[spectre] Ecocide and Inscription vol. 1: Black Ops. Petrolepathy, Escaped Slaves, Cinemacide - new open access book

[Gary Hall]

Open Humanities Press is delighted to announce the publication of Tom 
Cohen's Ecocide and Inscription vol. 1: Black Ops. Petrolepathy, Escaped 
Slaves, Cinemacide – A Tele-mnemonics for the After-Times.

Available open access and in colour print from:

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/black-ops/

Book description

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

Author Bio

Tom Cohen is Emeritus Professor of English and co-director of the 
Institute on Critical Climate Change at the University at Albany. He is 
the author of Anti-Mimesis From Plato to Hitchcock (Cambridge 1994), 
Ideology and Inscription: Cultural Studies after Benjamin, De Man, and 
Bahktin (Cambridge 1998), and Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies, vols. 1 & 2 
(UMinn 2005). His most recent titles, co-authored with Claire Colebrook 
and J. Hillis Miller, are Theory and the Disappearing Future (Routledge 
2011), and its companion volume, Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (OHP 
2016). He is also the editor of Derrida and the Humanities (Cambridge 
2003) and co-editor of Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of 
Theory (UMinn 2001).

Series

The book is published as part of the CCC2 Irreversibility series, edited 
by Tom Cohen and Claire 
Colebrook:https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/ccc2-irreversibility 


Sigi, Gary, David, Joanna

-- 
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University

Director of Open Humanities Press: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Blog: http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/

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