{"id":5733,"date":"2017-07-16T16:47:56","date_gmt":"2017-07-16T20:47:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.surfzen.com\/cscp2017\/?p=5733"},"modified":"2019-06-08T18:28:07","modified_gmt":"2019-06-08T22:28:07","slug":"elena-del-rio-the-grace-of-destruction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/2017\/07\/16\/elena-del-rio-the-grace-of-destruction","title":{"rendered":"Elena del R\u00edo, The Grace of Destruction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elena del R\u00edo, The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas<\/em>. <\/b>London: Bloomsbury, 2016; 267 pages. ISBN 978-1501303029.<\/b><\/p>\n

Reviewed by David H. Fleming, University of Nottingham Ningbo China.<\/i><\/p>\n

As the latest instalment in Bloomsbury\u2019s \u201cThinking Cinema\u201d series, The Grace of Destruction <\/i>surfaces as a paradoxically timely and untimely book. Indeed, insofar as the ongoing \u201cethical-turn\u201d in contemporary film-philosophy is concerned (see Nagib, 2011, 10; Choi and Frey, 2014, 1; Sinnerbrink, 2016, 5), and the wider \u201caffective-turn\u201d within millennial humanities, the book is very much of its moment. However, if we frame it alongside 2016\u2019s populist nationalist movements (in the \u201cWest\u201d), and the so-called \u201cpost-truth\u201d events, it suddenly appears recast\u2014in the Nietzschean sense\u2014as an incredibly untimely work. For almost in anticipation of these events, Elena del R\u00edo celebrates \u201cextreme\u201d artworks that use their form and content to show how passive<\/i> forces breed ressentiment<\/i> and bad conscience, while active<\/i> forces can help stimulate experimental creativity, and positively change the world. In such endeavours, del R\u00edo finds her untimely ally in Nietzsche, who (in)famously argued that the conjunction of art and philosophy is \u201cuseful for harming stupidity\u201d and exposing all \u201cforms of baseness of thought.\u201d (183)<\/p>\n

Following in the footsteps materialist philosophers such as Brian Massumi, affect is here viewed as being \u201cinherently political\u201d (3), especially when used within various world cinemas that challenge viewers to \u201cthink with <\/i>negative affects, rather than against <\/i>them.\u201d (6) As with her earlier book Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance<\/i>, del Rio foregrounds the non-representational \u201cpowers of affection\u201d associated with film, albeit this time arguing that the articulation of extreme cinema and immanent philosophical thoughts provide a fertile \u201cbreeding ground for generating new forms of life and thought, new libidinal and affective assemblages.\u201d (22) The book\u2019s aims are outlined up-front in terms of five interventions into the fields of Deleuze, cinema, ethics, and violence studies. These constitute a desire to (1) \u201ctrace the emergence of violence to the genealogy of morality and its breeding of reactive forces,\u201d (2) shift \u201ca worn out, self-evident emphasis on violence into a more complex discourse of affective forces,\u201d (3) \u201cstress the political embeddedness of affective life,\u201d (4) \u201crecast the political as affirmative potential by underscoring the experimental, ethological program that many of these so-called \u2018extreme\u2019 cinemas undertake,\u201d (5) and \u201cmake a case for extremism as a global cinematic tendency and not one that is limited to European cinemas.\u201d (5)<\/p>\n

Over five cumulative chapters, del R\u00edo dives into the work of cultural and clinical \u201cdiagnosticians\u201d such as Christian Mungiu, Michael Haneke, Taksehi Kitano, Lars von Trier, and David Lynch, whose cruel<\/i>, affective films she sees dealing a \u201ccritical and philosophical blow against moral man,\u201d while also affectively promoting the creation of new values. Approaching cinema as a \u201cwar machine\u201d and a kind of thought, the introduction employs Mungiu\u2019s Beyond The Hills <\/i>(2012) to help give shape to, and signpost, the style<\/i> of film-philosophy that readers can expect throughout the book. For amongst other things, this andante Romanian work foregrounds situations where either \u201cthe sensory-motor schema is disabled and cannot remedy the situation\u201d or else a \u201cmoral vision does not come to anybody\u2019s rescue, and anxiety and despair are not redeemed by either the invention of scapegoats or of moral meanings.\u201d (25) What is more, the film also creates an affective interval that acts \u201clike a spur or a revelation,\u201d generating a crack in the edifice of moral thinking. (25) Chapter One, \u201cThe Disease of Morality\u201d explores von Trier\u2019s Dogville <\/i>(2003) and Haneke\u2019s The White Ribbon<\/i> (2009). These transport us into yet more sick and sickening communities that breed \u201can unquenchable thirst for judgement and retribution and a defensive position of hatred and suspicion toward the forces of the Outside.\u201d (26) By allowing viewers to sense the difference between morality and ethics, judgement and cruelty, reactive and active forces, these films are celebrated for offering a Spinozist-Nietzschean-Deleuzian perspective on the world. That is to say, these films variously expose the structural violence bound up in morality and moral thought, the role this plays in the production<\/i> of evil, the apportioning of blame for this evil\u2019s existence, and the reactive desire to visit retribution upon the guilty body. Del R\u00edo\u2019s discussion of Dogville<\/i> clearly illustrates this while showing how Grace (Nicole Kidman) surfaces as an active agent of cruelty (72), who unleashes a \u201cmomentous final act of annihilation\u201d (70) that expresses a will to \u201coverthrown the human in the human.\u201d (72) Von Trier\u2019s film philosophy is thus framed as \u201can unapologetic allegory for the death of moral man\u201d and <\/i>\u201can aesthetic allegory of the way cinema, and art in general, can advance the destruction of morality and its deadening debilitating tricks.\u201d (74\u20135)<\/p>\n

In another timely manoeuvre, the chapter \u201cBare Life\u201d takes the conceptual apparatus of Giorgio Agamben as its point of departure, essentially divorcing notions of biopolitics and bare life from their exclusive association with the Nazi death camps. This chapter also curates an encounter between Haneke\u2019s Code Unknown <\/i>(2001) and Carlos Reygadas\u2019 Battle in Heaven <\/i>(2005): two films that diagnose the state of life under what Deleuze called the modern societies of control. Starting with the work of Haneke, which betrays an \u201cintuitive grasp of the present cultural and historical zeitgeist<\/i>\u201d and undertakes a political \u201cactivism of affection,\u201d del R\u00edo shows how the auteur director exposes the structural production and biopolitical organisation of poverty and oppression. (83) That is, the control of bare life and the maintenance of biopolitical inequality operate as the vile abstract logic of modern societies. \u00a0In the next chapter, \u201cPhysics of Violence, Folds of Pain,\u201d readers are then asked to consider pain as an intensive\/affective matter, rather than a presupposed psychological trait or qualified emotion courtesy of Fassbinder\u2019s \u201cperformative machine\u201d Alexanderplatz<\/i> and Lynch\u2019s perplexing Inland Empire. <\/i>These masterworks are framed as films not just about life, but films that appear to have a dramatic life of their own. After exploring Fassbinder\u2019s \u201cethological\u201d work, Lynch\u2019s notoriously baroque masterpiece is shown as advancing a new \u201cethics of subjectivity,\u201d which unfolds in time, and thinks individuality as being superseded by multiplicity. (145) To explicate why, del R\u00edo synthesizes a Leibnizian monadic philosophy with a nomadic feminist ethics: the affinities between which are revealed by Inland Empire<\/i>\u2019s febrile depths and surfaces. In an inspired reading, the true nomadic and monadic subject of Lynch\u2019s film is shown to be the lead actress Laura Dern, rather than the mutable and modulating fictional characters she plays. That is, for del R\u00edo, it essentially becomes Dern\u2019s subjectivity that is called upon to schizophrenically and transversally envelop\/enfold \u201ca multiplicity of women\u2019s affective states,\u201d which \u201cdevelops\/unfolds the Oneness of women\u2019s world through a process of serial becomings.\u201d (144)<\/p>\n

In my view, the \u201cEthology of Death\u201d constitutes the book\u2019s most thought-provoking chapter. As this zooms in on the \u201cphilosophical essay\u201d films of the \u201caggressive filmmaker-philosopher\u201d Takeshi Katano, who somewhat paradoxically, del R\u00edo argues, both is, and is not, a genre filmmaker. (182) On the one hand, Kitano is a director that has appropriately been described as creating a \u201cgenre solely for himself.\u201d (167) While on the other, he is renowned for obsessively returning to the yakuza genre so that he can \u201caddress death head-on, with no need for narrative causality of psychological motivation, both of which he abhors.\u201d (166) Kitano\u2019s films do not tackle death at the level of \u201crepresentation,\u201d though, but instead force viewers to confront death directly as \u201can affective event.\u201d (165) Del R\u00edo here finds great value (and black humour) in Kitano\u2019s \u201coverwhelming\u201d or \u201cexorbitant\u201d \u201cnarcissism and its radical, potentially controversial, consequence\u201d for eliminating the intrusion of the Other as a transcendental structure in his films. (174, 175, 177) Recall here that Kitano\u2019s unique oeuvre toys with the plicated identities of Takeshi Kitano the star director and Beat Takeshi the star actor (who more-often-than-not dies in his films), in a way that is \u201cmarked by a paradoxical blend of narcissism and self-annihilation.\u201d (184) This inimitable \u201cotherlessnes\u201d shows how Kitano\u2019s film-thoughts preserve \u201can immediate and impersonal point of view that belongs to the film itself as a machine of creation, and to Kitano as the brain that facilitates its movement.\u201d (177) Building on such ideas, del R\u00edo ends the chapter by pondering the fluid mediated nature of historical violence and film violence, using the triadic director\/actor\/star to open up and clinically diagnose this complex of forces. (169) The book concludes with \u201cExtinction\u201d and thinking through the relation between destruction and creation as it is thought by von Trier\u2019s Melancholia<\/i>: a film that escapes \u201cthe pitfalls of both humanism and nihilism\u201d (198) while affectively fulfilling its own \u201cprogram of ethological experimentation.\u201d (208) This gesture rounds out an inspiring and thought-provoking book that should appeal to a broad readership (interested in global film, film philosophy, cine-ethics, extreme cinemas, and politics) and is fit for an era when critically interrogating the habitual ways in which we think, live, and act (as citizens and a species) has never been more important.<\/p>\n

Additional References<\/b><\/p>\n

Choi, Jinhee and Frey, Mattias, eds. (2014), Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film theory, Practice, and Spectatorship<\/i> (London: Routledge).<\/p>\n

Nagib, L\u00facia (2016), World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism<\/i> (London: Bloomsbury).<\/p>\n

Sinnerbrink, Robert (2016), Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film <\/i>(London: Routledge).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elena del R\u00edo, The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas. London: Bloomsbury, 2016; 267 pages. ISBN 978-1501303029. Reviewed by David H. Fleming, University of Nottingham Ningbo China. As the latest instalment in Bloomsbury\u2019s \u201cThinking Cinema\u201d series, The Grace of Destruction surfaces as a paradoxically timely and untimely book. Indeed, insofar as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-news","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 12:58:24","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5733"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6936,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5733\/revisions\/6936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}