Forthcoming

This groundbreaking study explores the concept of “petrolepathy” - a mode of reading attuned to the era of climate chaos and ecocide. Examining works by Faulkner, Morrison, and Hitchcock, among others, 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). These sketches continue and fill in what Timothy Clark has named an “inhumanist school” at the margins of Anthropocene and techno-deconstructive clustering, whose primary import is to assume no practice or critical posture is not part of the current vortex. From this, the imputation of climate “comedy” to the current modes of robo-denialism, deferments, and digital capture platform hyper-material reading modes stripped of the hermeneutic relapse and mimetic coding that makes “Anthropos the Interpreter” a core agent of guaranteed climate extinction events unfolding. 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 - these sketches track 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.