Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature

by Tomáš Jirsa, Bernd Herzogenrath (Editor), Patricia Pisters (Editor)

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.

168 pages, Paperback

Published September 8, 2022

Reviews

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

What, if anything, changes our understanding of aesthetic form when it breaks apart in a violent encounter with excess, madness, or radical alterity? Is it any different when the same form quietly disintegrates under the corrosive effects of embedded self-canceling drives? To answer these questions, Tomáš Jirsa's monograph makes use of a wide-ranging yet coherent assemblage of conceptual instruments, pondering and dissecting an equally heterogenous corpus that spans across media from fiction, memoir, and theater to cinema, visual arts, and conceptual installations. By virtue of unexpected juxtapositions emerging from its transdisciplinary and transmedia infrastructure, Disformations reads as a work of critical curatorship rooted in the libraries and galleries of Central and Western European cultural imagery.

From postwar memoirs and modernist literature (Rainer Maria Rilke, Richard Weiner, Vladimir Nabokov, Michel Tournier) to contemporary wallpapers and Rococo formal plays, from painting (Vincent van Gogh, Francis Bacon) and theater (Eugène Ionesco) to conceptual art (Joseph Kosuth, Jan Šerých) and film (Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick), a wealth of figures and references unfolds in the four chapters of the book, concerned with just as many intermedia comparisons. The reader need not, however, feel bewildered by this complex conglomerate of artifacts characterized by a shared concern with formal transformations. Jirsa understands aesthetic forms not as "ontologically given representational units" (6) but instead as dynamic, proliferating processes in continuous interaction with their own surroundings (5) and plasticity (10). The overarching demonstration of the book flows gracefully, although perhaps a little fast-paced in the sequencing of case studies structured around four major figures: war-wounded faciality, wallpaper patterns, the garbage dump, and the empty chair. All four are unpacked, in rapid succession, as sites of affectively driven deformations of preestablished forms. The author's compelling—because thought both from within the formal affordances of the intermedia figures and via the affective encounters with them—arguments make up for a vertiginous ride, which might awaken in some readers the desire for an extended examination complementing the already close reading of the works under scrutiny.

Read the rest of my review in Discourse, here