A time of broken futures: biopolitical temporalities,postmemory and apocalyptic affect in Larissa Sansour’s In Vitro

Abstract

With a particular view to the workings of intergenerational time and postmemory within (and against) hegemonic power formations, Larissa Sansour’s sci-fi short film In Vitro (2019) examines the biopolitics of temporality under conditions of occupation. Starting from the premise of a post-apocalyptic Palestine, the film stages postmemory as a form of inversed futurity or speculative futurism that provides insight into the enduring repercussions of political world-breaking and world-making. In Vitro thereby highlights the affective operations of political violence by tapping into a wider biopolitical project of feeling, but it also draws attention to the role of technological mediation though narrative, memory and visual culture in maintaining, and also resisting, specific regimes of control. Adding to a discussion about the biopolitics of feeling and temporality more broadly by introducing the notion of apocalyptic affect, the author demonstrates that the film’s poignant illustration of displacement, trauma and nostalgia identifies the temporal unfolding that crafts exclusionary spaces and walled lives, while also attempting a politically vital piecing together of intergenerational time. In Vitro’s invocation of mnemonic futurity thus provides an emotional and temporal politics of worlding that reanimates the present as presence. Ultimately, such forms of speculative worlding provide insight into how power and violence organize space, temporality and feeling towards taken-for-granted forms of political embodiment that are central to the biopolitical project, but they also matter politically precisely because they challenge the choreography of hegemonic experience in favour of complicating configurations of imaginative futurity.