The disturbing and intense films of Lars von Trier are often dismissed as misogynist, misanthropic, or anti-humanist. This book, however, invites us to engage with his work to found a new feminist vision and discover what might be distinctively hopeful for the future of our fragile human condition. This exciting collection is fundamentally a gamble. Instead of repudiating Lars von Triers use of cliché and provocation, the contributors double down on the most controversial, problematic, and seemingly intractable figures in his corpus: the Woman, the Sacrifice, the Earth, Evil. Wresting his films from tired evaluations and defensive posture, the essays here approach these tropes and things with due seriousness to show how their intensification in von Triers works constitutes a mode of speculative potential, one that situates the cliché at the ground of cinematic experiment, the cinematic at the heart of political thinking, andmost boldlyvon Trier at the center of feminist theory.