Full Description
What happens when forms fall apart? And how do affects such as fear, shock, fascination, and desire drive and shape formal disturbances in modern literature, cinema, and contemporary art? Opening an interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural affect theory, media philosophy, and literary studies, Tomáš Jirsa explores how specific affective operations disrupt form only to generate new formations. To demonstrate the importance of the structural work of mutually interacting affects, Disformations provides close readings of four intermedia figures stretched out across modernist fictions, contemporary video art, and posthuman visual experiments—the faceless face, the wallpaper pattern, the garbage dump, and the empty chair. Analyzing a wide range of texts, images, and audiovisual works, from Vincent van Gogh and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Rainer Maria Rilke, Gaston Leroux, and Richard Weiner, to Francis Bacon, Michel Tournier, Ingmar Bergman, Eugène Ionesco, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Kosuth, and Jan Šerých, this book opens up a new avenue for addressing how aesthetic forms desubjectify affects to mobilize their mediality and performative qualities. Jirsa's innovative theoretical framework and incisive readings offer a fresh inquiry into how artistic media produce their own figural thinking and in so doing compel us to think with them anew.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
When Forms Fall Apart: An Introduction
Disformations Open Form to New Formations
Formal Disturbances Are Grounded in the Affective Operations that Rewrite Form
Aesthetic Forms Think with and through Intermedia Figures
Chapter 1
Facing the Faceless: Modernism, War, and the Work of Disfiguration
Shattering the Face in Modernism
Toward the Affective Work of the Formless
Inflicting Wounds upon Language: Gueules Cassées
Rewriting the Faceless Experience
Chapter 2
Curves that Break the Frame: On the Relentless Absorption of the Wallpaper Pattern
Nabokov's Unruly Geometry of Wallpaper
Rococo, or the Broken Frame
Boredom, Fascination, and the Screen of Hallucination
For a Morphological Reading of Gilman's Wallpaper
Between Excess and Absence: The Patterns of Madness
Chapter 3
How Text Becomes Diatext: Gemini and Performativity of the Garbage Dump
Speaking for Rubbish: Tournier's Dandy Garbage Man versus Waste Studies
The Media Archaeology of Garbage
Reading a Figure, Trashing the Subject
From Metatext to Diatext
Chapter 4
The Portrait of Absence, or When the Empty Chairs Get Crowded
Chairs without Sitters: Weiner, Kosuth, and the Missing Subject
Tracing the Present Absence with Van Gogh, Derrida, and Nancy
Chairing Not Sharing, Shifting Not Sitting: A Media Swap in Ionesco's The Chairs
Decentered, Not Vanished
Coda: Affective Compounds Make a Media Excess
Notes
Bibliography
Index
