Mark Schmitt (English Cultural Studies | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

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. The presentation illustrated 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.