Eugenie Brinkema - The Violence of Fascination: on Martyrs, Metaphysics, and Form

Professor Brinkema's lecture focuses on Pascal Laugier's 2008 new-extremist horror film Martyrs, arguing that the film generates a formal violence that is coextensive with the very aesthetic fascinations that structure it, rendering an account of violence that is monstrative and creative, cinematically demonstrating not the violation of body but the impersonal, non-embodied violence of a fascination with form, one shared by horror and metaphysical philosophy. 

Eugenie Brinkema‘s research in film and media studies focuses on violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics in texts ranging from the horror film to the body of films dubbed “New European Extremism” to the visual and temporal forms of terrorism. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals including Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Criticism, differences, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, World Picture, and in anthologies on director Michael Haneke and rape in art cinema. Her first book, The Forms of the Affects (Duke University Press, Spring 2014), interrogates the relationship between form and grief, disgust, nostalgia, anxiety, and joy in film, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. Her current project explores the speculative potential of radical formalism in relation to horror and love.