The arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only
now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only
now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social,
and philosophical extinction. While pointing out that reflections on
disaster were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism,
Last Things pushes romantic thought toward an altogether new way of
conceiving the "end of things," one that treats lastness as neither
privation nor conclusion. Through quieter, non-emphatic modes of
thinking the end of human thought, Khalip explores lastness as what
marks the limits of our life and world. Reading the fate of
romanticism--and romantic studies--within the key of the last, Khalip
refuses to elegize or celebrate our ends, instead positing romanticism
as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of
survival and sustainability.
Each chapter explores a range of romantic and contemporary materials:
poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and
William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume,
Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert,
Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo
Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter
Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between temporalities, Last Things
undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for
contemporary culture. It examines an archive on the side of
disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.
