Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction

by Steven Swarbrick, Jean-Thomas Tremblay

Overview

How films help us understand the inevitable death of Earth and humanity

Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction brings cinema studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis into novel configuration around the concept of negative life, a sundering of human and nonhuman relations. Engaging a philosophical and cinematic corpus that rejects the pastoralism of “entanglement” or “enmeshment,” Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay counter ecocritical pieties and cut a new path for theory. They examine films by Julian Pölsler, Kelly Reichardt, Lee Isaac Chung, Mahesh Mathai, Paul Schrader, and others that exemplify the existential contradictions currently intensifying amid the sixth mass extinction. Each case study testifies formally and thematically to negative life as a structural condition of thought and film. Together, the cases reveal the unlivable dimension of life and art, where form, desire, and nonbelonging tarry with the future-oriented promise of ecostudies—where all that lives connects. Negative Life militates against this promise, showing that faith in connection is a dead end.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810147195
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2024
Series:	Superimpositions
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

STEVEN SWARBRICK is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological
Poetics from Spenser to Milton.

JEAN-THOMAS TREMBLAY is an assistant professor of environmental humanities at York University. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction Ecocriticism against The Wall 
Chapter 1 First Cow at the End of the World 
Interlude The Horror of Entanglement I: Annihilation, In the Earth
Chapter 2 Familiar Afterlives in Minari and Bhopal Express
Interlude The Horror of Entanglement II: Antichrist, Lamb, X
Chapter 3 The Queer Impossibility of First Reformed
Acknowledgments
Notes
References 
Illustration Credits 
Index

Editorial Reviews

​“In their generative call to theorise, and make room for, the afterlives of entanglement, Swarbrick and Tremblay . . . provide a conception of the human subject as much more subdued and fractured, and whose incoherence and contradictions cannot necessarily be easily resolved through more-than-human entanglement . . . This work is never simply an intellectual exercise in theoretical development, but a timely invitation to come to terms with life's intensifying contradictions in times of climate emergencies.” —cultural geographies

“Negative Life is a major work of critical analysis whose challenge to the pastoralizing tendency of certain ecocritical theorists should have the paradoxical effect of enlivening the field.” —Lee Edelman, author of Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing 

"Negative Life is both an essential critique of ecological affirmation in an age of extinction and an exciting foray into some of the edgiest cinema of our time. Written with a lucidity and energy that makes the dire world of extinction and its denial engagingly readable, this is a must-read for anyone working in the environmental humanities." —Claire Colebrook, author of Who Would You Kill to Save the World?

“Enormously inventive, polemical, and lucidly written.” —Jacques Khalip, author of Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar  

From the Publisher