About

Eugenie Brinkema is an affiliated faculty member based in MIT Literature who researches violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics in texts. Her work spans a range of media, including horror films, gonzo pornography, European extremism, and viral media forms related to terrorism. She has published articles in numerous anthologies and journals such as Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Criticism, Discourse, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Journal of Visual Culture, LIT, Qui Parle, Somatechnics, and World Picture. Her first book, The Forms of the Affects, was published with Duke University Press in 2014 and received honorable mention in the Modern Language Association First Book Prize. In 2022, she published Life-Destroying Diagrams, which explores the theoretical potential of radical formalism in relation to horror and love.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Art
• History
• Social psychology
• Criminology
• Epistemology
• Psychoanalysis
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Geography
• Literature

Selected publications

• Not Done Being Over: Death and the Trouble with Understatement

  Film criticism · 2023-10-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The paradox of The Trouble with Harry: While Hitchcock dubbed it an exercise in “understatement,” the film turns on the hyperbolic insistence of the corpse at its center. Contravening the unmoved narrative and indifferent or irritated characters, the movements of cinematic form alone propose an ethical stance towards the dead.

  PublisherDOI

• Form for the blind (porn and description without guarantee)

  2023-01-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This article reads the paradoxical, curious, and seemingly self-negating pornographic category known as ‘Described Video’ – focusing on PornHub’s growing archive of professional vocal transcriptions of conventional visual pornographic texts, which are described in great detail, in real time alongside the source video, ostensibly for the benefit of the visually impaired. Through a close reading of the way in which the formal language of each text is described alongside narration of sexual practices, the article argues that described video reveals the tension at the heart of pornographic form: the inadequate mediation that all pornography attempts to contravene and disavow, a confusion of description with action. While pornography might seem the Antivalue of description – Don’t tell me, show me! – I argue that the pornographic commodity is itself a positive claim about the nature of description, one that is complicated in the case of described video. Ultimately, description comes to name an interpretation of pornography, making clear that pornographic labour is inextricable from its formal activity, and that desire is not a result of fantasies or flesh, but that form is what gets viewers off.

  PublisherDOI

• Acknowledgments

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Geography
  • History
  DOI

• INTERLUDE II. RHYTHM & FEEL

  2022-01-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER FOUR. MIDDLE-TERM NOTATIONS: LETTER, NUMBER, DIAGRAM

  2022-01-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Responses to ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’

  Psychoanalysis and History · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Life-Destroying Diagrams

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER SIX DISGUST AND THE CINEMA OF HAUT GOÛT

  2020-09-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER SEVEN INTERMITTENCY, EMBARRASSMENT, DISMAY

  2020-09-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Form

  2020-12-22 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mark Babanin

  University of Rochester

  16 shared

• Tim Melody

  University of Rochester

  16 shared

• Agnieszka Kurant

  University of Rochester

  16 shared

• Donna Haraway

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  16 shared

• Hernan Cox

  University of Rochester

  16 shared

• Renzo Taddei

  Universidade Federal de São Paulo

  16 shared

• Stefanie Hessler

  University of Rochester

  16 shared

• Rachel Thompson

  16 shared

Awards & honors

• Honorable mention in the Modern Language Association First B…