#brinkema

[stormpoetics]

"You start by merely trying to describe the minor differences modulated through variations in types of light.

You leave lists like this lying around:

glinty

glowing

glazed

glittering

gleaming

blurred

hazy

fogged

flared

smoky

gauzy

patchy

flickering

shimmering

shadowy

refracting

reflecting

&c."

-Eugenie Brinkema, How I Have Not Written Certain of My Readings

[stormpoetics]

"But if there is one thing that a profound commitment to close reading for form requires, it is getting comfortable with a certain fucked relation to time.

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn described this demand as “the extravagant patience” of Derrida’s subtle, winding, indirect analysis. And lest you prefer that genteel Gallic phrasing, recall that the Latin patientia means suffering, threads back to *peh-: to hurt. But if you want a mode of interpretation that is speculative, dynamic, vital, and creative, perhaps it ought to cost something.

Radical formalism, as articulated in The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022)—not a formalism in thrall to radical politics or any prior affordances, but a formalism that grounds (radix: roots) theoretical claims—involves what I call reading without guarantee. Not only does this require eschewing paraphrase or the application of an assemblage of themes, it also means that one begins reading from some (any) particular details of a particular textual object and then proceeds to see what happens. One does not know in advance what the writing of a reading will reveal. You have to put in the work and the work is writing and thus the work itself has form and the work will both construct and read itself—and your work, also, will never be done or final or closed."

-Eugenie Brinkema, How I Have Not Written Certain of My Readings