This chapter turns to consensual and dissensualmodes of separation to illustrate how the COVID-19pandemic has turned the present into a time ofintense separation, one of which is between thosebodies marked as essential versus non-essential,those that have ‘pre-existing conditions’ andthose without, and those located in precariouszones of abandonment, congestion, and containment,and those that, owing to prevailing economicdistancing and apartness, can practice a life ofsocial distancing. These precarious lives arerendered in intimate portraits and scenarios inEdna O’Brien’s novel The Little Red Chairs (amedia genre that sees the world more patiently andin a more socially contextualized way than mostnews media) and Stephen Frears’s film Dirty PrettyThings (2002). With these aesthetic readings ofprecarious migrant lives in London, we look atmoments of solidarity among exploitable “nightpeople” who work illegally in the hospitalityindustry. Ultimately, our reflections on aestheticseparation/separation aesthetics in the wake ofthe pandemic help map the dynamics ofvisibility/invisibility, community/immunity,hospitality/hostility that the contemporarypolitics of the pandemic amplifies.

This chapter and the images that accompany itpays special attention to the workings of ‘mimeticviolence’ and emphasizes what we can learn byexamining the COVID-19 pandemic’s transversalityby comparing, combining, and contrasting it withother sublimes. Ultimately, the chapter examinesthe early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic’stransversality by comparing, combining, andcontrasting it with the racial, nuclear, andapocalyptic sublimes.

This chapter turns to the very culture ofmiddle-class households to illustrate how thecontemporary globalizing world has unleashed newflows of migrant labor, among which are youngwomen working in homes abroad. With a focus onsubaltern characters, investigations in thischapter treat the way their articulation of theirprecarity can become political critique. Itfocuses on a critical locus of enunciationsupplied by the conditions of migrant femaledomestic workers as articulated not inethnographic work that solicits their actualvoices, but through a focus on literary andcinematic texts in which the female protagonistscompare domestic servitude to colonialism (in thecase of Ousmane Sembène’s film Black Girl) and towar crimes (in the case of Zadie Smith’s story,“The Embassy of Cambodia”). Mediated with somethoughts from Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the SubalternSpeak?” and Mahasweta Devi’s short story “TheBreast-giver”, we also reflect on the ethicalsignificance of aesthetic interruptions throughother genres as illustrated by our reading ofimages from Ramiro Gomez’s Happy Hills paintingand cardboard-cutting series. In effect, theartistic texts we analyze raise an importantethico-political question regarding the effect ofcapitalist modernization on ethical and domesticlife, while provoking us to recognize the ethicalweight of proximate and distant others.

This chapter offers extended ruminations on apocalypticsublimes by exploring the convergence of racial,nuclear, and pandemic sublimes. Treating theapocalypse in terms of its Greek meaning(apokalupto), we compose a literary and cinematicmontage that addresses the pandemic “event” byincorporating critical apocalyptic thinking whichopens toward an uncertain future. To make sense ofsome of the apocalyptic responses to a renewed senseof the fragility of life in the wake of nuclear,racial, and pandemic sublimes, we read two IngmarBergman films (Winter Light and The Seventh Seal)alongside a series of philosophical texts thatillustrate the way the arts can reveal and unsettledeeply held commitments by creating encounters amongdiverse sense-making practices that pre-exist thepandemic and other events.

Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s pensée dutremblement (a quakeful, or tremulous, thinking)and Anna Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World,the brief Coda to the book present a series ofrefrains on aesthetics, precarity, and thenumerous problems that precariousness poses forethico-political comprehension.

By charting the tension between reasons of stateand justice, as well as the way the global justicedispositif involves a wide variety ofprotagonists, some of whose practices seem to beheterogeneous to the international justice regime,this chapter examines the valuation practices,overlapping cartographies, regimes ofcalculability, secrecy, and colonial specters thatemerge as one investigates the subplots and shadowworlds behind the prosecution of crimes againsthumanity. Through a reading of Mathias Énard’snovel Zone, where the author stages a drama aboutjustice that effectively engages grammatical andtheatrical framing of how to approach the “idea”(in this case) of justice, the chapter mapstruth-seeking and truth-concealing practices thatmove and traverse the “earth.” Our analysis thenturns to the protagonists and challengingrelations of intimacy exposed in Hugo Blick’sBlack Earth Rising (2018), a Netflix series inwhich the main protagonist, the legal investigatorand Rwanda genocide survivor Kate Ashby (MichaelaCoel), runs into a world of secrecy, colonialspecters, talionic laws (an eye for an eye), andmanhunting. These encounters interrupt her senseof self, truth, family, justice, and even her“idea of Africa,” thus leading her on a quest thatinvolves burrowing for justice in ways thatinvolve unburying memories, the dead, and aspectral past.

This chapter turns to the varied passages of thesporting body in the first season of MatthieuDonck’s Netflix series The Break (La Trêve) andthe routes, connections, and shadow-worlds itreveals. To situate the implications of themigratory flow of bodies and knowledges, we turnto cinematic texts that supply an imagery of theflow of African bodies and the forces that setthem in motion, subjecting them to various formsof valuation, speculation, and pain. This isprimarily achieved through a reading of Africansoccerscapes and ethnoscapes in Gerardo Olivares2007 film, 14 Kilómetros and AbderrahmaneSissako’s film Timbuktu (2014). The chapterillustrates how different investigativeapparatuses enable a series of epistemological andaesthetic breaks that reveal, conceal, orfacilitate the trans-continental speculation andrecruitment of the ‘superfluous’ Black sportingbody and the precarity and desire that accompaniesthe dynamics of their subsequent use, abuse, and‘retirement.’

This chapter combines disparate discursive spaces ofbreathlessness (e.g., from industrial pollution,colonialism, and nuclear radiation) that have usemphasizing the precarities and struggles for breaththat exist within a planetary, phenomenological, andhistorical respirationscape whose immensity evokesnotions of the sublime as it mounts a challenge tocomprehension. To illustrate these convergences, thechapter begins with a reading of the link betweenbreathing and vitality in Clarice Lispector’s novelA Breath of Life, Philip K. Dick’s 1969 sciencefiction novel Ubik and Indra Sinha’s environmentalpicaresque novel Animal’s People (2007) so as toillustrate how corporate power, and racializedspaces of breathlessness, are evidence of bothspectacular and the more spectral forms of slowviolence.