Ecocide and Inscription 1: Black Ops: Petrolepathy, Escaped Slaves, Cinemacide - A Tele-mnemonics for the After-Times

• CCC2 The Nethercene
• Published: forthcoming
• ISBN: 978-1-78542-147-1
• PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-146-4

Forthcoming

Examining works by Faulkner, Morrison, and Hitchcock, among others, Tom Cohen traces a “hyper-blackness” that exceeds racial binaries and links to the viscous materiality of oil. He argues that this blackness before face or figuration offers a way to rupture the “Anthropocene” spell and its attendant anaesthesias. By tracking inscriptions that melt back into a prefigural domain, Cohen outlines a literary structure of climate change itself, one that undoes conventional notions of meaning, reference, and human exceptionalism. This daring work proposes new tele-mnemonic models for reading in the “After-times” – an era when tipping points have passed and cascade effects accelerate, unacknowledged. Blending literary analysis, philosophy, and environmental thought, it charts a path beyond mourning or denial toward a radical reconfiguration of thought itself in the face of planetary mutation that does not promise a good outcome (indeed, the “promise” is jettisoned). Taken as a contribution to Nethercene reading expeditions as a subset of Irreversibilities – a perspective that is transgenerational and temporally fluid, in radical transition, and inter-speciesist – Cohen tracks where liquefied figures of inscription direct our anthropomorphic fables and remain to confront as we leave the “Anthropocene Talk” bubble as a distraction. These “inhumanist” scans return to the interventionist prospect of reading technics at the point of the rise of LLM “A.I.” modes – seeing a direct line from the cave paintings and proto-writing through cinema, the algorithmic take over of the screen, mutations of literacies toward vidioscapes, and looming accelerations of the climate vortex.

With Black Ops, Tom Cohen enters the war over the visibility or occlusion of oil amidst the fossil-fueled crackup of the Holocene, the Earth-system configuration that allowed for what was called civilization. That crackup, Cohen incisively argues, entangles with received modes of sense-making. Cohen tracks how select literary, cinematic, and photographic artifacts screen yet undercut legacy semantic orders, exposing signifying technics for on-the-climate-charnel-ground reengineering. Detailing hermeneutic, mnemonic, and political tipping points that put the human in the rearview mirror (species split, anyone?), Ecocide and Inscription 1, Black Ops orients readers toward the catastrophic now of climate chaos, about which Cohen’s disconcertingly safe wager is that the only way out is an interminable, yet all-too-terminant, way through.

Robert Savino Oventile, author of Impossible Reading: Idolatry and Diversity in Literature and coauthor (with Sandy Florian) of Sophia Lethe Talks Doxodox Down