
Futures of the Flesh
An Experiment in Film Writing
Domietta Torlasco(Author)
Northwestern University Press
Will be published approx. on 15. September 2026
Book
Hardback
184 pages
979-8-89948-072-0 (ISBN)
Description
Exploring alternative possibilities of viewpoint through cinematic experimentation
In this boldly multidimensional work, Domietta Torlasco alternates between theoretical writings, film essays, and fragmented excerpts from an original screenplay to construct a temporal as well as spatial architecture for her critical intervention. Futures of the Flesh posits that cinematic experimentation holds the strongest potential to reimagine life-its forms, rhythms, and affects-beyond the division between subject and object, human and animal, animate and inanimate. Such potential cannot be clearly located in either space or time but, on the contrary, requires that we think according to momentum, diffraction, and difference.
As a novel notion and the formative medium of both subject and object, the flesh affirms the openness and indefinite generativity of being, allowing for the appearance of new perceptual relations and forms of kinship. Torlasco stages a dialogue between thinkers including Hortense Spillers and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and turns to canonical films, including Blade Runner and Solaris, classic sci-fi literature, such as Octavia Butler's Kindred, and contemporary video art to elucidate how these media imaginatively rework the distinction between categories of being. This book endeavors to redefine the relation between theory and practice, analysis and creation, to name the primary relations that, under specific techno-aesthetic conditions, enable the emergence of porous, un-bordered forms of life.
In this boldly multidimensional work, Domietta Torlasco alternates between theoretical writings, film essays, and fragmented excerpts from an original screenplay to construct a temporal as well as spatial architecture for her critical intervention. Futures of the Flesh posits that cinematic experimentation holds the strongest potential to reimagine life-its forms, rhythms, and affects-beyond the division between subject and object, human and animal, animate and inanimate. Such potential cannot be clearly located in either space or time but, on the contrary, requires that we think according to momentum, diffraction, and difference.
As a novel notion and the formative medium of both subject and object, the flesh affirms the openness and indefinite generativity of being, allowing for the appearance of new perceptual relations and forms of kinship. Torlasco stages a dialogue between thinkers including Hortense Spillers and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and turns to canonical films, including Blade Runner and Solaris, classic sci-fi literature, such as Octavia Butler's Kindred, and contemporary video art to elucidate how these media imaginatively rework the distinction between categories of being. This book endeavors to redefine the relation between theory and practice, analysis and creation, to name the primary relations that, under specific techno-aesthetic conditions, enable the emergence of porous, un-bordered forms of life.
Reviews / Votes
"Drawing on the most radical insights from Black Feminist scholarship, Torlasco's audacious breading of creative and scholarly genres of film writing takes to task some of the most threaded modes of film theory. Futures of the Flesh is difficult work of extraordinary beauty and accomplishment." -Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State University"Futures of the Flesh is a tour-de-force, offering powerful and convincing arguments that do not look away from phenomenology's blind spots." -Shane Denson, Stanford University
"'There are words, sounds, images that keep returning, like refrains, breaking out of context, creating new context,' Torlasco tells us. In tracking such words, sounds, and images, Torlasco has presented us with a powerful and demanding gift: a courageous book that breaks out of cliched academic writing, ossified disciplinary conventions, reified scholarly thought; a poignantly lyrical book that creates new forms of writing and thinking about racial and sexual difference in the cinema and outside of it; a book of rare, holographic, beauty, that keeps turning around, returning to, and being diffracted by the vertigo crossroads where the Flesh and the Black Mother met, still meet, shall meet again, in joyful entanglement, in catastrophic torsion, and in hope." -Cesare Casarino, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Evanston
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
2 b&w halftones, 12 full-color halftones
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
979-8-89948-072-0 (9798899480720)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Domietta Torlasco is a critical theorist, filmmaker, and professor of comparative literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of four books, including The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure. Her video essays have screened at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Kino Arsenal in Berlin, among others.
Content
Prologue
Part I. More Life, Fucker
Script Fragment 1: Oona
Part II. Quantum Cinema
Script Fragment 2: Brittlestar/Madame
Part III. For a Psychoanalysis of the Flesh
Script Fragment 3: Sea Point
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Part I. More Life, Fucker
Script Fragment 1: Oona
Part II. Quantum Cinema
Script Fragment 2: Brittlestar/Madame
Part III. For a Psychoanalysis of the Flesh
Script Fragment 3: Sea Point
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index