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/
Latest:
Book: Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative
Intelligence: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/
Video: 'Liquidate AI Art', Computer Arts Society:
https://www.bcs.org/events-calendar/2025/october/webinar-liquidate-ai-art
Talk: 'The Independent Intellectual vs Posting Zero and the Dead Internet':
http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/12/2/the-independent-intellectual-vs-posting-zero-and-the-dead-in.html
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