Yearning Through Form

Form is associated with ideas like order, stability, containment, and unity. In a context in which the enemies of those ideals--chaos, change, indistinction, deviance, decay--are projected onto the bodies of others, form can be used as an instrument of oppression and control. But form is also inescapable. In painting, in writing, in building lives together, we make and receive the world, our loves, our fears, and our desires through form. Yearning Through Form challenges the reduction of form to a metaphysical principle, focusing instead on how form is used in philosophy and in art to engage with change. In the face of the changes that have come with globalization and technological advancements on the one hand, and with increased freedoms for women, racial minorities, and queer persons, on the other, we have been inclined to respond by reifying the boundaries of old, recognizable shapes. In this book, Lexi Eikelboom moves beyond metaphysical theories to explore how uses of form in both art and philosophy speak to our human fears and desires about change. Tackling what formation--the idea of making ourselves--means in a world in which our fears and desires lead us to violently reinforce particular forms of social life at the expense of those who deviate from them, the book plunges the reader into the complex relationship between the individual form of the human being and the shapes, both compelling and constraining, through which that form is lived. Yearning Through Form offers a way of hanging onto form in all its iterations--metaphysical, artistic, social--while simultaneously grappling with the harms in which it is implicated. Philosophical accounts of form are treated as constructions alongside works of art, aimed at helping us to see our fears and desires more clearly. Form thus becomes a point of contact between philosophy and the arts, between the embodied and the speculative. The result of this approach is not a general theory of form but a particular yearning--for freedom, for contact, for equality--through various forms of 'form'.