Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction

How films help us understand the inevitable death of Earth and humanity

Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction brings cinema studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis into novel configuration around the concept of negative life, a sundering of human and nonhuman relations. Engaging a philosophical and cinematic corpus that rejects the pastoralism of “entanglement” or “enmeshment,” Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay counter ecocritical pieties and cut a new path for theory. They examine films by Julian Pölsler, Kelly Reichardt, Lee Isaac Chung, Mahesh Mathai, Paul Schrader, and others that exemplify the existential contradictions currently intensifying amid the sixth mass extinction. Each case study testifies formally and thematically to negative life as a structural condition of thought and film. Together, the cases reveal the unlivable dimension of life and art, where form, desire, and nonbelonging tarry with the future-oriented promise of ecostudies—where all that lives connects. Negative Life militates against this promise, showing that faith in connection is a dead end.