Details of all publications can be found on the CV section of this blog.

PDFs of some articles can be accessed through my University’s open access repository when copyright embargoes have passed.

Please click on the book covers below for more details about my monographs.

Philippe Grandrieux: Sonic Cinema, in “ex:centrics”, a Bloomsbury series (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

Reviews: 

“Throughout the book, Hainge engages with issues of spectatorship, representation, relation, and alterity, arguing that Grandrieux’s cinema cannot be approached from pre-existing reality, or preconceived hermeneutic and moral frameworks. The discussion pauses to consider fascinating statements from Grandrieux in interview, and allows itself to become distracted in dynamic ways. Hainge articulates Grandrieux within a rich lineage of twentieth-century thought, weaving in figures such as Artaud, Bergson, Levinas, and Heidegger. The book is a substantial contribution on Grandrieux and an exciting new sonotropic turn for film theory.”

Emilija Talijan in French Studies. 72.1 (2018)

“Hainge works within the tradition of phenomenology and affect theory, but he counters theorists such as Laura U. Marks and Vivian Sobchack with the notion of “sonic cinema”, a concept that emphasises the entire sensorium and so is not reducible to visuality alone.”

Troy Michael Bordun in Senses of Cinema (2018). 

Endorsements

“This book offers the very first comprehensive study of a major contemporary filmmaker and artist. A leading specialist of French civilisation and culture, Greg Hainge provides the rich philosophical and pictorial background of Philippe Grandrieux’s work. From Grandrieux’s work as a producer to the deepest challenges posed by his films and installations, the study conducted by Greg Hainge illuminates the consistency and magnitude of an exceptional artistic career, organically structured by experimental values.”

Nicole Brenez, Professor, Paris 3 Sorbonne nouvelle University, France

“Deploying a vocabulary derived from sonic principles, and in dialogue with questions about aesthetic logics of sensation, Greg Hainge reveals the Philippe Grandrieux of choreography, improvisation, dynamic contrast, rhythm, force, cacophony, all that is intensely immersive and (thereby) inventive. Hainge’s exploration takes the form of an abyssal unfolding-of Grandrieux’s corpus, extending from film through television, video, photography, installation and critical reflection; of the speculative potential of film-theoretical concepts derived from the sonic in place of the haptic or visual; of the inventive and political possibilities of (all) cinemas of cruelty; and of the new conceptual lives enabled by the promise of closely reading for form.”

Eugenie Brinkema, author of The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

“Philippe Grandrieux is one of the very rare truly innovative filmmakers to have appeared in French cinema since Chantal Akerman and Philippe Garrel. Powerfully visual, haptic and sonic, his images strive to express all possible states of the body, from the most extreme to the most commonplace. This is what the book of Greg Hainge manages to show us forcefully through a methodology that stresses above all the sonic dimension which allows him to harmonize all of the components of a cinema of the Figure, in the sense that Gilles Deleuze has given to this word through the painting of Francis Bacon.”

Raymond Bellour, co-editor of Trafic, revue de cinema and Director of Research Emeritus, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France

Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (Bloomsbury Academic,  2013)

Listed as one of the top 10 non-fiction books of 2013 by the Baltimore City Paper.

Reviews:

“Through these diverging, yet sympathetic references, Hainge creates an imaginative and provocative rendering of the noise of now: a multimodal, multidisciplinary conception of the frame through which noise can be brought into focus.” (Lawrence English in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov 23, 2014, available online: http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/say-making-sense-noise)

“impressive in its scope and intriguing in its complexity.”(Arild Fetveit in Screen, 55.3, Autumn 2014.)

“the breadth of reference is impressive and, as much as anything else, the book is a useful demonstration for the neophyte of how rapidly the academic fields of sound studies, noise studies and experimental music studies have grown over the past decade. Hainge’s commanding oversight of these adjoining fields is striking.” (Douglas Morrey in Modern and Contemporary France, 2014.)

“Hainge’s book is sweeping and difficult, but is a fine example not only of the author’s provocative thinking, but also of how far sound studies has come in such a short time.” (Nicholas C. Laudadio in Journal of Popular Music Studies, 27.2, 2015.)

“The originality of Hainge’s work is in its philosophical method. [… H]is disciplinary training equips him to make insightful incursions into the various philosophical arguments that coalesce around the operations of noise. […] Traversing many rich and wide-ranging topics, his book moves beyond the potential traps of falling into truisms, offering a highly nuanced reading of noise in all its materializations”. (Sally Macarthur in Musicology Australia, 35.2, 2013.)

Upon such highly contested ground, Hainge’s revised ontology of noise offers a novel and provocative intervention. Despite some personal reservations in regard to the book’s style, it is a worthy adversary of noise’s ongoing essentialism. (John Scannell in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 2014.)

“What makes his book a more interesting study than many of the other ‘ontologies’ currently on offer is that, rather than promulgating a return to (low-grade phantasy) objects, Hainge focuses on the anti-object par excellence, the nothing that is noise.” (Justin Clemens in Cultural Studies Review, 20, 2014.)

“[Hainge’s] unusual idea of noise utilises scientific ideas like almost no other cultural analysis on offer today. (Gerald Keaney in Philosophict, 3, 2015.)

Endorsements:

“We all know noise is there, but Hainge finds it everywhere. Love it, hate it, damp it, make it, even tame it into art-but escape it? Never. For noise, as Hainge shows, is not mere sound; rather, it names the ontological impedance and affordance of all relations in our emergent cosmos. Read this remarkably stimulating, wide-ranging, original book and you’ll never hear or think of noise the same again.” (Ronald Bogue, Distinguished Research Professor, Comparative Literature Department, University Of Georgia)

“Skillfully traversing experimental music, media studies, existential literature, horror films, contemporary philosophy and digital culture, among other subjects, Greg Hainge carefully unpacks the topic of noise to expose its deep complexity. His project to map an ontology of this elusive and pertinent topic raises the level precisely on why noise matters, and finally lends to identifying noise as an expansive and vibrant materiality.” (Brandon Labelle, Professor, Bergen Academy Of Art And Design, Norway, And Author Of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture And Everyday Life And Background Noise: Perspectives On Sound Art)

“In the wave of the current resurgence of both popular and scholarly interest in noise, Noise Matters blasts noise out of the realm of the purely sonic and into much stranger and more unexpected territory. From its opening manifesto on noise as essentially a question of the movement and vibration of both material and immaterial bodies, Hainge is just as at home dealing with the noise in Sartre’s Nausea as he is with the cinema of David Lynch or the noise music of Merzbow. In all of these spheres, controversial claims are made and arguments undertaken that present noise in terms and genealogies other than the cliches about modernist noise that many of both its proponents and detractors would have us believe, ultimately constituting a form of vital noise in, and in relation to, contemporary noise studies and surrounding fields.” (Dr Michael Goddard, University Of Salford, UK And Co-Editor Of Reverberations And Resonances)

“In Noise Matters, we are brought into a world of perceptual yet often hidden noise: noise arises, noise comes to be, noise infiltrates all. Hainge’s skill is to trace the filaments of noise into their material expressions, traversing film, fiction, philosophy, music, machinery, digital and analogue.” (Paul Hegarty, Author Of Noise/Music And Co-Author Of Beyond And Before: Progressive Rock Since The 1960s)

Capitalism and Schizophrenia in the Later Novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline: d’un … l’autre (Peter Lang, 2001)

Foreword by Professor Nicholas Hewitt: 

This excellent book is an important contribution to our understanding of Céline’s writing from a psychoanalytic perspective. Céline’s concern with madness in his writing is one of the major features of his work, and one which has been consistently recognised by his critics. In fact, Céline’s “madness” takes two forms, one clinical and covering a wide range of psychological symptoms, and the other aesthetic and stylistic, operating in the domain of hallucination and dream and often expressed through the means of “délire”.

His professional interest in psychology is well-documented. The correspondence with Cillie Pam in the 1930s, following his visit to Vienna in 1933, when he met a number of Viennese (and Jewish) psychoanalysts, demonstrates an above average knowledge of Freud’s work and refers specifically to the essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, of 1916. At the same time, by 1936 and the publication of Bagatelles pour un massacre, Céline, through his narrator Ferdinand, is at pains to distance himself from Freud and invokes instead a non-Freudian interpretation of dreams, embodied in Léon Daudet’s Le Rêve éveillé, of 1926.

Similarly, in Céline’s fiction the interest in psychological abnor­mality is present right from the beginning. In the long essay La Quinine en thérapeutique, of 1926, Dr Destouches recounts the strange case of the obsessive and Molièresque Dr Bazire, who is so convinced of the healing properties of quinine that, when it fails to effect an immediate cure on his own ailment, proceeds to increase the dose until he dies. Similarly, Céline’s doctoral thesis on Semmelweis fictionalises the career of the Hungarian scientist, signified by the inversion of the name Ignace-Fulop to Philippe-Ignace, by turning him, literally, into a madman. This con­cern with abnormal psychology continues into the fiction signed under the name of Céline: Voyage au bout de la nuit can not merely be interpreted as a dream and hallucination, it deploys a first-person narrator who spends much of his time, literally, delirious: from the light-headedness on the café terrace which opens the novel, through the literal nervous collapse in Paris during the War, to the fever in the African jungle and the hallucinatory crossing of the Atlantic on a slave-galley. Much more obviously Freudian in inspiration, Mort à crédit is a chronicle of madness: the neurotic Auguste, the fanciful Courtial des Pereires, the despairing Nora, the retarded child Jonkind, and, finally, the narrator Ferdinand himself, whose response to the misery of his family-life and economic situation is autism. This classic psychoanalytical tale ends significantly enough with a classic nervous collapse and a retreat into non-being, or back to the womb, under Oncle Edouard’s pile of ‘pardessus’. That this is no resolution is conveyed by the madness and delirium still tracking the mature narrator. Finally, from Bagatelles pour un massacre onwards explores the use of a deranged first-person narrator whose madness is both exculpatory and blindingly insightful.

Unsurprisingly, Céline’s critics have paid considerable attention to this body of psychological material at the heart of his writing. As early as 1971, Albert Chesneau, in Psychocritique de Céline, saw Céline’s work as highly susceptible to analysis on the lines of Charles Maurron. Similarly, Nicole Debrie, Willy Szafran, Henri Godard and Marie-Christine Bellosta have explored in considerable detail Céline’s debt to Freud in particular and psychology in general.

A psychological or, indeed, psychoanalytical, approach to Céline’s work presents problems, however. In the first place, most psychological studies of Céline have tended at some time to be backed into a biographical or autobiographical interpretation, as if the neuroses port­rayed and worked out in the novels could only stem from a reality grounded in biography. Here, the letters from Céline to Joseph Garcin are highly revealing: not only do they confirm his extensive knowledge of Freud, but they also an exclusively writerly relish for pastiching the 1930s vogue for psychoanalytical fiction. Not that this should be taken totally seriously—no more so that his claims that Voyage was a merely a response to fashionable First World War fiction—but it does indicate that the gallery of psychological victims in Mort à crédit, along with the neurotic, and often mad, narrator, in full “délire”, from Bagatelles onwards is the result of conscious artifice and not emotional momentum.

Similarly, psychological studies of Céline have rarely succeeded in integrating the psychological features of the work to is socio-economic concerns. Mort à crédit, with its acute awareness of the importance of gold and its extensive reflection of the life of petit-bourgeois turn-of-the-century Paris, is one of France’s major historical novels. And that historical dimension is intimately connected to the neurosis of its characters and the autism of its child-narrator and the delirium of his mature counterpart. In this respect, Ferdinand must be seen as literally and metaphorically schizophrenic.

Here, and it is the great merit of this book, the work of Deleuze and Guattari provides a compelling framework for the analysis of Céline’s writing, in that it enables the psychological, the socio-economic and, above all, the stylistic, to be fully integrated into one reading. Dr Hainge, with meticulous care and highly intelligent insight, takes us closer than we have ever been before to the psychological centre of Céline’s work.

Appraisal by Professor Michael Tilby, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge: 

In this illuminating study, Hainge demonstrates that Céline’s post-war novels are not to be explained in terms of pathological obsessions redeemed by the brilliance of the author’s stylistic innovations. With the aid of an approach derived from the anti-interpretative practice of Deleuze and Guattari, he makes a compelling case for seeing the later Céline as the lucid author of a ‘schizophrenic’ text, concerned to monitor the success or failure of his own creative strategies. This is a major contribution to our understanding of a difficult, and frequently misunderstood, writer. “