Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature

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, Tomas 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, Eugene Ionesco, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Kosuth, and Jan Serych, 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.

Tomas Jirsa is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic. Interested in relations between literature and the visual arts, affect studies, and music video, he recently co-edited (with Ernst van Alphen) How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices (2019). In 2015 and 2017, he was awarded a fellowship from IKKM in Weimar; in 2019, he was Visiting Scholar at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

Through a series of intriguing examples from literature, cinema, and contemporary arts, Jirsa's book takes readers on a delightful cross-disciplinary journey into affectively driven generative deformations. Passionate and erudite, Disformations's claim about the performative force of affects will be much debated in the contemporary media theory. * Pietro Conte, Associate Professor in Aesthetics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy * In this astonishingly inventive and wide-ranging book, Jirsa expertly traverses the domains of literature, painting, cinema, and video art for figures that push the formal limits of representation-the face destroyed by war, wallpaper patterns, the garbage dump, the empty chair-and thus reveal the dynamic force of affect at work in the secret heart of all formation. Arriving in the turbulent wake of the so-called affective and formal turns, Jirsa's media-philosophical concept of disformation brilliantly shows us a new way through the all-too familiar impasses of both. This book should be read by anyone interested in thinking deeply about the affective operations of form in our contemporary mediated moment. * Abraham Geil, Senior Lecturer of Film Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands * The central project of Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature is to reactivate the vital question of the affective operations of aesthetic objects. Through close readings of a range of fascinating figures-from empty chairs to wallpaper patterns-Jirsa insists on treating representational limits neither as ineffable nor as deficient, but instead as generative processes that expose the speculative potential of disturbances to form. * Eugenie Brinkema, Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA *