Imagining Extinction: Afterness, Fossils and Fiction (ACLA 2025)

Writing about extinction is an aporetic coming together of our current geological reality and imagination that borders on speculation. It is an act that opens up the ecological, the ontological, and simultaneously interrogates the disappearance of humans from the planetary scene. The space of imagination imagining its own annihilation is a precarious zone for the writer, one that also discharges a kind of nervousness for the reader. The crisis facing us now is how to disentangle extinction as a kind of placelessness, as empty space beyond time. How do we, as a species on the edge of the Sixth Mass Extinction, make sense of Rosi Braidotti’s statement, “‘We’ are in this together, but We are not one and the same”? Is the meaning of extinction limited to the effects of extensive destruction of natural resources, widespread ecological imbalance, permeating lives of animals and vulnerable tribes, habitat and biodiversity loss, or does it extend to the uncertain conditions of existence of all lives under neoliberal capitalism, to the new social class, the ‘precariat’?

All kinds of work on extinction conventionally move toward three directions: the scientific, fact-based conviction in ending as a follow-up to the five last extinction events and its consequent thrust on acting now against this imminent threat; an interrelational approach with interconnected networks that hypothesize the harmonious co-existence of human-animal- machine; and a ‘negative’ perspective that compassionately desires the vanishing of humans to save all other species. There are two other significant routes that tries to crack the inevitable shell of extinction — the transhumanist man-machine assemblage, and the fabulatory leap through folktales and future fiction.

However, extinction also marks the limit of an inexhaustible present, an interminable sickness, a state of continuous emergency. As a border that separates two timelines, an extinction event engenders the beginning of yet another cycle of multispecies possibilities. The notion of extinction, then, is an unpredictable balance between fantasies of continuation in a non-toxic environment and anthropocentric guilt, an anxious intention to ‘save’ the earth and an utter failure to grasp nature’s otherness, boundless enjoyment now that things are ending and philosophical and reproductive detachment. The moment we are able to comprehend the experience of an apocalypse, the image of the human, as we know it, alters irreversibly. Do humans still exist in this afterness, albeit an unrecognizable remainder / in the sense of an organic amalgam / a networked existent / a cyborg-figure / fossil imprints / decomposition and humus / postnarrrative memories overwritten by rocky layers and tectonic shifts?

The panel invites submissions that explore ways of dealing with the urgency and exigencies of extinction, which may include (but not limited to):

Extinction and Time/ Extinction and New Subjectivity/ Extinction and Colonialism/ Extinction and Animals/ Extinction and Death Drive/ Extinction and Pessimism/ Extinction and Spiritualism/ Extinction and Pandemics/ Extinction and Storytelling/ Extinction and Reproduction/ Extinction and Post/Transhumanism/ Extinction and Fossil-making