Abstract

This book offers a unique reconsideration of the performing body that privileges the notion of affective force over the notion of visual form at the centre of former theories of spectacle and performativity. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the body, and on Deleuze-Spinoza's relevant concepts of affect and expression, the book examines a kind of "affective-performative" cinema. The features of this cinema unfold via detailed discussions of the movements, gestures and speeds of the body in a variety of films by Douglas Sirk, Rainer W. Fassbinder, Sally Potter, Claire Denis and David Lynch. Basing her analysis on the body's powers of affection, Del Río shows the insufficiency of former theoretical approaches in accounting for the transformative and creative capacities of the moving body of performance.