Friday, October 14, 2011

Apocalyptic Animals

Do animals sense an end and limit to human culture and history? Attacks by animals are on the rise.

The final frontier of the human is the nonhuman. If we conquer the nonhuman then it is not a final frontier but rather a repetition of the human conquest that takes place in every space we explore. (See species extinction.) We plant the flag of culture across space and time and call it history and civilization. The final frontier is final only when we get over ourselves. It is final when we give ourselves over to the nonhuman, when we go native in the frontier, when we arrange our human world according to that which we are not. Do we have the hospitality to let the nonhuman change the parameters of culture and reconfigure how we dwell?