Bearing witness to ecological excommunication: reflections on oil in Salgado and Herzog through Cyclonopedia

Abstract

How do the inhuman forces of ecology relate to human subjectivities in contemporary materialist philosophy? This article attempts to tackle this question from the perspective of a particular instantiation of one of these forces: oil as it appears in Werner Herzog’s documentary-film Lessons of Darkness and Sebastião Salgado’s photographic series Kuwait: A Desert on Fire. It does so through the lens of Reza Negarestani’s theory-fiction Cyclonopedia, which offers a number of conceptual avenues to rethink morethan-human entanglements. Arguing for the possibility of considering both of these visual works as paradoxical mediations of a principle of ecological excommunication, this article then interrogates the political potentialities of an ecology predicated on incommensurability, anonymity, and complicity between human and inhuman forces, attempting to bridge recent debates on materialist ecology and revolutionary politics.