condition; for e... more ... aim to achieve a state by having the musical language emulate qualities of a condition; for example, having music become pure or ... Silence is thus a sticky leech, a stubborn, absorbent, renewable regime, to which aesthetics, philosophy, musicology, and critical theory are drawn ...
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2007
We begin with the radical muteness of the philosopher. Taking the skepticism of his teacher Herac... more We begin with the radical muteness of the philosopher. Taking the skepticism of his teacher Heraclitus to a distended extreme—one form, no doubt, of Oedipal rebellion—Cratylus of Athens, Aristotle’s Metaphysics tells us, “fi nally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his fi nger” (IV.5.745–46). Heraclitus’ philosophy of non-knowledge, which asserted that one could not step into the same river twice, for the ineluctable fl ow of Nature constantly changed and thus made impossible any notion of the same, was likewise refuted by Cratylus, this appraisal in language being exempted from his customary linguistic substitution of pointing: Aristotle again tells us that the student “criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once” (IV.5.746). For all the philosophical problems with skepticism, one has to admire the aesthetic dimension of Cratylus’s reaction to the instability of the world, a silent protest against the volatile fl ux that makes even language itself useless as a signifying order with any stable relation to fi xed meanings. Truth—or some sensible connection to the world—does not disappear in this account, however, but simply relocates itself on to the site of the body, much like a symptom. Contained within that pointing fi nger (or all such: God’s to Adam; the analyst’s wagging digit) is still a statement: Here, look. The attempt to summon into being an intersubjective economy of understanding—to persist in a relation to an insistently unreal real—takes the form of a visual imperative that, by Cratylus’ own account, itself is always in fl ux in relation to the meanings it may or may not partake of. Thus, even hysterical silence does not exempt one from the chaos of a spoken reality. He really ought to have been in analysis. In the same account of the errors of the skeptics, Aristotle writes of Heraclitus,
Duke University Press eBooks, 2014
Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Dec 1, 2012
Psychoanalysis and History, Apr 1, 2022
A Concise Companion to Visual Culture
Abjection Incorporated, 2020
Practical Aesthetics, 2020
Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster (2015) traffics in general and nominal categories of a dystopian di... more Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster (2015) traffics in general and nominal categories of a dystopian disciplinary society in which the Rules of the City are that Single people be transferred to a Hotel where they must find an amative Match within forty-five days; if they fail, they will be transformed into an Animal and released into the Woods—and it would be simple enough to treat Lanthimos’ formalism either film-historically, within the framework of “Greek weird wave,” or purely compositionally, as a study of enclosed space, natural light, and highly restricted and codified bodily gesture. However, The Lobster is, above all, a film about love, and my argument is that the film’s rigorous attention to forms of deadline and matching are in the service of an abstraction of the amative, a theory of love sustained by a tension between unity and dispersion. Unlike the philosophical dogma of love since Aristophanes as the yearning to be grafted together from halves, the fusing numerically offer...
JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2019