Book Review [ Untimely Affects : Gilles Deleuze and an ethics of cinema by Nadine Boljkovac]

Abstract

Claims to urgency should always be viewed with deep suspicion. Particularly, when it comes to discussion of dead thinkers, in this case, Gilles Deleuze, and films made in the aftermath of WWII, here the post-apocalyptic cinema of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. Consequently, the suggestions that this project is ‘urgent’ which appear on the back cover as well as in the book itself should ring alarm bells. What kind of new insight into cinema and its possibilities for ethical existence and radical reconfiguration of our perception and experience of time are we being promised here? In Untimely Affects, Nadine Boljkovac sets herself an ambitious, highly risky and ultimately impossible task. The paragraphs which follow constitute an attempt to articulate these three aspects of Boljkovac’s project before suggesting how the text is paradigmatic of contemporary Deleuze stu