21.03.2019Imag(in)ing Future Bodies - Dr. Eugenie Brinkema (MIT) Guest Lecture «Object-Oriented Horror: On Rubber, the Chorus, and the Torus» and Workshop «Formal Aff ects, Violence, and Horror»

This talk revisits the argument of my 2014 «The Forms of the Aff ects» in relation to the negative aff ective mode of horror to claim that horror

tarries with violence on the way to expressing nearly nothing about the ethical. Reading the toroidal form of the killer tire in Quentin Dupieux’s

2010 fi lm «Rubber», I argue that the fi lm stages a meta-formal thinking of two competing theories of aff ect: one bound to the anthropomorphic

view of a diegetic chorus and the other attached to the vibrant life of non-correlated objects—only to disqualify both as providing the ground of

an ethical critique of violence. I conclude that «Rubber» arrives at a point at which it has nothing to express, but nor is it without ground: that

ground is not causal but morphic. Violence is redescribed as being not catastrophic but catamorphic: a generalization of the folds of changing

forms. «Rubber» thus attests to the positive limit of the ethical and redefi nes horror as the terrain on which a critique of violence is rendered good

for nothing.

Guest Lecture "Object-Oriented Horror: On Rubber, the Chorus and the Torus"

21.03. 6:00 pm-8:00 pm in PLH-102, Plattenstrasse 47, 8032 Zürich

Workshop - PhD Colloquium "Formal Affects, Violence & Horror" 

22.03. 10:15 am - 1:00 pm in SOE-E-8, Schönberggasse 11, 8001 Zürich