Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Tomáš Jirsa is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Palacký 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.<p>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, <i>Disformations</i>’s claim about the performative force of affects will be much debated in the contemporary media theory.</p>
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 <i>disformation</i> 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 <i>Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature</i> 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
Disformations is admirable for its erudite close readings and unexpected comparisons that illuminate one another in a manner likely to engage both specialized and nonspecialized readers with different degrees of familiarity with literary and media studies, art history, and cinema.
Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture
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
Media not only determine our situation, as Friedrich Kittler has it; rather, our situation, our life, our thoughts only enfold and execute themselves within the medial field in the first place. Film-Philosophy has already shown that 'film thinks'. If we take this a step further, relating this approach to the whole range of media production, but also take a step back, and see what this approach basically means, we begin to see the seeds of a new Media Philosophy worthy of the name - not talking about media by way of 'philosophy proper', safeguarding disciplinary boundaries, but by realizing the philosophical qualities and impacts of each medium: it all starts from the assumption that our memory, perception, and thinking is not just a given, as an internal process that takes place behind the wall of our skull and is purely mental - there is always a 'material basis' of mediation.
The thinking media series publishes original, innovative, and transdisciplinary monographs and edited collections that advance debates in the nexus of media studies, philosophy, and the 'new sciences' (such as cognitive neurosciences and complexity theory).