ABSTRACT
In this article I suggest that fantasies of apocalypse are both a product and a producer of our current epoch-the Anthropocene-and that they also take us beyond this epoch by confronting what might be to come. I contend that “Anthropocene apocalypse” reveals how we have always been more-than-human in ways at once both geological and biological, ways through which earth forces have been folded within us. Against the dominant grain in social science and drawing on recent work in ecocriticism, I offer a hopeful reading of apocalypse. If contemporary apocalypse emerges as a nightmare of the Anthropocene’s socioecological risks, it also produces something over and above anxiety-something escapes, and such excesses might be mined for their transformative kind of feeling, not just criticized for their politically regressive negativity. The article therefore focuses on apocalyptic cinema, examining how film offers us a way of measuring our sensitivity to the Earth (rather than measuring the Earth’s sensitivity to human activities). The article analyzes one avant-garde, critically acclaimed film: The Turin Horse (2011), directed by Bela Tarr. Tarr’s film represents a particular kind of apocalyptic vision: uncompromising, difficult, culminating in cosmic emptiness that is implied but not presented. It is far from a Hollywood blockbuster. The film nonetheless distills into an intense form many anxieties of Anthropocene apocalypse, making it a suitable vehicle through which to explore the cultural politics of how we are sensitized to the Earth.
