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

<p>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 videoscapes, and looming accelerations of the climate vortex.</p>