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A Conversation on “Ecology, Extinction, and Posthumanism” with Claire Colebrook

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2025

Asijit Datta Open the ORCID record for Asijit Datta [Opens in a new window]
Asijit Datta*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Media Studies, SRM University-AP, India
*
Email: asijit.d@srmap.edu.in
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Abstract

This dialogue between Prof Claire Colebrook (Pennsylvania State University) and Asijit Datta is based on an online discussion, “Ecology, Extinction, and Posthumanism” which took place on the 1st of August, 2020 during the raging days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The transcript echoes Colebrook’s sentiments that the ethical demands of the climate hazard or the imminent extinction cannot be addressed to a particular subject or ‘we’. The predominant tension is concealed in the idea of the human and its values. As humans, we refuse to ask whether there is a future where life continues with endless possibilities for us. For Colebrook, the inability to adopt such a stance emerges from the historical condition that we as language-beings have always been the ones to define life, the ones that are essentially racing towards extinction. Following the extinction experiments of Husserl and Bergson, Colebrook contends that only the death of the ethical and political subject can provide us with alternate modes of survival in this world. This conversation engages with issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, American politics, and post-apocalyptic cinema to arrive at an imagination that requires the annihilation of the human as we know it.

Type
Interview
Information
Hypatia , First View , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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References

Colebrook, Claire. 2014a. Death of the posthuman: Essays on extinction, vol. 1. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colebrook, Claire. 2014b. Sex after life: Essays on extinction, vol. 2. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weinstein, Jami, and Colebrook, Clare, ed. 2017. Posthumous life: Theorizing beyond the posthuman. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zylinska, Joanna. 2014. Minimal ethics of the Anthropocene. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar