Abstract

How do we live at the end of the world? How do we write the story of our species differently and construct a democracy that does not belong to human beings alone? As we face down a new era of climate change, we require nothing short of a philosophy for the end of the world. In this provocative and timely work, the philosopher and poet Travis Holloway proposes a counternarrative for human beings in the Anthropocene. Folding the history of gender, race, colonialism, and capital into geological time, Holloway retells the story of human beings in the Anthropocene in order to direct us towards ways of life that are external to it. Examining contemporary art, he considers how the reinvention of epic is challenging us to face climate change collectively. The final section on politics proposes a radical form of democracy that will have to be won and yet reconceived as a zoocracy, a rule of all of the living. Holloway takes up difficult, unanswered questions in recent work by Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yusoff, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Isabelle Stengers, and engages with the fields of feminism, postcolonialism, political theory, Black studies, and Continental philosophy. Ultimately, this book explores a way to live and assemble at the end that resists both neoliberalism and ethnonationalism.