The Role of the Intellectual in the Age of Extinction

This essay examines “the question of the animal” against a background of contemporary public and academic concern with climate change in the Anthropocene era. He argues that this era, in which humankind’s activities have become the most powerful influence over what happens on the planet, presents a special challenge to the humanist and critical traditions of human studies, which find it difficult, with their unique ways of thought and description, to think about the destruction of the planet and the mass zoological extinction we are witnessing. According to Ilani, human thought never experienced such a total transformation of the world. The fact that the post-nature technological situation is creating unprecedented threats and new forms of violence, whose victims are not only humans, requires us to find ways to introduce, into the conversation, the voices of nonhuman animals and of the plants, the soil, and the various natural phenomena.