Table Of ContentDeath of the PostHuman undertakes a series of critical encounters with the D
legacy of what had come to be known as ‘theory,’ and its contemporary e
a
supposedly posthuman aftermath. There can be no redemptive posthuman t Death of the PostHuman
h
future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit o
f
and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come
t Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1
h
to be known as the human—despite its normative intensity—can provide
e
neither foundation nor critical lever in the Anthropocene epoch. Death of the P
PostHuman argues for a twenty-first century deconstruction of ecological and o Claire Colebrook
s
seemingly posthuman futures. t
H
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Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State
University. She has written many articles and books on visual culture, poetry,
literary theory, queer theory and contemporary culture, including most
recently Theory and the Disappearing Future with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis
Miller (2011).
C
o
Cover Image: “Shriek & Flash” (detail) le
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Dominic Minichiello © Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA o
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Oil on board, 2009
Series: Critical Climate Change
Death of the PostHuman
Critical Climate Change
Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook
The era of climate change involves the mutation of sys-
tems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and
has stood, until recently, outside representation or address.
Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change
concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and
energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological
and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibil-
ity of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual
production and archives; but the current sense of deple-
tion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes
of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new
formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and re-
alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical
languages and conceptual templates, political premises and
definitions of ‘life.’ There is a particular need to publish in
timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the
boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the in-
terface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomor-
phic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change
is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo-
political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of
terrestrial mutation.
Death of the PostHuman
Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1
Claire Colebrook
OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS
with Michigan Publishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor
2014
First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2014
Freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.12329362.0001.001
Copyright © 2014 Claire Colebrook
This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license.
Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy
their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under
the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair
use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restric-
tions. Please see the Permissions section at the back of this book for more information.
ISBN-13 978-1-60785-299-5
Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose
mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books
published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at Michigan Publishing are produced through
a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which
provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to pub-
lish leading research in book form.
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www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org
Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 9
1. Extinct Theory 29
2. The Sustainability of Concepts:
Knowledge and Human Interests 46
3. A Globe of One’s Own: In Praise of the Flat Earth 59
4. Earth Felt the Wound: The Affective Divide 73
5. Destroying Cosmopolitanism for the Sake of the Cosmos 96
6. Time And Autopoiesis: The Organism has No Future 116
7. Face Race 140
8. Posthuman Humanities 158
9. Why Saying ‘No’ to Life is Unacceptable 185
10. The Joys of Atavism 208
Works Cited 230
Permissions 245
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the patience, dedication and support of Open
Humanities Press, and Sigi Jöttkandt in particular. For ongoing intel-
lectual stimulus and friendship I thank Tom Cohen, Jami Weinstein
and J. Hillis Miller.
