Rhythm of Images

Domietta Torlasco is a critical theorist, filmmaker, and associate professor in the Department of French and Italian and in the Comparative Literary Studies Program at Northwestern University. She is author of The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film (Minnesota, 2013) and The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film. Her recent video essays screened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Life2. Labor3. Memory4. MediumNotesIndex

"Domietta Torlasco is a unique scholar-artist whose work resides at the intersection of critique and practice, reflection and poeisis. Her erudition and critical virtuosity are on full display in The Rhythm of Images, a work that looks at the way image cultures produce rhythms that resonate across philosophy, speculative thought, and cinema. Among the remarkable achievements of The Rhythm of Images is its stereographic score, a multivocity that emerges from the force of Torlasco’s ensemble."-Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift"Domietta Torlasco’s The Rhythm of Images is a major breakthrough in aesthetic ontology. At the heart of this extraordinary intervention-as beautifully written as it is rigorously conceived-is an unexpected conception of rhythm as rhuthmos. Taken as rhuthmos, rhythm is understood against the all-too-familiar, and altogether problematic, assumption that rhythm is the engine of order, synchronization, and relations of identity-and against the idea that rhythm is primarily a question of sound. For Torlasco, rhythm is a force of difference, of what holds us together in and with difference. And what emerges first as a difficult problem of form moves fearlessly outward to surprisingly new, and much needed, ways of thinking about the relation between being and technicity, subject/object relations, time and capital, freedom and labor, difference and sameness."-Brian Price, University of Toronto