Beginning from Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of destiny in Difference and Repetition, Professor Claire Colebrook will look at the temporality of the ends of humanity. The end of humans as a species may be a specifically modern and secular notion, but the possibility of thinking of humanity as a fragment of deep time goes well beyond modern Western thought to a mythic conception of the cosmos. On the one hand, resignation in the face of extinction amounts to nothing more than a passive and entitled nihilism. On the other hand, a sense of a world without and beyond ‘us’ enables a radical and minor temporality.

Claire Colebrook is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Penn State University. She is the author of numerous works on visual culture, poetry, literary theory, queer theory and contemporary culture. More recently, she has been the co-editor, with Tom Cohen, of a series of monographs for Open Humanities Press: Critical Climate Change. 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 work is a book on fragility (of the species, the archive and the earth): Fragility: Species, Planet, Archive (Durham: Duke University Press, Forthcoming).