The grace of destruction: a vital ethology of extreme cinemas

About the Author

Elena del Río is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her essays have been featured in journals such as Camera Obscura, Discourse, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film-Philosophy, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, SubStance, and Deleuze Studies. She has also contributed essays to edited collections on the films of Atom Egoyan, Rainer W. Fassbinder, and on the philosophy of film, and Deleuze and cinema. She is the author of Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (2008).

Product Description

For Elena del Río, extreme cinema is not only qualitatively different from the representations of violence we encounter in popular, mainstream cinema; it also constitutes a critique of the socio-moral system that produces (in every sense of the word) such violence. Drawing inspiration from Deleuze's ethics of immanence, Spinoza's ethology of passions and Nietzsche's typology of forces, The Grace of Destruction examines the affective extremities common in much of global, contemporary cinema from the affirmative perspective of vital forces and situations-extremities such as moral/religious oppression, biopolitical violence, the pain involved in gender relations, the event of death and planetary extinction.

Her analysis diverges from the current literature on extreme cinema through its selection of films, which include key international examples, and through its foregrounding of relational, affective politics over representations of sexuality and graphic violence. Detailed formal and philosophical analyses of films like The White Ribbon, Dogville, Code Unknown, Battle in Heaven, Sonatine, Fireworks, Dolls, Takeshis', Inland Empire and Melancholia are meant to move us away from the moral appraisal of violence and destruction, and to compose an ethological philosophy of cinema based on Deleuze's idea that, “when truth and judgment crumble, there remain bodies, which are… nothing but forces.”

Review

“Del Río’s Grace of Destruction… [continues] to invigorate the conversation surrounding the new extreme cinema while also expanding the applicability of its terms in productive and challenging ways that particularly encourage us to consider the ethical and philosophical ramifications that only the extreme encounter can engender.” - Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

“[The Grace of Destruction]... is 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.” - David H. Fleming, SYMPOSIUM: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy