ABOUT THIS BOOK

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 architecture for 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

DOMIETTA TORLASCO is a critical theorist, filmmaker, and professor of comparative literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of four books, including The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure. Her video essays have screened at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Kino Arsenal in Berlin, among others.

REVIEWS

“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

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue
Part I. More Life, Fucker
Script Fragment 1: Oona
Part II. Quantum Cinema
Script Fragment 2: Brittlestar/Madame
Part III. For a Psychoanalysis of the Flesh
Script Fragment 3: Sea Point
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index