William Connolly - “Extinction Events and Entangled Humanism”
Channel: Center for 21st Century Studies
Date: 2015-05-07

Dr. William E. Connolly (Johns Hopkins University) at the Center for 21st Century Studies "After Extinction" Conference, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. April 30, 2015.

“Extinction Events and Entangled Humanism”
This essay starts by reviewing the limits and dangers of sociocentrism in the social sciences and humanities during a time when neoliberal capitalism and a host of nonhuman force fields with powers of their own bump into one another. It soon turns to a review of two major extinction events in the past that may help to illuminate dangers and possibilities of today: the decimation of 90% of life 250 million years ago and the demise of the Neanderthals 28000 years ago. The essay then attempts to account for the denials and deferrals about capitalist/climate intersections today through an engagement with Nietzsche. It closes with an elaboration of “entangled humanism”, both to challenge humanist exceptionalism and to soften the appearance “post-humanism” sometimes takes to those still mourning the loss of sociocentrism and humanist exceptionalism.