Department of Humanities Professor Jean-Thomas Tremblay has co-authored a new book, titled Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024), which brings film studies, queer theory and psychoanalysis into novel configuration. 

The book makes a tripartite argument; first, that life is held together by contradictions which the contemporary climate crisis aggravates; second, that the thinkers tending to ecological existence have too often smoothed over its paradoxes; and third, that aesthetic form, particularly cinematic form, exposes what structures life’s contradictions. Tremblay and co-author Steven Swarbrick offer fresh perspectives that challenge the traditional ecocritical view whereby “entanglements” or “enmeshments” offer a satisfactory solution to extinction. 

Professor Tremblay offers, “Reviewers and endorsers, including Lee Edelman, Claire Colebrook and Jacques Khalip, have emphasized the polemical nature of Negative Life. Steven and I certainly hope that readers will be provoked and that the book will inspire them to rethink some of the assumptions that inform their encounters with representations of damaged ecologies. Readers and endorsers have also remarked on the book’s irreverent and humourous tone. It’s a theoretically sophisticated text, but certainly not a dour one.”  

Negative Life appears in the Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image series, edited by University of Toronto Professor Brian Price. The book includes readings of works by such filmmakers as Julian Pölsler, Kelly Reichardt, Lee Isaac Chung, Mahesh Mathai and Paul Schrader. Each case study testifies formally and thematically to negative life—a sundering of human and nonhuman relations—as a structural condition of thought and film. 

Professor Tremblay is an associate professor of Environmental Humanities and the director of the graduate program in Social and Political Thought. His interdisciplinary research and teaching span the environmental humanities, sexuality studies and literary studies and film studies, and concentrate on the overlapping environmental, economic and political crises of the 1970s to the present while recovering the longer histories of nature writing and the life sciences. 

For more information or to secure a copy of Professor Tremblay’s new book, visit  Northwestern University Press. Use coupon code NUP2024 for a 25% discount.