Mundus immundus: Unworlding, Afterlife, and the Cinema

Mundus Immundus asks how cinema becomes a mode of thinking where words fail us. Immundus is what ensues on the collapse of networks of reciprocity that make up the "world" as extended semiosis and as habitable environment. At the same time, this book argues, it also describes certain forms of withdrawal of cinematic worldmaking, forcing us to experience and inhabit the space and time of disaster's afterlife. In dialogue with films by Pedro Costa, Lucrecia Martel, Kléber Mendonça Filho, Laura Citarella, Flora Gomes, Lisandro Alonso, and Adirley Queirós, among others, Mundus 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). But it 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.