Futures of the Flesh
An Experiment in Film Writing
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Northwestern University Press
Publishing:15th Sep '26
£26.99
This title is due to be published on 15th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Exploring alternative possibilities of viewpoint through cinematic experimentation
In this boldly multidimensional work, Domietta Torlasco alternates between theoretical writings, film essays, and fragmented excerpts from an original screenplay to construct a temporal as well as spatial architecturefor her critical intervention. Futures of the Flesh posits that cinematic experimentation holds the strongest potential to reimagine life—its forms, rhythms, and affects—beyond the division between subject and object, human and animal, animate and inanimate. Such potential cannot be clearly located in either space or time but, on the contrary, requires that we think according to momentum, diffraction, and difference.
As a novel notion and the formative medium of both subject and object, the flesh affirms the openness and indefinite generativity of being, allowing for the appearance of new perceptual relations and forms of kinship. Torlasco stages a dialogue between thinkers including Hortense Spillers and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and turns to canonical films, including Blade Runner and Solaris, classic sci-fi literature, such as Octavia Butler's Kindred, and contemporary video art to elucidate how these media imaginatively rework the distinction between categories of being. This book endeavors to redefine the relation between theory and practice, analysis and creation, to name the primary relations that, under specific techno-aesthetic conditions, enable the emergence of porous, un-bordered forms of life.
"Drawing on the most radical insights from Black Feminist scholarship, Torlasco's audacious breading of creative and scholarly genres of film writing takes to task some of the most threaded modes of film theory. Futures of the Flesh is difficult work of extraordinary beauty and accomplishment." —Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State University
"Futures of the Flesh is a tour-de-force, offering powerful and convincing arguments that do not look away from phenomenology's blind spots." —Shane Denson, Stanford University
"'There are words, sounds, images that keep returning, like refrains, breaking out of context, creating new context,' Torlasco tells us. In tracking such words, sounds, and images, Torlasco has presented us with a powerful and demanding gift: a courageous book that breaks out of clichéd academic writing, ossified disciplinary conventions, reified scholarly thought; a poignantly lyrical book that creates new forms of writing and thinking about racial and sexual difference in the cinema and outside of it; a book of rare, holographic, beauty, that keeps turning around, returning to, and being diffracted by the vertigo crossroads where the Flesh and the Black Mother met, still meet, shall meet again, in joyful entanglement, in catastrophic torsion, and in hope." —Cesare Casarino, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
ISBN: 9798899480713
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
184 pages