Emma Kauffman
Part One: The Carceral Logic of Western Thought
Such a caring for death,
an awakening that keeps vigil over death,
a conscience that looks death in the face,
is another name for freedom.
-Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death
Once only a latent figure, tucked away neatly in the depths of our imagination, human extinction is no longer a future possibility; it is here and it is now. The earth will outlive humanity; most scientists (natural and social) agree on this fundamental point. What continues to remain unanswered, however, is when this will happen, and under what conditions ought we live, in the meantime. Perhaps this is because the possibility of human extinction is both absurdly simple to grasp – the earth will outlive humanity – and as impossible today as extinguishing the sun – human immortality continues to be one of our longest standing fantasies. But, is it not worth wondering if we should really be continuing this self-maintenance in an era of climate catastrophe? If ‘sex’ or ‘life’, as Michel Foucault demonstrates in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, is what continues to constitute this moment of politics and power, then, I would like to consider a future by taking death seriously. Through radically (re)imagining life and death, outside the bounds of what is, my intention is to both complicate and clarify the stakes and possibilities of human extinction.
In the age of human extinction, new ideas that extend far passed what climate science and state/military policies have to offer are urgently needed. Luckily, theory has always been a generator for new ideas, as it is both descriptive of our world and speculative, in that it conjures up ways to think outside the bounds of this world.[1] Since its inception, theory has sought new worlds and new languages in order to interrogate taken-for-granted truths. And, this is why the conceptual and existential problems that the Anthropocene[2] poses align well with political theory’s central project. However, while petrocapitalism has spent the last two hundred years growing, mutating, and drastically diminishing the odds of human survival, political theory has had little to say about our self-inflicted demise. By continuing to concern itself narrowly with questions about human life: What does it mean to be human? What is the political utility of the human? What does it mean to live? How do we organize life? What kind of impact does life have? And so on. Theory remains ill-equipped to engage with some of the most poignant questions of the day: Is human life supposed to be sustained? What does it mean to die, not as individuals but as a species? And, how do we engage theoretically in the face of death? These are not easy questions; they do not evoke easy thoughts. In fact, they require a kind of thinking that goes against the majority of thinking and theorizing that has evolved in the West, since the beginning of the ‘modern’ period.
How and what we think and theorize throughout history affects how and what we think and theorize today. To problematize this further, how we think limits what can be thought and vice versa. And these processes (re)produce each other, move through each other, in ways that go almost completely unnoticed by the ‘we’ doing the thinking. This is the carceral logic of ‘modern’[3] western thought: the liberal subject gives a law to himself through certain assumptions of normativity – of what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ – and through these assumptions, we give ourselves life and a way to sustain this life. This results in specific ways of thinking, knowing, being and sensing that, over time, become taken-for-granted truths. These truths are becoming increasingly difficult to challenge and/or change. This is the most crucial hurdle we must jump over, as our new landscape, of depletion, decay, mutation, and exhaustion, call for new ways of thinking, seeing and understanding the world and our place in it.
Informed by the theoretical intervention Claire Colebrook undertakes in both her volumes on extinction – Death of the Posthuman and Sex After Life –into the political and discursive utility of the subject, I contend that now is the time to abandon our present ethos of habits and theoretical practices. And instead, take on the notion of “becoming-imperceptible.”[4] I advance the question: How would practices of theorization change if we[5] were to drastically shift our attention; away from the advancement of life and towards imagining our collective death – as humans? I explore this question through a critical intervention into the central tenants of political theory. I begin by outlining these central tenants in humanism and posthumanism and identify how they both facilitate and limit theoretical analyses of human extinction. Following this, I explore why it might be helpful to move thought beyond the human and its posthuman counterpart, and how we might begin this process.
I suggest that this can be done through a mode of deconstruction that is informed by Jacques Derrida, although it will be mobilized differently in this paper to fit my trajectory. My choice to use deconstruction is inspired not only by Derrida’s work, but also by the work put forth in Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy. In this anthology theorists examine Derrida’s work from an ecological vantage point and mobilize a form of deconstruction to think deeply and critically about climate catastrophe and human extinction. As Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes and David Wood explain in the introduction, one of deconstruction’s many targets is logocentrism, which “names the ultimately self-contradictory attempt to distinguish the human vis-à-vis nature, by way of ‘his properties’, especially access to language, history and death.”[6] Deconstruction seeks to expose the fragility of these binary hierarchies and their links “to ethnocentrism, sexism, and anthropocentrism.”[7]
I mobilize a few of Derrida’s neologisms in an attempt to resist these binary hierarchies, and the carceral logic of ‘modern’ thought. I use undecidability[8] to emphasize the importance of exploring ambiguity and uncertainty, especially as a way to disrupt binary complacency. Beyond[9] is a useful way to draw attention to reading, writing and thinking past what is legible, past an understanding that relies on “the handrail of existing meaning.:”[10] I use remainder[11] to indicate moving past our world, its systems and structures, in order to disrupt presence and theorize outside ourselves. Finally, différance[12] is used to highlight mortal life as necessarily always in relation to and yet distinguished from the nonliving.[13] Tracking and reconsidering “our appropriative mastery and alleged sovereignty over nature” requires that we, not only grasp “the complex underbelly of intelligibility and coherence,”[14] but also reimagine the rationales and rationalities that have damaged the earth’s system. As it is in the remainder, beyond ‘life’, that we can begin to explore the ‘undecidability’ of death. In the différance between death and life, there remains, not only a beyond of life, but also a beyond of death, that is, a death that is not opposed to a ‘life’ (but maybe not life as we know it today). This is my point of departure.
Part Two: Humanism and its Discontents
Man is an invention whose recent date, and whose nearing end perhaps, are easily shown by the archeology of our thought.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
As I have briefly mentioned, thinking and theorizing our collective death goes against the current dominant human order. The order I am referring to here has been described by Timothy Morton (2017) as ‘explosive holism’[15]: an ontological trend premised on the valorization of wholes over the sum of their parts. This has given rise to certain assumptions of a singular reality that equates ontology with culture and understands different ethno-cultural perspectives through and reduced to Eurocentric categories.[16] Moreover, the tradition of ‘explosive holism’ upholds what Bruno Latour calls the ‘modern constitution.’[17] This ‘modern constitution’ is premised on a binary division between the internal and the external – for example: nature from culture or ‘us’ from ‘them.’[18] Today, these binary categorizations define the contours of western thought.
Informed by Sylvia Wynter’s work on humanist discourse, I associate the development of ‘explosive holism’ with the date 1492. In her seminal essay, 1492: A New World View (1995), Wynter’s examines 1492 as a historic moment that lay bare two crucial ‘truths’ in humanist discourse: the systematic omissions of certain characteristics – specifically blackness – from the figure of ‘man’ and a new ‘species-inclusive’ account of humanness.[19] This set the stage for a new world order – the colonial order – an order that has dominated our knowledge systems ever since. I repeat the term ‘order’ to draw attention to a historical pattern. Each human order throughout history has predicated itself on a specific notion of order. As Wynter notes in ‘1492’:
“The ancient Greeks, for example, held that one progressed from the earth at the lowest point of the structure to higher and higher levels of perfection. Similarly, the feudal order had mapped its own hierarchy of spiritual degrees of perfection onto the physical universe. The criterion of perfection in this case arose from an ontological division between the clergy as the bearer of the new ‘life’ of the spirit, effected through baptism, and lay men and women as the bearers of the post-Adamic legacy of Original Sin, who therefore perpetuated the ‘fallen’ and ‘degraded’ life of ‘natural man’. Such a life was therefore constantly in need of the ‘redemptive process’ presided over by the category of the clergy, who were also the orthodox guardians of a mainstream order of knowledge of which theology (like economics in ours today) was the master discipline and ‘queen of the sciences.’”[20]
The colonial story of Christopher Columbus, whose voyages changed the ethnic composition of two continents, revolutionized the world’s diets and drastically altered the world’s environment, is informed by this feudal order.[21] Its organizing principles were predicated on a classificatory schema that stereotyped images of Western and Eastern Hemispheres into a nonhomogeneous and arbitrarily divided habitable/ uninhabitable earth.[22]
In Europe, at the time, Copernicus was formulating a mathematic model of the universe that placed the sun, instead of the earth, at the center.[23] This new model, which explained how the earth was in fact not fixed but rotating around the sun, deeply undermined the Christian theological premise that the Earth was fixed.[24] Such a fundamental breach in knowledge led Europe away from a theologically absolute way of knowing to a more scientific knowledge base. No longer was the human a homo religiosus Adamic fallen Man, instead ‘he’ became homo politicus.[25] This new figure of man was a political animal who had the capacity to self-govern through his own reason.[26] The next few centuries, thanks to Darwin’s discovery of evolutionary biology, were dictated by another humanist mutation. Darwin’s epistemological rupture permeated in and outside of Europe giving rise to a new globally hegemonic knowledge system based on a purely biocentric version of humanness.[27] All the while, the category of the human remained trapped in the order of 1492. Western humanist discourse, as it is known today, is rooted in this history of order.
As Wynter demonstrates, our contemporary moment is dominated by an episteme that she refers to as ‘bio-scholasticism,’[28] which is directly linked to the history I have outlined above.[29] So much so, it continues to function according to the same “cognitively closed descriptive statement and sociogenically encoded truth of solidarity” as ‘theo-scholasticism’ – the episteme that dominated Latin-Christian knowledge systems in Europe during the feudal order.[30] It was “precisely this theocentric and arbitrary mode of divine creation central to the Scholastic order of knowledge that was to be challenged by the intellectual revolution of (hu)man-ism.”[31] Yet it continued to play a fundamental role informing the “secularizing and rapidly expanding modern European state, and its new and post-theological mode of subjective understanding.”[32] The new symbolic construct was that of ‘race’ as oppose to ‘caste’ but the category of the human remained trapped in the same role-allocating structure of the feudal-Christian order.[33] And, the nonhomogeneous and arbitrarily divided habitable/uninhabitable earth was used to map “the range of human hereditary variations and their cultures”, creating “new metaphysical notions of order” that ran parallel to the past religious categories.[34] The premise of this post-religious moment had simply replaced God with Man, the true Rational Self of ‘Man’ “who was now embodied in the subject of the expanding state.”[35] This, alongside Copernicus and Darwin’s fundamental scientific findings, made possible a subjective autonomy of cognition that gave rise to the intellectual revolution of liberal (hu)man-ism in the nineteenth century.[36]
The past 500 years that I have briefly outlined “brought the whole human species into [the West’s] hegemonic, purely secular model of being human.”[37] This is an important point to consider. As Sylvia Wynter notes in a series of interviews with Katherine McKittrick, the ecological catastrophe that human beings face today dates back to 1750 but accelerated around 1950. Further outlining the reason for its acceleration:
“The majority of the world’s peoples who had been colonial subjects of a then overtly imperial West had now become politically independent. At that time, [the colonized], after [their] respective anticolonial uprisings, were almost all now subjects of postcolonial nations, [but] nevertheless [they] fell into the mimetic trap of what Jean Price-Mars calls, in the earlier nineteenth-century case of Haiti, ‘collective Bovaryism” – because the West is now going to reincorporate [them] neocolonially, and thereby mimetically, by telling [them] that the problem with [them] wasn’t that [they’d] been imperially subordinated, wasn’t that [they’d] been both socioculturally dominated and exploited, but that [they] were underdeveloped. The West said: ‘Oh, well, no longer be a native but come be Man like us! Become homo oeconomicus!’ While the only way [they] could, [the West] further told [them], become un-underdeveloped, was by following the plans of [the] economists.”[38]
This is why the Anthropocene is a tricky term; why (hu)man-ism is a tricky term; and why modernity is a tricky term. They have a history. A history of forced replication by the West onto the rest that led to the “mimetic model of the Western bourgeoisie’s liberal monohumanist Man.”[39] This model’s imperatives are simple: assimilate into the homo oeconomicus, uphold free-market capitalism, increase capital accumulation, and techno-industrial economic growth. Such a homogenizing model leaves little room for alternative modes of being and contains thought within a fixed and rigid order – that of ‘explosive holism’ – making it exceedingly difficult, especially given how much time has elapsed, to think outside its sturdy and well-established walls. There have, however, been attempts in the past few decades to free man and thus thought from the liberal monohumanist discourse. In the next section I will discuss one of these attempts.
Part Three: Rejecting Man, Becoming Posthuman
And it’s hard to be a human being
And it’s harder as anything else
Isaac Brock, Modest Mouse
Western critiques of liberal humanist discourse have been proliferating since the beginning of the sixties, a time that brought with it dynamic and complex movements that led to a “series of ‘isms’ (initiated by the black antiapartheid struggle for civil rights, women’s rights/feminism, indigenous and other color of-color rights, gay and lesbian rights, and so forth).”[40] Together, these movements were mobilized to challenge (hu)man-ism’s episteme and its universal truth, with the intent of opening it up to include subjective differences. This initiated a shift, away from the monohomogenous liberal (hu)man dictated by ‘his’ biology, and towards an understanding of selfhood through representation, signification and cultural difference. Such a shift opened space for new ways of thinking human cognition, ways that challenged the notion of the subject as an abstract and rational actor, and the methodological presumptions that go along with this notion. Presumptions that assumed equality of agency among individuals by equating woman and raced ‘others’ as equal to white men. No longer would man, under the guise of universalism and equality, stand in for the human. As such, these heterogenous ways of knowing otherwise made room for a new discourse – the discourse of posthumanism.
Generally speaking, posthuman discourse began as a way to challenge the longstanding belief that humans were separate and elevated from more-than-humans[41] and their environment. Posthuman discourse proliferated in the late twentieth century[42] as a response to the breakdown of three distinct boundaries – the separation between animal and human; the distinction between animal-human (organism) and machine; and the boundary between physical and nonphysical.[43] No longer was the human understood as a unique being, but rather as a part of an interconnected network of things – living and non-living[44] – and of the geological cycle of matter. By blurring the distinctions between nature and culture, this process of disintegration opened thought up to a much more nuanced understanding of human relations, especially relations between humans, more-than-humans, and their environment.
Today, by privileging informational patterns of experience, posthuman discourse understands the subjective embodiment of biological matter as an accident of history, instead of as an inevitability of life. It conceptualizes the human body as a series of fragments that can be manipulated and changed, a conceptualization that connects the posthuman to machine.[45] More precisely, posthumanism does not see any essential separation between bodily existence and the natural and technological environment.[46] As Katherine Hayles explains in her book How we Became Posthuman, “[i]f human essence is freedom from the wills of others, the posthuman is ‘post’ not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will.”[47] Posthuman discourse does away with the liberal (hu)man-ist notion of the natural self, and instead posits a configuration of the human as a collection of blurred lines and heterogenous components.
Despite its manifold differences, posthumanism does not overcome the human, it is not unhuman, nor has it really left the realm of the already well-established liberal (hu)man-ist discourse. This is especially visible in the humanities and social sciences. As Colebrook notes, the adoption of posthuman discourse in these areas has not led to a new, less anthropomorphic structure, but instead, lets the human live on “by consuming, appropriating and claiming as its own the life of animals, digital technologies, [and] inter-disciplinarity (or the rendering of science as human).”[48] Now, if we think about this in relation to the history of liberal (hu)man-ism, posthuman discourse becomes increasingly problematic.
Much of the discourse on posthumanism abstains from critically engaging with the violence that birthed and continues to structure its intellectual tradition. For this reason, many Indigenous scholars have taken posthumanism to task. Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts, for example, examines how “agency circulates inside of two different frames: Place Thought (Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe cosmologies) and epistemological-ontological (Euro-Western frame).”[49] Her intention is to emphasize the different ways of knowing that are inherent to Indigenous cosmologies against the colonial frame. In doing this, Watts draws attention to how “colonization is not solely an attack on peoples and lands; [but] rather, this attack is accomplished in part through purposeful and ignorant misrepresentations of Indigenous cosmologies.”[50] Specifically, she notes how Indigenous ontologies are often neutralized and trivialized by powerful institutions that self-legitimize through (neo)colonial power. These processes of neutralization and trivialization stem from the epistemological-ontological tradition of ‘explosive holism.’ As Watts notes:
“The epistemological-ontological removes the how and why out of the what [and] [t]he what is left empty, readied for inscription […] These distinct domains provide evidence that humans are assumed to be separate from the world they are in, in order to have a perception of it […] It necessitates a separation of not only human and non-human, but a hierarchy of beings in terms of how beings are able to think as well. [And these] man-made distinction between what and how/why is not an innocent one. Its consequences can be disastrous for not only non-humans but humans as well.”[51]
Her critique does not exclude posthuman discourse, which she argues, continues to perpetuate the ‘hierarchies of agency’ imposed by common understandings of Actor Network Theory,[52] a theory that informs posthumanism.[53]
Metis scholar, Zoe Todd, further identifies the Eurocentrism of posthuman ontologies noting how both posthumanism and the Anthropocene “share a terrain” that allows both schools of thought to dominate “in what is an undeniably white intellectual space for the Euro-Western academy.”[54] Although much of the discourse is critical of colonial ways of knowing, the power dynamics remain the same.[55] Posthuman scholars remain problematically silent; silent about their location/positionality, and silent on existing Indigenous or non-western scholarship.[56] This is further iterated by Juanita Sundberg, who identifies numerous ways “in which posthumanist texts enact universalizing claims and, as a consequence, reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by further subordinating other ontologies.”[57] For example, Sundberg notes how posthuman discourse continues to enact the self in relation to “the magical primitive Other.”[58] As a result, posthuman scholars often reproduce a “humanist framing of the human as modern, rational, autonomous, and nature transcendent” even when they are drawing attention to the active role of “nonhuman materials in public life.”[59] By remaining silent about location and positionality, as well as existing Indigenous and/or non-white scholarship, the discourse of posthumanism remains ill-equipped to create, engage with, and/or think outside a dualist framework.
As a consequence of such practices, posthuman discourse perpetuates a system of knowledge that continues to fit within the tradition of ‘explosive holism.’ The discourse’s exclusive focus on Anglo-European thinkers “enacts the world as universe, [which refers to] the ontological assumption of a singular reality or nature, about which different cultures offer distinct interpretations.”[60] Such a closed order of knowledge equates ontology with culture, frames the ‘true’ nature of reality as understood exclusively through western science, and “supports the anthropological claim that different perspectives on the world may be understood through and reduced to Eurocentric categories.”[61] While posthuman discourse offers powerful tools to identify, critique and alter Eurocentric knowledge systems, it remains ill-equipped to learn from and be in dialogue with multiple epistemic worlds.[62] Recognizing the current moment as one imprisoned in the history of 1492, the next two sections speculate beyond the human and its posthuman counterpart in an effort to free ourselves, our thoughts, and our theories, from the seemingly inescapable past/present.
Part Four: The ‘Eco’ Prefix
Ontology abandons us here: it has simply permitted us to determine the last ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities and the value which haunt it.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
As I have shown in the previous two sections, thinking and theorizing in the West remains caught up in a history of ‘explosive holism,’ even when it tries to escape, by relying on rigid and binary distinctions; distinctions that separate the human from nature, nature from culture, culture from science, etc. But, this is not to say that the field of environmental theory has not been a quintessential aspect of philosophy throughout history. Environmental philosophy in the English-speaking world dates back to the 19th century.[63] But, it was not until the 1970s that the field of environmental ethics really came into being. Since then, there have been many philosophers and theorists exploring humans and their relations with the environment. Subsequent ‘eco’ theories have also been emerging – eco-phenomenology, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and so on – a proliferation that bears witness to the real and increasingly pertinent problems of the day.[64] All this considered, I have attempted to demonstrate how dominant theoretical and methodological frameworks continue to severely limit ‘eco’ philosophy’s reach. Serious and sustained engagements into human extinction, outside the bounds of these dominant modes of thought, remain marginal at best.
Luckily, a few theorists have been grappling with this seemingly (im)possible task. Claire Colebrook, for example, undertakes the death of the human in both her volumes on extinction – Death of the Posthuman and Sex After Life. In this series, Colebrook, acutely aware of the world’s rapidly changing landscape, grapples with how to respond creatively to extinction. Her theoretical interventions in Death of the Posthuman engage a series of different theorists throughout history in order to highlight how fixated we have been on the sustaining and furthering of life. As a result, we have neglected to explore a fundamental question: what if life is not supposed to be sustained? She urges the reader to engage with this question, suggesting it might initiate a humbling new way of thinking. Her concluding remarks:
“Things have changed. The overwhelming question that presses itself upon us – requiring incessant repression and working through – is not the question of how we humans were placed in a world in which the task was too hard, the conditions too bleak or the burden of freedom too confronting. The question is not one of how we humans can justify hostile life, but how we can possibly justify ourselves given our malevolent relation to life.”[65]
These remarks open us to a beyond with new worlds, new ways of thinking and new ways of theorizing. For too long, theorists and philosophers alike, have been focusing on life, and, in the process, they have neglected how thoroughly futile humans are, and how paradoxical the pursuit of life is. Time and time again, history has shown us that humanity is not interested in sustaining life. Colebrook acutely notes this and suggests we turn our gaze, (re)orient[66] ourselves, away from humanity’s capacity to live well, and consider the possibility that: “it is not the horror of existence that tortures humanity but a humanity that can do nothing other than destroy itself and its milieu, and all – perversely – for the sake of its own myopic, short circuited and self-regarding future.”[67] By highlighting the necessity to unbind theory from its chains, she emphasizes the potential in entertaining a world without humans. Colebrook’s task is not a small one, and these theoretical interventions are paving the way forward.
Further, Sylvia Wynter’s motivation to give humanness a different future has also lent itself to studying the figure of the human and how it is tied to a specific history that lingers in the present.[68] Her theories have also drawn attention to how, for the past 500 years, human history has followed a very specific trajectory and continues to play a fundamental role in our thought processes today. She notes:
“How are we not to think, after Adam Smith and the Scottish School of the Enlightenment, that all human societies are not theologically determined with respect to their successive modes of economic production that determine who they are? How are we not to think in terms of an ostensibly universal human history, that itself has identified as one in which all human societies, without exception, must law-likely move from hunter-gatherer, to pastoral, to agricultural modes of material provisioning, to one based on a manufacturing economy?”[69]
By meticulously outlining human history, Wynter’s draws attention to the interconnectedness of today’s problems: “rather than positing that ‘we humans have a poverty problem, or a habitat problem, or an energy problem, or a trade problem, or a population problem, or an atmosphere problem, or a waste problem, or a resource problem,’ these, on a planetary scale, are understood, together, as ‘inter-connected problems.’”[70] This interconnected reality calls into question our present status quo’s ‘system of learnings’ episteme, “which inevitably calls for separate disciplinary solutions.”[71] By calling this into question, she urges students and practitioners to consider the futility in approaching our present moment using such a problematic and ill-equipped status quo.
Additionally, while she does not explicitly discuss human extinction the way Colebrook does, she gestures towards it through her notion of symbolic death. Symbolic death, a term that has its roots in the concept of dysbeing – an English neologism that stems from Ami Césaire’s term déserte, is mobilized by Wynter to highlight Césaire’s and Frantz Fanon’s longstanding quest to think past the white gaze and instead focus on the imperceptibility of the black body.[72] A quest that lends itself well to thinking and theorizing past the “institutionalized and ostensibly universally applicable norm of being human.”[73] By vigorously engaging the reality that life has never been evenly distributed amongst all humans, Wynter’s theoretical interventions force us to think seriously about how we might organize collectively in light of the uneven responsibilities for, and vulnerabilities to human extinction. Further, they open the door to new theoretical and methodological frameworks, outside ‘explosive holism.’ This is of course not an exhaustive list. There are many theorists out there grappling with the (im)possible question of human extinction and exploring the murky waters of death on a macro scale.[74] Those that I have engaged with inform the next section’s theoretical intervention.
Part Five: Learning to Die, Finally
We are now others to ourselves. It is quite clear. Look above: the sky is falling. From this perspective, what we cannot possibly yet see is how the sky has a forest on its back.
Pedro Neves Marques, Look Above, the Sky is Falling
It might be difficult, damn near impossible, for us, white settlers, to imagine the end of the world. Our lives, while not without difficulty, have been nourished and watered, and given a unique vitality that others have not been afforded. This vitality has lent itself well to our human centered world view, a view that makes even the smallest speculation into a ‘world without us’ almost unfathomable. But, the truth is, the world has already ended for many others, humans and more-than-humans alike, several times, since the inception of homo sapiens. As Pedro Neves Marques remarks in his essay Look Above, the Sky is Falling, “it is said that 95 percent of Amerindians died between 1492 and 1610” an annihilation that amounted to “more than 50 million people.”[75] I bring this up, not only to trouble the notion that humans could have some universal experience of death, but also as a way to unsettle some of the resistance we might have towards thinking and theorizing human extinction.
Our history of thinking has, for too long, imposed limits on what is and is not considered to fit within the confines of the ‘human’ by stubbornly sustaining a particularly rigid fantasy of the human being, who only comes into being to the extent that they move away from animal and nature. This creates significant problems and limitations to the practice of thinking and theorizing in the age of the Anthropocene. For one, it forecloses the horizon of possible ways of knowing, and imprisons thought within a vacuum sealed container of western ontologies and epistemologies. Now, if we consider this foreclosure alongside what Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin rightly note about the Anthropocene, precisely that: “the Anthropocene is not simply the result of activities undertaken by the species Homo sapiens […] [but] from a particular nexus of epistemic, technological, social, and political economic coalescences figured in the contemporary reality of petrocapitalism.”[76] [77] We add a new and equally problematic layer to this thought prison. If we take this claim to be true, then not all humans or more-than-humans and not all knowledge systems have had an equally destructive role on the earth. This means that the particularly troubling “nexus of epistemic, technological, social and political economic coalescences”[78] that Davis and Turpin are referring to is bound up in the tradition of ‘explosive holism’ – a tradition that, as I have noted, always already contains ways of thinking and knowing.
This is why there are significant benefits to thinking and theorizing the death of the human. While many scholars – particularly Indigenous and racialized scholars – throughout history have had success thinking otherwise, dominant modes of thought continue to be caught up in the tradition of ‘explosive holism.’ This is a serious problem that I suggest might actually be addressed if we think beyond the human and its survival. As it is in this space beyond the human where we can begin to think about how a resistance of existence might offer itself as a permanent revolution. No longer will we have the excuse of justifying our existence through upholding the status quo.
When humans grapple with climate catastrophe, we feel threatened. This is because climate catastrophe poses an imminent threat to our world as we understand it today. Specifically, we see the end of the world as the end of the total horizon of meaning, value and possibility. We work tirelessly to sustain our world through upholding the status quo. We use the immanency of climate catastrophe as a way to justify our resistance to radical change. Consequently, we remain perpetually unwilling to grapple with the end of our world. This is why I contend that engaging with thinking that goes beyond the human, that resists existence, especially our existence in our western world, might be the key we need to get us out of our embedded histories and thought prisons.
I want to end in a speculative mode, as it seems to be the only way to engage death on such a large-scale. My speculation follows from a reality Roy Scranton eloquently notes in his book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
“Once the methane hydrates under the oceans and permafrost begins to melt, we may soon find ourselves living in a hothouse climate closer to that of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, approximately 56 million years ago, when the planet was ice-free and tropical at the poles. We face the imminent collapse of the agricultural, shipping, and energy networks upon which the global economy depends, a large-scale die-off in the biosphere that’s already well under way, and our own possible extinction as a species. If Homo sapiens survives the next millennium, it will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we have known for the last 200,000 years.”[79]
This is a bleak reality. It is getting bleaker by the hour. We no longer have the luxury of moving forward, of progressing or accumulating, as we have done before. However, it is becoming exceedingly difficult to exit our human history, despite numerous attempts; we continue to trudge along under the same conditions. So, what is the alternative? I speculate that the alternative might not involve ‘us’. Further, I would like to go as far to suggest that this kind of radical speculation is the only way forward.
I acknowledge that our imaginations are not free from our histories. Moreover, I recognize that I am sedimented in my own history and socio-cultural practices. I do not claim to be ahistorical, or free from my humanness. But I wonder and wander anyways. And, through this wondering and wandering I speculate: What would it mean to put death first? What would it wake people up from? Would it open us up to an undecidable beyond outside the confines of ‘explosive holism?’ Let us consider a hypothetical. A woman has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. She leaves the doctor’s office feeling anguish, fear, and sadness. Grappling with her death, she wanders and wonders. She considers her life and her impossible future, aware that things keep moving, with or without her. During this process of self-reflection, her perspective shifts and changes. No longer does she feel overcome by fear and anguish, but rather experiences a sense of freedom. She is not necessarily free from her history, or her present, but she imagines differently. No longer tied to the future, she is not afraid to move through the world in new ways.
Now, let’s scale up this hypothetical. How might we, homo sapiens, imagine differently, upon acknowledging our terminal illness? Our terminal illness being: “The Sixth Mass Extinction: caused by the Anthropocene, caused by humans.”[80] Upon receiving the diagnostic, we are overwhelmed, afraid, and most of us are in denial. It is hard to accept mortality, especially given how inherent longing for immortality is to the human condition. But, we wonder and wander, nonetheless, until finally we are able to entertain the erasure of the human. In the process of entertaining the idea, we are overcome with a sense of freedom, we have escaped our thought prisons, our habits, and our practices; especially those that got us into this predicament. This marks a shift away from anthropocentrism; a shift away from time. Moments become multiplicities; histories are subverted, changed; homogeneity is diffracted, lost; and we imagine ourselves dying, staring up at the sky, hand in hand, as we rock together across the face of the world. It is here, in the nothingness, “the place where living and dying meet, where time-being is exposed as indeterminately multiple and filled with all matter of desiring im/possibilities”[81] that we can finally escape our longstanding adversity to deconstructing thought, to thinking differently. We must confront the nothingness and open ourselves up to the fullness of its void, however paradoxical that may seem. Because, it is in the nothingness, “the place where living and dying meet,”[82] that we find new ways of knowing, thinking, being and sensing. It is here that we escape our violent history and its sedimentation in the tradition of ‘explosive holism.’
Just think about it in the context of this paper. Our trajectory, both past, present and future, has violently excluded many humans and more-than-humans, from living. As a result, a multitude of humans and more-than-humans have been living and dying in this void, confronting this nothingness, over and over again, throughout history. This is why I suggest that it is here in the remainder, the void, that we find new ways of remembering differently. It is here that we can begin to think through who has even been included in this world, what it is to be in this world, and also what it means to die. As Karan Barad so eloquently puts it “what makes us human is not our alleged distinctiveness from – the nonhuman, the inhuman, the subhuman, the more-than-human, those who do not matter – but rather our relationship with and responsibility to the dead, to the ghosts of the past and the future.”[83]
Dying is our past/present/future. It is our only option. It has always been our only option. Let this be a reminder, a provocation, that urges us to consider life and death differently. Dying is a sinking back into, it is the blackness beyond our present distinctions, and already possible potentials. It is the brokenness that opens us up to try anew, to go beyond ourselves, to see differently. Dying is how we get out of the intolerable place that we are in and confront the undecidability of the nothingness. Most of all, dying, at the end of it all, is how we become less human, as it is through dying that we become more other than we are ourselves. This is death’s potentiality. This is death’s call.
[1] Tompkins, K. W. (2016). We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know. Avidly. Retrieved From: http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/09/13/we-arent-here-to-learn-what-we-know-we-already-know/
[2] The human species is now recognizable as a being bound to the reality of its destructive power to such an extent that geologists are regarding our present configuration as an Anthropocene epoch “where man’s effect on the planet will supposedly be discernible as a geological strata that will be readable well after man ceases to be” (Colebrook, pp. 10, 2014).
[3] While I recognize that there are many different ways of being modern, the discourse around modernity that I refer to throughout this paper is linked to Western European thinking, theorizing, and life practices. This is important to note as not all people, or groups of people, think in the same way and dominant modes of thinking and theorizing have had varying degrees of influence on people/groups of people depending on their history of thinking and theorizing.
[4] Colebrook, Claire. (2014). The Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction Vol. 1. (Michigan: Open Humanities Press), 48.
[5] Aware of the deep and historically entrenched connotations that surround the word ‘we’ – its raced, gendered, and classed contours – I choose to use the term ‘we’ throughout this paper as an invocation and invitation to the/any reader of this text to walk, ask, listen and converse with it. This is because, although human impact on the earth has not been equal, the temperature of the earth will soon be uninhabitable for humans. In this sense, while acknowledging the ongoing domination inherent to Eurocentrism and neoliberal capitalism, the ‘we’ I refer to throughout this paper includes all humans.
[6] Fritsch, Matthias., Lynes, Philippe., & Wood, David. (2018). Introduction. In Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (New York, New York: Fordham University Press), 1-29.
[7] Fritsch, Lynes, & Wood, 2018. Ibid., 6.
[8] Decision is confined to already-possible possibilities that have already been considered decidable. Decisions must always be made in the present, leaving no time to access or weigh all the evidence. For Derrida, then, undecidability opens us up to traces of a future, or a ‘to-come’. It does not paralyze decision, it gives decision possibility outside the ‘here-now’ (Wortham, 2010).
[9] To leave the bounds of already existing fields of ‘potentials’, to interrupt and suspend established programmes, norms, conventions, moralities, duties, and expectations, one must think beyond what may already be established, predicted or prescribed (Wortham, 2010).
[10] Wood, David. (2018). The Eleventh Plague: Thinking Ecologically after Derrida. In M. Fritsch, P. Lynes and D. Wood. (Ed.), Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (New York, New York: Fordham University Press), 29-50.
[11] Informed by Jacque Derrida, I use the term remainder to refer to that which exceeds all structures and systems “even when making them possible […] and affirms an inappropriable difference, or the repressed other” (Wortham, pp. 32, 2010).
[12] Différance is the “non-signifying difference that traverses every mark, the unpresentable and unsystematizable remainder which at once constitutes and exceeds the mark’s possibility” (Wortham, pp. 37, 2010). It is used to conceptualize the remainder in all ‘things’, which calls us to rethink the relations of presence, which both limit and maintain philosophy, history, culture and politics of the Western tradition (Wortham, 2010). The difference between ‘différance’ and ‘différence’ is inaudible. It requires that the words are written to notice that they are different. This is why I use it in this paper to emphasize the importance of writing, and theoretical writing in particular.
[13] Fritsch, Matthias., Lynes, Philippe., & Wood, David. (2018). Introduction. In Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (New York, New York: Fordham University Press), 1-29.
[14] Wood, David. (2018). The Eleventh Plague: Thinking Ecologically after Derrida. In M. Fritsch, P. Lynes and D. Wood. (Ed.), Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (New York, New York: Fordham University Press), 29-50.
[15] Timothy Morton uses ‘explosive holism’ to describe how the tradition of theory is bound up in a Neolithic theism and humanist discourse that propagates the belief that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. This way of thinking turns all things into rigid, contained and empirically verifiable entities and results in problematic binaries – subject-object, human-nonhuman, conscious-nonconscious, sentient-non-sentient, lifeform – non-life, thing-nothing – making it increasingly difficult to see, think, and/or theorize outside this framework (Morton, 2017).
[16] Sundberg, Juanita. (2013). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies. 21(1), 33-47.
[17] Latour, Bruno. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
[19] Wynter, Sylvia. (1995). 1492: A New World View. In V, L. Hyatt and R. Nettleford. (Ed.), Race, Discourse, and the Origins of the America: A New World View (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press),5 – 57.
[23] McKittrick, Katherine. (2015). Sylvia Wynter: on being human as praxis (Duke University Press).
[24] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 14.
[25] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 15.
[26] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 15.
[27] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 17.
[28] The Scholastic order of knowledge is premised on an “Aristotelianized Unmoved Mover, and totally omnipotent God who had created the universe for the sake of His own glory rather than specifically for mankind’s sake, which gave rise to a theocentric view of the relation between God and man.” Created, as a result, was a binarism of divine/human relations: “the former’s total omnipotence was contrasted with the total helplessness and cognitive incapacity of ‘natural man’ as the fallen heir of Adam’s sin” (Wynter, pp. 26, 1995).
[29] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 17.
[30] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 17.
[31] Wynter, Sylvia. (1995). 1492: A New World View. In V, L. Hyatt and R. Nettleford. (Ed.), Race, Discourse, and the Origins of the America: A New World View (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press), 27.
[32] Wynter, Sylvia. (1995). 1492: A New World View. In V, L. Hyatt and R. Nettleford. (Ed.), Race, Discourse, and the Origins of the America: A New World View (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press), 27.
[37] McKittrick, Katherine. (2015). Sylvia Wynter: on being human as praxis (Duke University Press).
[38] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 27.
[39] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 24.
[40] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 23.
[41] I deploy the term more-than-human as a semiotic tool, used to emphasize the reality that humans are not alone but dependent and reliant on the environment that surrounds them. Additionally, I use it to problematize the term nonhuman, which upholds the mistaken pretense that agency, intention and purpose can only be attributed to humans, and contributes to a hierarchal categorization with humans at the top, as elevated and separated from their environment. I use it to reject human exceptionalism in an effort to decenter the human from its position of superiority and create a framework that can better account for the human condition as intimately intertwined with all other things.
[42] It is important to note that Indigenous knowledge systems have always held the belief that humans are entangled and inter-dependent with more-than-humans and the environment, however, it wasn’t until around the twentieth century that western knowledge systems began to engage critically with the human/nature binary.
[43] Haraway, D. (2016). A Cyborg Manifesto. In Manifestly Haraway (Introduction by Carry Wolfe), (University of Minnesota Press).
[44] I use living and nonliving here in the normative sense of life as it has been designated by humans.
[45] Hayles, K. (1999). How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
[48] Colebrook, Claire. (2014). Sex After Life: Essays on Extinctino, Vol. 2. (Open Humanities Press), 159.
[49] Watts, Vanessa. (2013). Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 2(1), 21.
[52] ANT (Actor-Network-Theory) is a theoretical and methodological approach prefaced on the notion that everything in the social and natural world exists in constantly shifting networks of relations. ANT provides a framework to study these networks through combining disciplinary practices together, and in this way it avoids objectivism and essentialism (Latour and Davis, 2015).
[53] Watts, V. (2013). Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 2(1), 20-34.
[54] Todd, Z. (2016). An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology. 29(1), 247.
[56] Sundberg, Juanita. (2013). Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies. Cultural Geographies. 21(1), 33-47.
[57] Sundberg, 2013. Ibid., 42.
[58] Sundberg, 2013. Ibid., 37.
[59] Sundberg, 2013. Ibid., 38.
[60] Sundberg, 2013. Ibid., 38.
[61] Sundberg, 2013. Ibid., 38.
[62] In her paper, Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies, Sundberg adopts the term ‘multiepistemic literacy’ from Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen to refer to a dialogue and method of learning “between [a] diversity of epistemic/ethical/political approaches or epistemic worlds, [and how they] work to enact a ‘pluriversal world’: a world in which many worlds fit” (Sundberg, pp. 34, 2013).
[63] For more on environmental philosophy in Europe in the 19th Century see Romanticism, a field of study that was later picked up by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and so on, in the 20th Century. For more on how Romanticism was picked up in the 20th Century, see the first generation of the Frankfurt school (Fritsch, Lynes and Wood, 2018).
[64] Fritsch, Matthias., Lynes, Philippe., & Wood, David. (2018). Introduction. In Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (New York, New York: Fordham University Press), 1-29.
[65] Colebrook, Claire. (2014). The Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. (Open Humanities Press), 198.
[66] Informed by Sara Ahmed, I use the term (re)orient to highlight how bodies shape and form the contours of our worlds through the (re)production of norms, and these norms affect/limit how we orient ourselves in the world. As a result, what our bodies tend towards, how they orient and/or (re)orient, and what they leave behind, have real implications and can initiate real changes.
[67] Colebrook, Claire. (2014). The Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. (Open Humanities Press), 199.
[68] McKittrick, Katherine. (2015). Sylvia Wynter: on being human as praxis (Duke University Press).
[69] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 38.
[70] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 44.
[71] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 44.
[72] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 60.
[73] McKittrick, 2015. Ibid., 60.
[74] For more on death, extinction, and the (im)possibility of the human see Sigmund Freud, Fredrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michael Naas, Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, Karen Barad, Roy Scranton, Zoe Todd, Eve Tuck, and so on. Aware that I have only just touched the surface of eco-theories, these are just some of the people that I have found helpful thus far.
[75] Marques, P. N. (2017). Look Above the Sky is Falling: Humanity before and after the End of the World. In J. Aranda, B, K. Wood and A. Vidokle. (Ed.), Supercommunity: Diabolical Togetherness Beyond Contemporary, (London, UK: Verso), 414-418.
[76] This quote is taken from Davis and Turpin’s introduction to their edited anthology Art in the Anthropocene (2015), a work that brings together a collection of multidisciplinary conversations concerned with art and aesthetic in the age of the Anthropocene thesis.
[77] Davis, H., Turpin, E. (2015). Art & Death: Lives Between the Fifth Assessment & the Sixth Extinction. In H. Davis and E. Turpin, (Ed.), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, (Open Humanities Press), 3-31.
[78] Davis and Turpin, 2015. Ibid., 3-31.
[79] Scranton, R. (2015). Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene, (San Francisco: City Light Books), 19.
[80] Morton, T. (2016). Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, (New York: Columbia University Press), 13.
[81] Barad, K. (2018). Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable. In M. Fritsch, P. Lynes and D. Wood. (Ed.), Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy, (New York, New: Fordham University Press), 240.
Emma Kauffman is an abolitionist and critical theorist pursuing a Master’s in Political Science at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include prison abolition, psychoanalysis, critical pedagogy, inter-species relationships, radical kinship, alternative theories of governance, and alternative theories of sovereignty. Kauffman’s work has been published in Jewish Voices for Peace, and the Political Science Journal at the University of Alberta. In addition to completing her Master’s, she works alongside prisoners at the Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Institute teaching philosophy.