Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human
activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is
Extinction? examines several key moments that have come to define the
terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of
animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to document and
interpret these events.
Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua
Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness
appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing
attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these extinction events
also involves examining what happens when the conceptual and cultural
forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits
as well. Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of
extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies
methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life.
What Is Extinction? delves into the development of last animal
photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with
human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last
fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that
attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current pursuit
of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely interpretations of
how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and
continue to change in the present.
