Forthcoming

How is our vanishing world experienced and cathected into affective circuits of fear and enjoyment, mourning and resistance? To consider what Hannah Arendt calls Entweltlichung, or loss of world, this book turns to cinema as an alternate form of thinking (in) the present. Mundus immundus — a central figure in Augustinian theology — offers a key for addressing the clashes and entanglements between the two histories that emplot our catastrophic present: the annihilation, in real time, of a habitable planet, and the becoming-fascist of late-capitalist subjectivities as our way of coexisting with and of enjoying the world’s unworlding.

But rather than to industrial cinema’s apocalyptic end-tales and their grand allegories of collapse and resurgence of extractive capitalism and white supremacy, Andermann turns to the neo-regionalist cinemas of the Global South to study unworlding and its afterlives as an interruption or withdrawal of cinematic worldmaking, forcing viewers to “stay with the trouble.” In dialogue with films by Pedro Costa, Lucrecia Martel, Kléber Mendonça Filho, Laura Citarella, Flora Gomes, Lisandro Alonso, and Adirley Queirós, among others, Mundu Immundus inquires about disaster by invoking some of its most illustrious names: Capitalocene (the relationship of mutual devastation that subsumes bodies and environments), Negrocene (the racialized denial of world that has sustained capitalism since its origins), and Thanatocene (the imbrication between technologies of war and extraction, and of these with forms of spectacle and enjoyment founded on destructiveness). The book also explores the poetics and politics of afterlife — of survivance, re-existence, re-becoming Indigenous — and their manifestations in contemporary cinemas of re-enactment and re-performance.