Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body argues against the idea that cinema is best understood as a system of representation to be decoded from a safe critical distance.

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Benjamin, Vertov, psychoanalysis and contemporary film theory, Shaviro treats cinema as a force that acts directly on bodies: producing sensation, affect, pleasure, pain and forms of perception before they are organised into meaning.

It looks deeply as spectatorship through montage, masochism, horror, comedy, gender; Warhol and Cronenberg become ways of testing how cinema distributes intensity and reorganises the relation between viewer and image. Against film theory’s tendency to reduce visual pleasure to ideology or illusion, Shaviro insists on the material force of the image itself. The result is an early and important contribution to affect-oriented film theory, and a useful bridge between Deleuzian philosophy and the phenomenology of watching.

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993. First edition. Paperback, Theory Out of Bounds series, volume 2. Light shelf wear and minor creasing to covers; internally clean and sound.