A Time Becoming Another: Afterlives of the Seen, Figures of the Yet-to-Come

Abstract

This article examines the configuration of a new visual regime in the context of today’s “unquiet times,” characterized by geopolitical acceleration, the consolidation of alliances between technology, economy, and warfare, and the radical transformation of the public sphere. Drawing on the work of Georges Didi-Huberman, Hito Steyerl, and Éric Sadin, it analyzes how the proliferation of images produced and circulated through artificial intelligence and social media generates processes of cognitive saturation, neuro-excitation, and loss of traceability, ushering in an “age of indistinction” that facilitates the invisibilization of conflicts and subjectivities that fall outside the interests of post-liberal extractivist capitalism. Particular attention is paid to the reappropriation of cinematic and fantastic visual logics by populist leaders and techno-oligarchs, as well as to the rupture of the “civil contract of images,” exemplified by the reel of the “Riviera of Gaza.” Against this backdrop, the article argues for the centrality of cinema as a site of critical resistance and of the reappropriation of the future, capable of dismantling dominant regimes of visibility through montage, anachronism, and the production of zones of opacity and indecidability that restore a politics of the gaze and of relationality.