In this collection of essays, the Renaissance is located at the conceptual threshold of the Anthropocene. In French Studies, canonical authors express fears about the future of the planet that, while often set in a millenarian frame, anticipate or chime with ours. In the late chapters of the Quart Livre, the world under the ugly regime of the well-named Messer Gaster is going to seed. In the thick of the Wars of Religion, Ronsard decries the violence that fellow subjects have done both to the Americas and the forests of his homeland. In a celebrated passage of ‘Des coches’, following Lucretius, Montaigne writes tersely and typologically, ‘[l]’univers tombera en paralisie; l’un membre sera perclus, l’autre en vigueur. Bien crains-je que nous aurons bien fort hasté sa declinaison et sa ruyne par nostre contagion’ (‘the universe will fall into paralysis; one member will be shriveled, the other vigorous. I daresay that we will have strongly hastened its decline and ruin by our contagion’). For Montaigne, as if they belonged to a theatrum mundi or world-theatre, rampant depredation and ecological ruin were signs of the end of the world he had known.

Such was the context from which Olivier de Serres (1539–1619) emerged to be read here as a thinker concerned with human reshaping of the planet.

Composed and written with force and conviction, the essays in this collection attest to the continued pertinence and promise of film theory. Born of cinema itself, whether in view of the Lumiere Brothers's Workers Exiting a Factory or Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, theory begs us to consider how and why we commit ourselves to study cinema and visual media. And for what ends: examining at a gamut of cinemas from the origins of the seventh art to the digital age, each of the authors in the pages above discerns issues that make theory contemporary. Mindful of film history, they show how the moving image remains a compelling forum for dialogue and exchange over issues of a first magnitude: what it means to live in a world that by and large we experience on screens or through moving images; but also, on how visual media might shape the future of cognition as such. The authors remind us that with theory, we are enabled to consider the force and fragility of cinema: in what ways the medium is endowed with uncanny power and yet, how ephemeral and passing it can be. Demonstrating that theory rescues cinema from itself without the promise of redemption, the authors employ a variety of concepts and methods that turn films into unsettling critical objects.

At the risk of repeating what Hunter Vaughan notes cogently in the Preface, and what in different ways the authors have shown in their contributions: the foundations of theory are strong, and the directions it is taking bear untold promise. Several major of lines of inquiry draw their way through the sum of the essays. First, as historians of the present are quick to remind us, since 2007, following the implementation of the cell phone and the iPad, the advent of Facebook and the growth of the internet, we live in the world in ways inalterably other than those we had known even a decade ago. We can posit that the great tradition of ‘going to the movies’ is long gone and that the movie palace is now either a museum or a photographic image.

Apparatus theory claims to study the “machineries” of the seventh art. Dealing not so much with cameras, projectors, film stock, the design of iPads, editing programs and applications than the relations that viewers sustain with the medium, it lays stress on psychic and social mechanisms that shape the experience of cinema. Considered in a broad sense, it accounts for the power that film holds in respect to the world in which it operates or is deployed. Adepts of apparatus theory consider how cinema is viewed, what it does to the imagination, and in what ways it gets consumed, remembered, classified and even forgotten. For enthusiasts of cinema trained in psychoanalysis, apparatus is understood as a complex process of libidinal exchange between the perceiving spectator and the various screens on which moving images are perceived and registered, which include both the surfaces on which films are projected and the psychic devices that sift the impressions we gather from the experience of viewing a film. For the sociologist and historian of the seventh art, apparatus can refer to a broadly defined economic sphere in which of film is construed to play a significant role in the construction, management and practice of everyday life, in short, as a mechanism having purchase on the lives and minds of collective groups of moviegoers. For those who would call themselves “ordinary” or gardenvariety viewers of cinema, apparatus theory deals with how enthusiasts and cinephiles control, mediate or even politicize their passion for film.

For the sake of brevity it can be said, grosso modo, that in its purview of the mental economies that drive the medium the theory gives rise, first, to a critical appreciation of cinema and, second, to a creative doubt prompting us to be aware of why and wherefore cinema functions in our sentient lives.

The contexts in which the idea of apparatus takes shape tell much about what it was, how it has evolved and, perhaps, where it is and how it works today. Officially born in France in the turmoil and conflict of May 1968, it reflected on the political and aesthetic virtues of theory — in other words, on how film, which otherwise belonged to the industry of capital, could be interpreted to acquire political and philosophical mettle enough to work contrary to consumerism.

Susan Suleiman's Risking Who One Is is the creation of an existential warrior. Throughout, the author reminds us that from birth we are what we are and not much more. To set ourselves in relation with our environs, to become who we are, we must push ourselves to the limits of our intellectual and physical experience. Such are the risks she has taken in Le Roman à thèse, ou l'autorité fictive (1983) and more so in the prismatic autobiography Budapest Diary: Searching for the Motherbook (1996); no less, of late, in the tenor of Crises of Memory (2006) and other works on writers born in the wake of the death camps; in the new approach she takes to literary history in French Global, co-edited with Christie McDonald (2010), as its title suggests, that extends the borders of the current state of French studies. Of these, in its introspective style, the Motherbook best tells its readers that doing literary history or criticism involves taking creative risks—calling ourselves in question, taking a remove from the persons we imagine ourselves to be in our daily lives, and even in working against ourselves in order to find a creative drive in alienation. Readers infallibly find in the writing what elsewhere anthropologist Marc Augé calls ‘an ethnology of self,’ which he implies to be that moment when a subject risks looking at itself from afar, when it begs itself to wonder ‘who’ or ‘what’ it is and, in the best and most intransitive sense, it begins to become.

In a recent essay, Augé asks himself what it means to age and how reflection on the passage of time causes him to find in myriad memory-images a paradox of proximity and distance—the very matter with which the ethnologist must contend at all times. Contrary to the girth of Simone de Beauvoir's monumental La vieillesse, his slim monograph begins with an extensive description of his cat. As time passes he recalls how the kitten had cavorted, as Montaigne had said of his own errant writing, à sauts et à gambades, jumping high onto a dresser whence it could look over the author's world below.