The Cinematic Anthropocene and the Future Politics of Killing

Bibliographic Data

ID21720401
AuthorsGregers Andersen (0000-0003-0018-0905, Aalborg University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume26
Issue3
Pages394-410
Publication date2022-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFilm-Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1466-4615 • E-ISSN: 1466-4615
PublisherEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3366/film.2022.0207
OpenAlexW4295541367
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited5

This article considers two films, Elysium (Neil Bloomkamp, 2013) and What Happened to Monday (Tommy Wirkola, 2017), in order to demonstrate that they foreshadow a paradigmatic shift in the relationship between biopolitics and thanatopolitics. According to Michel Foucault, and later Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, it is chiefly the association of humans with biological danger that causes biopolitics to mutate into thanatopolitics. However, in these two films, humans are construed as an ecological danger that prompt thanatopolitics. They depict futures in which the regimes in power act on ecological threats by brutally micromanaging and killing members of their populations. In this the films unveil how the idea of sustainability as equilibrium can never benefit all, but must always leave some human beings out, either by abandoning them to die or by actively killing them. This is important because it brings to light the risk that the Anthropocene could engender regimes that will kill on different grounds than regimes have in the past

Anthropocene · Environmental ethics · Political science · Politics · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy

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