In the spotlight Christine Daigle

What does the apocalypse and/or post-apocalypse mean for you? 

The (post-)apocalypse comes with a necessary inquiry into the nature of the human, the nonhuman, the world, and their interrelations. What does it mean for a world to end? Is it the same as to say the world is ending? For whom is it ending and does this ending offer opportunities for new beginnings? And if we are going to recognize that the world has already ended for some humans—humans whose worlds were taken away by European settler colonialism for example—and for many nonhuman species—species we have driven to extinction in the ongoing 6^th mass extinction event—what do we think is so special about our own extinction, Western humans who tend to be the most privileged globally?

What is your fellowship trying to achieve, which questions is it addressing, and with which methods?

I am working specifically on the notion of joyful extinction. My work explores questions about the end of the world and how to live through it and after (if at all). This presupposes thinking about a post-apocalypse and what it may look like and how transformative it should and would be. Living in the 6^th mass extinction, we are surrounded by a lot of pain and suffering and the depletion of the world as a tremendous number of nonhuman species disappear daily. Can we think of ways to operate a severe correction to our course as humans in order to make it through and limit the amount of suffering? Since it is the most damaging way of existing on earth, can we make our Western humanist way of living extinct? Abandoning our position of mastery posited by humanist exceptionalism, we would be operating a joyful extinction: we would make the future a time and place in which all beings can thrive. 

How does the fellowship project build on or connect to your previous career or biography? 

My academic pathway took me from the existentialist and phenomenological philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir to critical posthumanism and material feminism. I grew increasingly dissatisfied with philosophies that posited a sharp distinction between humans and nonhumans and between humans and nature. I was also unhappy with the view that the human is exceptional and has a right to help itself to natural resources and the lives of nonhumans as it pleases. Critical posthumanism, which rethinks the human from a non-anthropocentrist perspective, provides great tools. Material feminism, with its further emphasis on material entanglements and relations among all beings, allows us to better understand how we are always interconnected both subjectively and materially. I am currently leading the project “Bomb Pulse: Cultural and Philosophical Meaning of Time Signatures in the Anthropocene.” Thinking about temporality and the Anthropocene naturally led me to an in-depth reflection onthe ongoing 6^th mass extinction: the only mass extinction event caused by one species, the human. 

What do you hope to take with you from the project and its results?

The question of rethinking the human has been with me for my whole academic career. I hope to make some headway in thinking and envisioning what it would be like to reconceive ourselves as fully entangled with other beings and the world. I have already started working on that in my last book, but the task is also to think what a world with such post-humanist humans would look like. How would they live together? What kind of cities would they build? What occupations would they pursue? While focusing on extinction at CAPAS, my project is resolutely oriented toward a hopeful future. 

What are the aspects you are looking forward to with respect to input from other disciplines, other perspectives, and the exchange with the fellows and people at CAPAS?

As academics, we often suffer the anxiety of not having read everything we should have! While there is no getting away from this entirely, interacting with and receiving feedback and input from fellows from other disciplines is key to have a better-rounded approach to one’s project. An interdisciplinary setting such as CAPAS is very generative in this sense and although I am only at the beginning of my fellowship as I write this, I have already started to reap the benefits! 

To get some practical advice: What would be the three things you would definitely need in a post-apocalyptic world? 

I need to cheat here because some items on the list require other items for them to be useful. 1- seeds to regrow food. This requires having some gardening handbook because I do not have the knowledge to grow seeds successfully (and very few folks have that knowledge nowadays).

2- boxes of matches. This requires material that can be burned so fires can be made to provide heat and cooking opportunities. Matches alone are not helpful.

3- a pair of vegan Dr. Martens and thick socks. In many end-ofthe-world fiction narratives, footwear is an important concern because walking is the only mode of locomotion and one needs durable shoes and socks that can keep feet dry and warm. 

What are some of your favourite pop culture references to the/an (post)apocalypse?

There are so many! I like any kind of disaster movie even if I find that, overall, they have a tendency to lean toward a happy ending fueled by human ingenuity and techno-optimism: we almost all died but then we did not because we invented the tool we needed or we used our super-smarts! Despite this flaw, these movies still tell us a lot about what kind of anxieties are present in the creation process—whether it is nuclear war, environmental devastation, alien invasion, a zombie apocalypse—and what solutions humans think might be workable. They provide good material to think through serious questions about the nature of the human and how it relates to other beings but also more concrete questions such as, for example, “what three things would I definitely need in a post-apocalyptic world?” 

 

Christine Daigle is Professor of Philosophy at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. She explores material feminism and posthumanism, driven by her interest in the body and vulnerability. At the heart of her research are fundamental questions like: What is the human? How should humans coexist with others? Can we envision a world where all beings thrive rather than merely survive?