Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection
Elena del Río
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 0748649417
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book offers a unique reconsideration of the performing body that privileges the notion of affective force over the notion of visual form at the centre of former theories of spectacle and performativity. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the body, and on Deleuze-Spinoza's relevant concepts of affect and expression, Elena del Río examines a kind of cinema that she calls 'affective-performative'. The features of this cinema unfold via detailed and engaging discussions of the movements, gestures and speeds of the body in a variety of films by Douglas Sirk, Rainer W. Fassbinder, Sally Potter, Claire Denis, and David Lynch. Key to the book's engagement with performance is a consistent attention to the body's powers of affection.
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is paradoxically the affective impact of this event that leads her to initiate a series of public performances.11 Even if only briefly, these performances expand her power to make things happen and to shake things out of their habitual rigidity. Sara Jane thus illustrates the capacity of affect to enliven the predictable context formed by Lora’s stagnant movement upward. Paraphrasing Massumi’s remarks on the vivacity of affect, I would say that Sara Jane re-makes the film eventful; M1245 ELENA
have been circumscribed all along within a larger, more insidious circle of patriarchal mores. Maria’s transformation into the ideal object of male consumption brings to mind Phelan’s argument regarding the “impossibility of ‘having a body’ separate from the community in which desire to ‘possess’ it – libidinally, syntactically, psychically – circulates” (Phelan 1995: 207). This feature of highly restricted, while nonetheless partly inventive and deviant, movement is accurately represented in a
affect, and to be affected by, any and all bodies they may come into contact with. Ultimately, the performer’s narcissistic body thrives in its openness to affective processes that hold an unlimited transformative potential. Actions and passions As Olkowski has argued, at stake in the generally negative evaluation of narcissism within psychoanalysis (even in its feminist version) is a disregard for “[the ego’s] originally multiple nature” and the assumption “that it is . . . something unified and
toward him, leaving one leg behind, ever erect, a strong reminder of her desire” (Foster 1996: 1). M1245 ELENA TEXT.qxp:Andy Q7 6/5/08 10:46 Page 145 145 7. Thriller’s use of restrained movement is consistent with the melodramatic representation of the victim as “subjected to physical restraint” (Brooks 1994: 18). The increase of fluid movement in the women’s bodies at the end of the film adheres to the melodramatic script outlined by Peter Brooks: “None of these
destabilizing the relation between the affective-performative image – which I see as inherently tied in with processes of transformation and becoming – and the notion of genre – which I see as culturally identified with processes of stabilization of meaning and knowledge. The key role performance plays in destabilizing generic classification has been persuasively addressed by Josette Féral: M1245 ELENA TEXT.qxp:Andy Q7 6/5/08 10:46 Page 15 15 [P]erformance, caught up as it is in