Mark Schmitt (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) | Embracing Extinction: Pessimist Epistemology and Lost Futures

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in pessimist philosophy and its diversification, from afropessimism to queer pessimism, antinatalism and eco-pessimism. As a philosophy of time, pessimism points to the lost futures haunting the present – whether it is the (no-)future of the unborn child, the (no-)future and the being stuck in the present of Black and queer bodies and subjects, or the death of species, the Earth and even the universe. In my presentation, I will illustrate how pessimist narratives of disruption in philosophy, literary fiction and cinema offer epistemological approaches that allow us to know time and humanity differently, taking non-being and the ahuman as its horizon of futurity.