Reading/Form

two essays on Brinkema and cinema

Henselmans, Jakob

At its best, Eugenie Brinkema’s work is an unremitting plea for practices of reading and writing and thinking more alert to the chances of difference. ‘Form’ is where she finds first criti-cal ground and a structural openness to change, but form is a strange thing with shifting faces. The two long essays in this short volume present different attempts of going about form in theory, and relate these attempts to heightening concerns about convention, ambiguity and the moulds we have for encounter. How is thought on form to process an encounter with the fold-ings of such form in thought? Where does reading form make way for a baseline thought that we take on genuinely because we feel that we have to? Alternatively, what happens when we take seriously dissociation for the infinity that it triggers? To what ex-tent are we willing to take reading just in order to keep reading differently?