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Violence: most of us would be happy if we never had to experience it, and many are driven by the belief that nonviolent spaces exist. In Violent Affect, however, Marco Abel starts from a different, potentially controversial assumption: namely that violence is all-pervasive by ontological necessity. In order to work through the implications of this provocation, Abel turns to literary and cinematic works such as those by Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Harron, Patricia Highsmith, the Coen Brothers, and Robert DeNiro, contending that we do not even know what violent images are, let alone how they work and what they do. Countering previous studies of violent images based on representational and, consequently, moralistic assumptions, which, Abel argues, inevitably reinforce the very violence they critique, Violent Affect instead turns to the concept of “affect” as a means to explain how violent images work upon the world. Arguing for what he calls a “masocritical” approach to violence, Abel’s analysis attends to the affects inherent to violent images with the goal of momentarily suspending judgment of them, thus allowing for new, unanswered critical questions about the issue of violence to emerge. Abel suggests that shifting from representational understandings of violence toward an account of its affective forces is a necessary step in developing more ethical tools to intervene in the world—for acting upon it for the betterment of the future. (20091015)
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Violent Affect Unive rsity o f Neb Linco raska ln and Press Londo n Chapter is based on the author’s critical essay “Judgment Is Not an Exit: Toward an Affective 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 appeared 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 affect : literature, cinema, and critique after representation / Marco Abel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn- : - - - - (alk. cloth) isbn- : - - -x (alk. cloth) . American fiction— th century—History and criticism. . Violence in literature. motion pictures. I.Title. ps .v a '. —dc Set in Chaparral Pro by Bob Reitz. Designed by Ashley Johnston. . Violence in For Magda and Richard Abel In memory of Magda Löhr ( – ) Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii . The Violence of Sensation Miller’s Crossing, Affect, and Masocriticism . Judgment Is Not an Exit Representation, Affect, 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 The violence of sensation is opposed to the violence of the represented (the sensational, the cliché). The 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, F