Volume XII, Issue II, Spring 2019
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ANDREW JOHNSON<br />
Twilight of the Humans:<br />
Nietzsche, Dismal Politics, and the Coming Planetary<br />
Apocalypse 1<br />
Andrew Johnson<br />
Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.<br />
-Wernher von Braun<br />
There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your<br />
own cold legs...<br />
-Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow 775)<br />
§ I – A Fable: “Humanity is Dead!”<br />
The death of all future generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain<br />
of the living. Human civilization has charted a one-way, irreversible course<br />
towards the end of history, planetary destruction, civilizational collapse, and the<br />
extinction of the human species. We (a general, amorphous, and problematic<br />
“we”) live in doomed days. The horizon of possibilities has grown dark and<br />
midnight approaches. A capitalistic death-drive prepares to ‘immanentize the<br />
eschaton’. Shrouded in darkness, the human herd scatters and scurries, screaming<br />
that ‘now, finally now, is the time to act,’ before neoliberal global capitalism makes<br />
all that is solid melt into air!<br />
Political thought has yet to acknowledge that the contemporary moment is<br />
shrouded by the coming planetary apocalypse. Distracted by triumphant<br />
aggrandizements about democracy, rising standards of living, and declining rates<br />
of political violence, few soothsayers predict the eclipse of the foundational ideas<br />
which have determined the politics of the past several centuries (e.g. civil<br />
disobedience, contract, legitimacy, liberty, tolerance, separation of powers, rights,<br />
etc.). Unmoored, there is little guarantee that the search for new ideas will be<br />
1 I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the Nihilism.Hope conference<br />
at the University of Victoria (April 2016), who provided feedback on an earlier draft.<br />
Acknowledgements also go to Michael Lang, Gregory Jones-Katz, Joshua Trevino, Doug<br />
English, and Jovian Radheshwar for their inspiration, fellowship, and support. Apologies<br />
to the nameless numbers not acknowledged whose influence nevertheless haunts these<br />
pages.<br />
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