Negative Life

Offering a bracing theoretical corrective to ecocriticism’s emphasis on pedagogies of care and interconnection, this book brings cinema studies, queer theory and psychoanalysis into novel configuration around a concept inherent to yet critical of life: negative life, a sundering of the connections between human and nonhuman relations.

“ Negative Life is a major work of critical analysis whose challenge to the pastoralizing tendency of certain ecocritical theorists should have the paradoxical effect of enlivening the field.” —Lee Edelman, author of Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing

“Enormously inventive, polemical, and lucidly written.” —Jacques Khalip, author of Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar

Steven Swarbrick is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological
Poetics from Spenser to Milton.


Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an assistant professor of environmental humanities at York University. They are the author of Breathing Aesthetics .