Event overview
Claire Colebrook (online) and in conversation with Adrian Heathfield (live)
The imagination of the end of the world has been figured, more often than not, as the end of the archive. What might a world without books, monuments and art objects look like? Well before extinction studies and post-apocalyptic cinema started to meditate upon a world without an archive, there has been a long literary meditation on the end of the book.
One way of understanding the figure of an archive-free world is traditionally apocalyptic: at the end of time inscription will give way to immediate intuition. Another way of understanding the possibility of the end of the book is to think about forms of archive beyond the privatized and state form of the individual work. What might a positive sense of ends and extinctions look like?
Claire Colebrook is the author of New Literary Histories (Manchester UP, 1997), Ethics and Representation (Edinburgh UP, 1999), Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum 1997), Gilles Deleuze (Routledge 2002), Understanding Deleuze (Allen and Unwin 2002), Irony in the Work of Philosophy (Nebraska UP, 2002), Gender (Palgrave 2003), Irony (Routledge 2004), Milton, Evil and Literary History (Continuum 2008), Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (Continuum 2010), and William Blake and Digital Aesthetics (Continuum 2011). She co-authored Theory and the Disappearing Future with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller (Routledge 2011), and co-edited Deleuze and Feminist Theory with Ian Buchanan (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), Deleuze and History with Jeff Bell (Edinburgh 2008), Deleuze and Gender with Jami Weinstein (Edinburgh UP 2009) and Deleuze and Law (Palgrave) with Rosi Braidotti and Patrick Hanafin.
Colebrook has written articles on visual culture, poetry, literary theory, queer theory and contemporary culture. She recently completed two books on Extinction for Open Humanities Press: The Death of the Posthuman, and Sex After Life, and has co-authored (with Jason Maxwell) Agamben (Polity, 2015) and (with Tom Cohen and J.Hillis Miller) Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (Open Humanities Press, 2016). Her most recent book is Who Would You Kill to Save the World? (Nebraska UP, 2023). She is now completing a book on fragility (of the species, the archive and the earth).
Part of the series:
sensing ends — outliving wreckage
organised by Adrian Heathfield
This talks series gathers artistic and theoretical voices to address various historical and recent, ‘natural’ and human generated disasters, as well as singular instances of catastrophic imaginaries. As human extinction awareness thickens and extends across the globe, the series asks in what ways we can respond to and surpass the growing material wreckage and its shadows.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 21 Mar 2024 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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