The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas by Elena Del Río (review)

Much like her first book, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (2008), Elena Del Río's The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas privileges the body's expressive and affective capacities over representational paradigms and narrative form. Reasserting a filmic and philosophical allegiance to the body, Del Río's latest work advances an original assessment of violence in contemporary cinema, with a particular focus on "negative affects" and the forces, extremities, and moral codes that precede and exceed acts of violence.

Deploying an array of theoretical insights from multiple disciplines, Grace of Destruction engages a selection of films that demonstrate a certain extremity (3). For Del Río, "extreme cinemas" should not be confused with extremely violent films that display "sensationalist physicalit[ies]" (4) but films in which socio-moral systems and structures produce "negative affects" in subjects/individuals, often culminating in acts of violence. Del Río stresses the importance of separating "force" from "violence" but reiterates the latter's "immanence" to the former (8). Grace of Destruction does not, then, analyze cinematic violence as a series of decontextualized, individuated acts but as grounded on a "sustained practice of intensity that […] pervades the everyday body and its inherently aberrant movements and affects" (4). By engaging the "negative affects produced in such situations as moral/religious oppression, biopolitical violence, […] gender relations, the event of death, and in closing, planetary extinction" (3), Grace of Destruction is dedicated to uncovering the eminently political potentialities deployed in affective relations between bodies and other bodies and between bodies and the oppressive/repressive forces confining them.

Following Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, the first chapter of Grace of Destruction provides an incisive examination of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (2009) and Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003). Del Río stresses that both films demonstrate a commitment to Nietzschean "slave morality," or "the morality of utility that turns the possibility of action and open aggression into the triumph of reaction and ressentiment" (32). The primary conveyance of this chapter is that White Ribbon and Dogville both demonstrate a battle between stronger and weaker forces in which opportunities for direct action/aggression (or active forces) are repressed or forestalled by a stronger pouvoir, thus breeding reactive forces. Impulses to convert reactive forces into active ones (puissance) emerge, albeit in a displaced fashion, whereby acts of aggression and revenge are misdirected and, thus, inadequately challenge (and in many ways, strengthen) the morally righteous figures that initially manifested such reactive forces. For example, in her analysis of The White Ribbon, Del Rio remarks that patriarchal figures, including the pastor, doctor, and baron, possess tremendous amounts of power and agency within the small German community in which the film is set (35). Particularly unable to stand up to their father are the pastor's children, who experience intense physical abuse, verbal aggression, and shame for the smallest "infractions," including indulging in pubescent sexual desires (35). Denied of the ability to actively confront or respond to their father, or to harness their puissance, the children engage in a series of terrorizing, violent acts against the adults in their community (35–37). While these acts could be read as the children's "means [of] transform[ing] passive reactions into active ones," Del Río stresses that these "violent actions actually arise as a displaced response to the incapacitating powers of the father" (37). The children's anger and resentment toward their father, misdirected toward the community as a whole, ultimately feeds (and reveals the children's powerlessness to) the violent, repressive, and moral codes that initially bred their ressentiment (37–38).

The most engaging chapter in Grace of Destruction, aptly titled "Bare Life," is also its most interdisciplinary. Invoking Deleuze, Foucault, and Agamben, this chapter explores the philosophies of "biopolitics" and "bare life" in the context of Haneke's Code Unknown (2000), and Carlos Reygadas's Battle...