Towards the end of this diverting book, Brian Dillon recalls the moment when, as a graduate student, he delivered a paper to a roomful of academics. His subject was an essay written in 1930 by Siegfried Kracauer in which Kracauer describes a photograph of a film actress standing outside the Hotel Excelsior on the Venice Lido. Dillon attempted to link the image with multiple other ‘photographic moments in fiction, poetry and criticism’, only to be challenged by a junior academic: ‘Where were my judgements and distinctions? Where was history – no, historicity?’

With this tale, Dillon anticipates – and gently refutes – any equivalent objections to this book. He conceives of ‘affinity’ as pointing to a ‘realm of the unthought, unthinkable, something unkillable by attitudes or arguments’. If this at first seems ethereal – evasive, even – Dillon succeeds in constructing such a realm out of fragments.

Affinities takes the form of multiple short essays, interspersed with periodic reflections on the concept of affinity per se. The essays are arranged according to the date or period of the main subject in each case: ‘chronology was random enough for my needs.’ And so a chapter on the proto-modernist photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron is followed by a study of drawings in which the English physician Hubert Airy (1838–1903) attempted to depict scintillating scotomas, the phantasms that appear to sufferers of migraines. Dillon shifts from the memory of his own first affliction as a schoolboy in Dublin (he became aware one day of a bewildering absence in his field of vision) to Airy’s meticulous illustration of ten serrated apparitions on a dark background, each – in the scientist’s words – ‘like a fortified town with bastions all around it’. The personal interlocks with the historical, and familiar subjects (Dillon’s tastes are never quite ‘mainstream’) alternate with apparently more recondite ones.

Early on, Dillon points to theorists and academics who have grappled with ideas of affinity – among them Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin and the art historians Alexander Nagel and Christopher S Wood. He discusses Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809), in which erotic dynamics form an allegory – or an extension – of chemical affinities. But as the book unfolds, it becomes clear that his desire is to contemplate rather than to theorise.

We move, for instance, from a reflection on Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas of the 1920s to the hermaphroditic sea snails captured in a 1978 documentary by Jean Painlevé. Dillon points out that the documentary features a transient clip of Loie Fuller, the ‘serpentine’ dancer who is the focus of an earlier chapter, famed for her deployment of light and billowing material. Such correspondences flicker out across the book. Elsewhere a photograph of Francesca Woodman crawling into a cupboard brings to mind Claude Cahun’s presentation of herself in a similar position.

Other lines of continuity run through the book, affording a sense of structure. As Dillon acknowledges, ‘there is usually some connection to optical technologies, some new way of seeing or framing the world’, in his affinities. Film and photography dominate, and some two thirds of the subject matter belongs to the 20th century.

Dillon’s concern is with the feelings that looking elicits. Writing of Andy Warhol’s little-known 1966 work Outer and Inner Space, a double-screen film installation in which Edie Sedgwick confronts her own visage, he notes that only a single phrase is audible amid the sonic blur: ‘Don’t you feel like…’ This captures the sensibility of much of his own project. A memorable chapter deals with the nostalgic allure of Granada’s 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. He recalls how, as a teenager, the story conjured a vision of ‘aristocracy as a protective fantasy against social and academic anxiety’. Decades later, the novel and its adaptation retain their power to evoke ‘a beautifully lit prison’. As ever, the subject prompts an inward turn, casting light through the author’s memory and imagination. 

There is a restrained aestheticism in this. At one point, Dillon quotes Walter Pater’s famous contention that ‘in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is’. Meaning is a matter of emotion and inference, not a hard kernel to be extracted. Not that Dillon is impervious to political realities or ideological pressures. Of a photograph by William Eggleston showing the artist’s uncle with his black chauffeur, he observes: ‘The whole is a study in connection, identification, hierarchy and disparity, and it is filled with reminders of race and class.’ But largely the book remains free from didactic intent.

Many of Dillon’s ideas take the form of questions (‘is affinity a formality or a feeling, a physical state or a psychic one?’). He is acutely conscious of what it means to align oneself with the art and lives of others. Two late chapters address, in melancholic and humorous style, his mother’s turn to charismatic Catholicism and his aunt’s endless feuds with neighbours. From his aunt’s obsessive surveillance of CCTV monitors, he pivots to the compelling suggestion that such forms of ‘habitual, and even morbid attention to the world … don’t merely preclude self-examination or disallow self-knowledge, but rather stand in for a close look at our lives’.

Here and at many points in the book, Dillon resists – by means of laconic precision – any lapse into solipsism or anecdote. Only occasionally are there longueurs, as when he fastidiously describes the contents of videos by Charles and Ray Eames, which probably have to be seen to make much sense. At other moments, he succeeds in capturing the resistance of certain images or characters to elucidation. The blurry, the obscure, the fugitive qualities of things are deftly described – from the ‘abstract blurs’ of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs to Claude Cahun’s portraits of herself, a strange duality of play-acting and authenticity.