What is extinction? : a natural and cultural history of last animals

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. A philosophical and ethical meditation on the implications of extinction for all animal species, human and non-human. "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." -- Back cover Contents 5 Introduction 9 Part I 51 1 Photographing the Last Animal 51 2 Indigeneity and Anthropology in Last Worlds 77 Part II 117 3 Literary Extinctions and the Existentiality of Reading 117 4 Concepts of Extinction in the Holocaust 142 Part III 175 5 Critical Theory for the Critically Endangered 175 6 What Is De-Extinction? 206 Conclusion 239 Acknowledgments 255 Notes 259 Index 287