Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation

313 Pages·2008·1.28 MB·English

by  Marco Abel

Violent Aff ect

LUinnciovlenr saintyd oLfo Nndebornaska Press
Chapter  is based on the author’s critical essay
“Judgment Is Not an Exit: Toward an Aff ective
Criticism of Violence with American Psycho,” which
appeared in Angelaki . (): –. A Taylor &
Francis publication, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals.
Chapter  is based on the author’s critical essay “Don
DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future’: Literature,
Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing /,” which ap-
peared in pmla . (): –.
©  by the Board of Regents of the University of
Nebraska
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abel, Marco.
Violent aff ect : literature, cinema, and critique after
representation / Marco Abel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
isbn-: ---- (alk. cloth)
isbn-: ---x (alk. cloth)
. American fi ction—th century—History and
criticism. . Violence in literature. . Violence in
motion pictures. I.Title.
ps.va 
'.—dc 
Set in Chaparral Pro by Bob Reitz.
Designed by Ashley Johnston.
For Magda and Richard Abel
In memory of Magda Löhr (–)

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
. Th e Violence of Sensation
Miller’s Crossing, Aff ect, and Masocriticism 
. Judgment Is Not an Exit
Representation, Aff ect, and American Psycho 
. Are We All Arnoldians?
A Conceptual Genealogy of Judgment 
. Serializing Violence
Patricia Highsmith’s “Empirical” Pedagogy
of Violence 
. Becoming-Violent, Becoming-DeNiro
Rendering Violence Visible on Screen 
. Don DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”
Violence, Pedagogy, and the Rhetoric of
Seeing / 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index 

ix
Th e violence of sensation is opposed to the violence of the repre-
sented (the sensational, the cliché). Th e former is inseparable from
its direct action on the nervous system, the levels through which
it passes, the domains it traverses: being itself a Figure, it must
have nothing of the nature of the represented object. [Violence] is
not what one believes it to be, and depends less and less on what is
represented.
—Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon
I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would not try
to judge.
—Michel Foucault, “Th e Masked Philosopher”
Any project that lays claim to the attribute of novelty, let alone
“radical” novelty, deserves to be received with immediate sus-
picion. More often than not, such works turn out to be merely
minor (albeit at times important) modifi cations of familiar argu-
ments (how many more “radical” social constructivist arguments
does one have to endure?). Despite my awareness of the danger
inherent to what is at least in part a marketing trap—the seduc-
tive force of novelty, however superfi cial, has long functioned as
the sales engine of capitalism—I nonetheless proceed by submit-
ting that the following study has indeed something new to of-
fer with regard to its chosen subject matter, images of violence