Keynote Lecture 3: Eugenie Brinkema (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | 14.00-15.45 |
VOXPOP* Register here before June 11, 2022 | More Info Here
Blindness and Description; Or, How to Read a Sunken Form
For all that Jordan Peele’s lauded horror film Get Out (2017) appears to traffic in the conventional negative affects of the horror genre—anxiety, suspense, panic, shock—Professor Brinkema will argue in her talk that the film in fact models a formal account of violence, one that grounds its critique of racialized terror and the dynamics of aggressions both micro- and micro- in its juxtaposition of the relationship of black life and survival to the very question of how to describe and interpret visual form, in particular the form of photographs. ‘Communities of feeling’ thus become intimately bound to communities of reading, while the political stakes of reading become visible solely through a complex grappling with different formal registers of the image.
Eugenie Brinkema is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research in film and media studies focuses on violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics. In dialogue with critical theory and continental philosophy, she argues for the speculative value of formalist readings in texts ranging from horror films to works of the new European extremism, from gonzo pornography to contemporary photography. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Criticism, differences, Discourse, film-philosophy, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, LIT, qui parle, and World Picture. Her books include The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), both published with Duke University Press. *VOX-POP is de creatieve ruimte van de Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen van de UvA. Het is een culturele plek waar UvA studenten, -medewerkers en de bewoners van Amsterdam gratis kunnen samenkomen. Meer informatie: https://voxpop.uva.nl/
