Pate Duncan’s Reviews > Life-Destroying Diagrams > Status Update

I really respect and appreciate the typography and layout of this book (like The Forms of the Affects, a gorgeous cover) as working for its argument itself. Brinkema insists on form’s stubborn refusal to be paraphrased, and her arguments interlock in a zig-zag path that is complicated by the book’s irregularities. Despite my own historicizing and emphasis on embodied spectators, I love this a lot.

Reading the bit about Final Destination’s airplane crash while waiting to board a flight isn’t helping things for me.

Where I found The Forms of the Affects a bit frustrating in how quickly it leapt to disavow the embodied viewing subject, I think I have an easier time buying—even sharing!—the overall affective frustration with the way that anthropocentric reduction to psychology, embodiment, etc. seems to get us away from the aesthetic to instrumentalize it theoretically in excess of its necessary condition of perception.