Quenched: Five Fires for Thinking Extinction

Jemma Deer

‘extinction’, from the Latin ‘ex’, intensive, and ‘stinguĕre’, to quench

—Oxford English Dictionary
The most effective agent in the extinction of species is the pressure
of other species.
—Alfred Russell Wallace1

Quick: it is a matter of life, and speed. The extinction crisis is not a

crisis of extinction as such, for this is a necessary process of evolution
(extinction is as creative as mutation or speciation); it is instead a matter
of quickness—of things moving too fast or too slow. The crisis today
is not that species are going extinct, but rather that rates of extinction
are far outpacing those of speciation.2 The speed of genetic adaptation
is incommensurable to the speed at which conditions are changing.
‘In the beginning there will have been speed ’, as Jacques Derrida
remarked in his thinking of a different extinction crisis: that of the
nuclear threat.3 Today, the earth is again faced with a fatal—and
anthropogenic—acceleration. In what follows I match Derrida’s ‘Seven
Missiles, Seven Missives’ with five fires: five thoughts for the ‘total
and remainder-less destruction of the archive’ that occurs every time
a species goes extinct.4 While Derrida’s archive was that of literature
and culture, the archive at risk today is the singular and irretrievable
archive of evolutionary history. For if the nuclear threat can be thought,
as Derrida suggests, in terms of what might be sent (missiles or missives
that trace a certain logic of localisation and linear trajectory, with points
of dispatch and arrival—even if the ‘aleatory dimension’ of such logic

The Oxford Literary Review 41.1 (2019): 1–17

DOI: 10.3366/olr.2019.0262
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/olr
2 Oxford Literary Review

cannot be foreclosed5 ), the extinction crisis today is a matter of dispersal

that is even less controllable: it spreads like wildfire, without direction.
The difference between a destructive blaze and a total holocaust might
rest on a change in the weather.

First fire: the future is burning

‘Soon it would be too hot.’6 Out of the teeming ground of the opening
sentence of J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World, a dense
grove of questions emerge, crowding each other like the ‘massive olive-
green fronds’ of the ‘giant gymnosperms’ that make this view from a
‘hotel balcony’ decidedly strange (7). How soon is soon? On which
time scale are we to read this line? Would it be too hot in a matter
of hours, weeks, years, or centuries? And what are we to make of the
strange folded temporality of the soon-would combination? Surely it
should read ‘soon it will be too hot’? Or has the imagined future of the
‘soon’ somehow already happened? When is the ‘now’ from which this
statement issues? What is the ‘it’ that will or would be too hot? The
time? the place? the world? For who or what will it be ‘too hot’? Too
hot to think? Too hot to bear? Or too hot to live? How hot is too hot?
This last question is one with which the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change has been grappling of late, as elaborated in the
792 pages of its October 2018 Special Report on ‘the impacts of
global warming of 1.5◦ C above pre-industrial levels’.7 The report is
permeated with parentheses—‘(low confidence)’; ‘(medium confidence)’;
‘(high confidence)’—as science leaves its solid base of observation for
the treacherous marshland of future predictions. If you pick your way
over this perforate ground, carefully edging around all these prediction-
caveat symbioses, on page 176 you will happen upon a wormhole that
opens out in the year 2100. The following scene unfolds:

The world as it was in 2020 is no longer recognisable, with decreasing

life expectancy, reduced outdoor labour productivity, and lower
quality of life in many regions because of too frequent heatwaves
and other climate extremes. Droughts and water resources stress
renders agriculture economically un-viable in some regions and [. . .]
poverty rates reach new highs. Major conflicts take place. Almost all
ecosystems experience irreversible impacts, species extinction rates
are high in all regions, forest fires escalate, and biodiversity strongly
Jemma Deer 3

decreases [. . .]. Life, for many indigenous and rural groups, becomes
untenable in their ancestral lands. The retreat of the West Antarctic
ice sheet accelerates, leading to more rapid SLR [sea level rise].
Several small island states give up hope to survive in their place and
look to an increasingly fragmented global community for refuge.8

In a section that gives us ‘storylines of possible worlds resulting from

different mitigation options’, this is ‘one possible storyline’ of the
range of ‘worse-case scenarios’ that the authors of the IPCC report
envisage—a scenario in which we reach 3◦ C of warming by 2100.9
It describes a future in which, ‘despite past pledges, the international
support for the Paris Agreement starts to wane. [. . .] CO2 emissions
are reduced at local and national level but efforts are limited and
not always successful.’10 As a ‘worse-case scenario’ we would expect
it to be bleak, but what is perhaps most disturbing here is not the
promised monstrosity of a world ‘no longer recognisable’, but rather
the realisation that much of what is being described here (heatwaves,
droughts, increased extinction rates, fires) has already begun to occur.
Unlike the ‘fabulously textual’ nature of the nuclear threat (‘a nuclear
war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it’), climate
chaos is already happening.11 Given that the IPCC’s work is rendered
somewhat tokenistic by governments that continue to subsidise and
support fossil fuels, arriving at a world akin to that of this ‘worse-case
scenario’ would be devastating, but it would hardly come as a surprise.
As Jeremy Davies writes, ‘at present the world’s total indicated fossil
fuel reserves hold another 780 billion tons of carbon, and the global
economy rests on the curious supposition that all of it will shortly
be extracted and burned.’12 The future, in economic terms, is already
burning.
Those that would accuse me of catastrophising by choosing to
quote the worse-case scenario can rest uneasy in the knowledge
that even the mid-case scenario holds little comfort. Here, the
‘international community continues to largely support the Paris
Agreement’ (and how much turns upon the quiet disaster announced
by the word ‘largely’? Could we read in this a subtle metonymy
of a dissenting president who has been known to use the word
‘bigly’?), agreeing on ‘reduction targets for CO2 emissions’ which
are ‘not ambitious enough to reach stabilisation at 2◦ C warming,
4 Oxford Literary Review

let alone 1.5◦ C.’13 This projected failure of ambition (which would
fall perfectly in line with the governmental response to the IPCC’s
work over the last three decades) would result in ‘deadly heatwaves’,
‘droughts’, ‘major flooding’, ‘increasing levels of public unrest
and political destabilisation’, ‘elimination of coral reef ecosystems’,
‘greatly’ increased ‘extinction rates’ and ‘very significant’ increase in
‘levels of poverty and disadvantage’.14 Any one of these ‘mid-case’
outcomes would be cause for major alarm, but of course the radical
interconnection of climate change brings the threat of the whole
assemblage.
‘Soon it would be too hot.’ ‘The world as it was in 2020 is no longer
recognisable’. There is something in the folded temporalities of these
two phrases that captures the proleptic nostalgia of the Anthropocene,
in which we find ourselves looking back on the future as if it were the
past, as if turning our gaze like this might work to reverse the course of
history.

Second fire: im/possible return

One of the keywords of climate change literature is ‘irreversibility’—
the notion that the changes being wrought are permanent, that they
cannot be undone.15 For the most part, however, talk of irreversibility
is couched within a particular scale: that of the Holocene and the
history of human civilisation. The irreversible rising of sea levels,
the irreversible increase in temperature, the irreversible increase in
atmospheric CO2 —all of these things are entirely reversible, given
enough time. The stable world of the Holocene is in fact ‘unusual’
when considered within the dynamic oscillations that characterise the
broader geologic timescale.16 That given, one could read the current
trends not as irreversibles, but as reversals tending towards one of
the planet’s previous states. Such a thought is not to downplay the
severity of the climate crisis—and nor is it to suggest that today’s global
warming is not anthropogenic—but rather it is to draw attention to
the particularly myopic gaze from which we demarcate our baselines
and objectives, and which tends to efface the dynamics of broader
geophysical temporality.
There is one process, however, by which the notion of ‘irreversibility’
holds true at any scale: that of extinction. Whereas the other markers
of climate change are bidirectional—sea level, atmospheric CO2
Jemma Deer 5

and temperature can all increase and decrease given the appropriate
conditions and timescales—extinction, like burning, only goes one
way. Even if new speciation counteracts extinction and thereby keeps
overall biodiversity at a ‘constant’ (and the current increased extinction
rates far outpace possible speciation17 ), this constant is different from
all the others in that it can be considered qualitatively and not just
quantitively. While total biodiversity might increase and decrease
over time in the same way that sea level can, no future biodiversity
could be qualitatively the same as it has ever been in the past.
Extinction is irreversible. As such, the thought of extinction—the
radical irretrievability which is the condition and threat for life as
such—perhaps holds the most force for conveying the critical urgency
of the Anthropocene. Even if the planet can return to a previous
climatic state, there will be no going back to life.
The Drowned World, Ballard’s haunting and prescient novel with
which I opened, takes the kind of long view that troubles notions
of climate change as a one-way process. Sixty or seventy years before
the time of the narrative, ‘violent and prolonged solar storms’ have
set off a process of runaway global warming, which brings about a
future that is figured as a recapitulation of the past (21). As one of
the biologists tasked with studying the planetary regressions puts it,
‘in response to the rises in temperature, humidity and radiation levels
the flora and fauna of this planet are beginning to assume once again
the forms they displayed the last time such conditions were present—
roughly speaking, the Triassic’ (42). This is a world of ‘continuous heat
waves’, in which ‘tropical areas rapidly [become] uninhabitable’ (23).
The unrelenting heat brings with it ‘rising waterlevels’, ‘encroaching
jungle’, a ‘steady decline in mammalian fertility’ and a ‘growing
ascendancy of amphibian and reptile forms best adapted to an aquatic
life in the lagoons and swamps’ (22, 23). The pre-human state to
which the planet is returning brings with it the threat of a post-human
state, as the necessary conditions for human societies diminish. The
paragons of civilisation—the cities of Europe and North America—
are either drowned by lagoons or ‘smother[ed]’ by ‘giant forests’ (19).
They are frequented only by a few renegade scavengers, and small teams
of military scientists tasked with studying the transformed ecosystems
and mapping the swampy new landscapes. We learn that there are
‘fewer than five million people [. . .] still living on the polar caps’, and
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that—because of the increased solar radiation—‘the birth of a child had

become a comparative rarity’ (23). Robert Kerans, one of the biologists
posted at the lagoons submerging what was once London, conceives
of this ever-decreasing human population in terms of a reversal: he
imagines that ‘the genealogical tree of mankind was systematically
pruning itself, apparently moving backwards in time, and [that] a point
might ultimately be reached where a second Adam and Eve found
themselves alone in a new Eden’ (23).
Ballard’s novel comes to us with renewed force today not (or not
only) because it is premised on runaway global warming, but rather
because of the ways in which it presents the thought of extinction as
the extinction of thought. If ‘a second Adam and Eve found themselves
alone in a new Eden’, as Kerans imagines, there would also be a passing
back from knowledge to non-knowledge, a return to innocence and
unashamed nudity, an undoing of the fall. In Genesis, the knowledge
attained by eating the forbidden fruit is reflective: it is consciousness
as self-consciousness, sight that turns back on itself. ‘And the eyes of
them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked’ (3:7).
To reverse this process would be to relinquish sight for blindness, to
pass out of thought as if into the deep rest of a dreamless sleep. Ballard’s
novel gives us to think the coming or returning of a world in which
there are no eyes (or ‘I’s) to see, and in which knowledge or truth can
always fall into senselessness, some ‘last meaningless register of sanity’
in a world without readers (63).

Third fire: the end of the word

In The Drowned World, the ‘backward journey’ of the ‘external
landscape’ stirs ancient pre-human memories and sends thought on its
own devolutionary voyage ‘into the archaeopsychic past’ (44). As one
of Kerans’s colleagues explains, ‘each one of us is as old as the entire
biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great
sea of its total memory’ (44):

I am convinced that as we move back through geophysical time

so we [. . .] move back through spinal and archaeopsychic time,
recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch,
each with a distinct geological terrain, its own unique flora and
Jemma Deer 7

fauna [. . .]. If we let these buried phantoms master us as they

re-appear we’ll be swept back helplessly in the flood-tide like pieces
of flotsam. (44–5)

And indeed, as the novel progresses, many of the characters find

themselves being helplessly swept back. At first they experience
recurrent dreams in which they feel themselves irresistibly drawn by
the ‘tremendous drumming’ of the ‘spectral sun’ towards the ‘amnionic
paradise’ of prehistoric lagoons (71, 70). Then, waking life is invaded
by a sense of, as Kerans puts it, ‘diminishing control over [their] own
motives’ (39), and the borders between the real world and dreamscapes
begin to break down—‘the residues of the dreams’ linger ‘below the
surface of [. . .] reality’ until the ‘terrestrial and psychic landscapes
[become] indistinguishable’ (114, 74). Finally, against the general
move of humanity towards the polar regions and away from the
increasing heat and inhospitable ecosystems, first Lieutenant Hardman
and then Kerans each embark on a lonely ‘southwards odyssey’, their
terrestrial movement tracing their psychic descent into deep time—a
time in which personality, language and thought cease to exist (70).
When Kerans comes across Hardman in the final chapter of the
novel, he is alerted to the latter’s presence in an abandoned temple
by ‘a faint almost inhuman cry [that] sounded thinly into the wet
air, like the groan of a stricken animal’ (170). Even though Hardman
does later manage to speak, he no longer responds to his own
name, nor recognises his former comrade (172). What he does say
issues as a ‘monologue of orders and instructions’, merely automatic
reiterations of his former role, rather than genuine communication
(173). Similarly, Kerans scratches a message on the temple wall before
losing himself in the jungles, but this message is destined to be no
more meaningful than Hardman’s monologue, as he is ‘sure that
no-one would ever read it’ (175). What remains of language is no
longer communicative, and meaning is extinguished in advance.
In Genesis, as I noted above, the fall into knowledge is a fall into
a divided self, a self that is capable of auto-deixis or self-reflection.
Such division would have been inevitable from the moment there
was language. And, of course, language was already there at the
beginning/s—both in the repeated invocations of Genesis, by which
God authors or creates the world (‘and God said . . . ’, 1:1–29), and in
8 Oxford Literary Review

the originary ‘Word’ of the Gospel of John (1:1). The snake (and it is
of course a speaking snake) tempts Eve with meaning or understanding,
promising that if she eats the fruit she ‘will be like God, knowing good
and evil’ (3:5).18 The fall, then, might be thought as a fall upwards,
from the sensuous ground of direct apprehension to the transcendent
ideality of concepts: not only, the snake promises, will you know what
is meant by ‘good’ and ‘evil’, but you will also know what it is ‘like’
to be God. The lure is not that you will be God, but you will be
like God—and so the differential wandering of language begins: an
asymptotic striving towards a meaning at which it is not possible to
arrive.
The implicit intuition of the Bible—that the promise or the
thought of language goes before human consciousness—correlates
with a modern philosophy of mind. In From Bacteria to Bach and
Back: The Evolution of Minds, Daniel Dennett suggests that the
emergence of consciousness needs language. The ‘human mind, the
comprehending mind, is [. . .] a product of symbiosis’, combining
‘two largely independent legacies’ of evolution: genetically-evolved
primate brains and memetically-evolved language.19 On this view,
human consciousness did not exist prior to language, but rather the
initial iterations of primitive linguistic structures (that is, repetitions of
verbal signs and nonverbal habits and gestures—or ‘memes’) were the
necessary basis for consciousness to emerge.
One of the several ways through which Dennett develops this
idea is in terms of the language acquisition of children. Rather than
children learning words and meanings together, Dennett suggests that
‘phonology comes first, creating a node or focus in the brain for the
auditory signature of the word, and then this becomes the basis [. . .]
for the semantics and syntax to develop around the sound’.20 Likewise,
he suggests, early hominids would have been saying things—making
and repeating sounds and gestures—before they were consciously
meaning things (just as Kerans and Hardman, on their backwards
journeys, revert to locution devoid of import). There is a link to be
made here between this idea of pre-conscious memetic evolution and
Derrida’s notion of the trace as ‘prelinguistic’ and ‘the possibility of
language’.21 Memes—or ‘culturally transmitted informational entities’
in Dennett’s terms—are not limited to human language (in a narrow
or broad sense), nor even to humans (we are not the only animals who
Jemma Deer 9

reproduce memes22 ), but their iterable structure is the precondition for

the development of human language. Whether, as Dennett suggests,
it was this language that made human consciousness possible remains
a matter for speculation, but I wonder if we could imagine an alien
species that has evolved self-consciousness without some form of
language? The perceived or perceivable space between what is noticed
and what notices—that is, the possibility of saying or feeling ‘I’, of
seeing oneself as if from the outside (which is necessary to know
that you are naked, or to feel shame)—seems to me to depend upon
the differential structure made possible by language in a broad sense.23
Or, as Derrida puts it in Speech and Phenomena, the ‘movement of
differance is not something that happens to a transcendental subject; it
produces a subject.’24
This notion considered alongside the extraordinary benefit conveyed
upon hominids through their coming to consciousness would make it
unlikely that human consciousness as self-consciousness is or will be
unique in the universe (so long as, of course, life arises more than once),
and so it is possible the ‘extinction’ of thought might—some place or
some time—be revealed to be merely a death.

Fourth fire: extinct metaphor

The word ‘extinction’ comes from the Latin ‘stinguĕre’, to quench.
It is a matter of putting out fires, of extinguishing or dousing
‘anything burning or shining’. Its senses of annihilation, of total
destruction or blotting out, and of the extermination of living beings
are based, then, on a figuration of life as fire or light. The ‘ex-’ is
an intensification of what is already present in the ‘quench’, which
is itself defined as ‘put out, extinguish, douse (a fire or flame)’.
(The definition is, then, curiously circular or self-extinguishing: to
‘extinguish’ is etymologically to ‘out-quench’, and to ‘quench’ is
repeatedly defined as to ‘extinguish’.) Like ‘extinguish’, ‘quench’ also
passes into metaphorical uses: it is to kill or exterminate, to suppress or
oppress, to slake thirst or hunger, to silence or quell, to destroy sight or
cause blindness.25
In several texts, Derrida talks about the radical metaphoricity of
language, where the relation between what is said and what is meant
cannot escape or foreclose the fact that meaning will never be pure
or present in itself: there is no ‘literal’ language or ‘proper’ meaning
10 Oxford Literary Review

that is not born of, or borne away by, the irreducible movement
of metaphor.26 This is the case even or especially when the metaphorical
sense of a word has been forgotten or effaced. In ‘White Mythology:
Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, Derrida notes how

there are said to be inactive metaphors, which have no interest at all

since the author did not think of them, and since the metaphorical
effect is to be studied in the field of consciousness. The traditional
opposition between living and dead metaphors corresponds to the
difference between effective and extinct metaphors.27

Effaced, inactive or extinct metaphors are the unconscious of language,

a force that moves beyond or before thought, out of sight and out
of mind. The idea of extinction is itself one of the so-called ‘extinct
metaphors’ to which Derrida refers. The metaphor of extinction has,
then, been doused or extinguished by the very obliterative force that it
names. When we speak of extinction today we do not hear the hiss of
doused flame, nor smell the smoke rising from the ashes. The so-called
‘original’ meaning of a word or text is as vulnerable as life, and there is
no future into which its arrival can be absolutely guaranteed.
In ‘White Mythology’, the sun is the ‘prime mover of metaphor,
the father of all figures. Everything turns around it, everything turns
toward it’ (WM, 243). (And in Genesis too, the first sign of a sign is
the sun: ‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the
heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and
for seasons, and for days, and years’, 1:14, emphasis added.) The central
or axial position of the sun posits a kind of pure univocality (nothing is
like the sun; there is only one sun); and it gives the light by which we
wake and watch, the light of reason and knowledge, of enlightenment;
the light by which we orient ourselves. It is the condition for clarity, for
evidence (from the Latin vidēre, to see), for unambiguity. It is the first
sign of transcendence, transcending, as it does, everything under the
sun (nothing can be ‘above’ the sun). In its rise and fall, the sun is the
figure of ascendance and descendance, of appearing and disappearing.
At the same time, because it is always beyond knowledge (too bright
to look at directly, too far away, too large and hot to grasp), it is a
centre or a meaning that is always in eclipse or ellipse: hidden, absent,
divided. What makes sight or insight possible is also a blind spot.
Jemma Deer 11

And so ‘every metaphor which implies the sun (as tenor or vehicle)
does not bring clear and certain knowledge’ (WM, 250). The sun is
both possibility and impossibility of pure, unequivocal meaning; its
singular and original light can only be re-presented through the eclipse
of metaphor, analogy or figure. The sun would also be, then, the first
figure of a fire that is extinguishable or quenchable, the first light at risk
of going out. For every meaning that rises or arises in language, there is
the fatal risk of extinction into dusk or darkness.
It is significant, then, that the movement set off by the thought of
extinction in The Drowned World is a movement towards the sun.
The thought of a world without humans is the threat of a descent
into meaninglessness, every trace of meaning to be submerged like the
sunken cities of former Europe, doused and left as unreadable remains.
Whereas, as Derrida notes in ‘No Apocalypse’, any individual death
‘can always give rise to a symbolic work of mourning, with memory,
compensation, internalisation, idealisation, displacement, and so on’,
the thought of ‘an absolute nuclear catastrophe [. . .] would irreversibly
destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity’.28 If the world is
drowned, the possibility of any ‘symbolic work’ drowns with it: there
will be no reading through which meaning can survive. But is the
journey south a movement towards pure meaning, towards an originary
and unequivocal signifier (there is only one sun), or is this a movement
towards an absence of meaning, towards the dark and formless void of
pre-Eden, the black core at the centre of light? Or is there, finally, any
difference between the two?
On the first page of the novel we read that ‘the solar disc was no
longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned
out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball’ (7). The shape
of an ellipse (from the Greek ‘´

´

’, to come short) is a kind
of de-formed circle that has been flattened and has two foci, or two
‘central’ points. The sun as ellipse thus falls short of univocality, or
of circumscribed definition (it is ‘no longer a well-defined sphere’).
The strangeness of the figurations in this line are reflective of the
sun’s dis/appearance as object of perception. What should be a matter
of seeming, of subjective perception as opposed to ‘reality’—the sun
surely only appears to be non-spherical, only appears to be a ‘wide
expanding ellipse’—is rendered as fact: it ‘was’. Meanwhile, the rather
more ‘accurate’ description of the sun as ‘a colossal fire-ball’ is relegated
12 Oxford Literary Review

to the status of a simile: the sun is, we are told, ‘like a colossal fire-ball’.
How can the sun be merely like a colossal fire-ball? Surely if there is a
colossal fire-ball, it is the sun? As Beatrice wonders to Kerans later in
the novel, ‘How many suns are there, do you think?’ (131). There is, it
appears, no one sun.
Ellipse is also ellipsis, the grammatical mark of absence, three dots
which signal that something that has been left out. Ellipsis is, as Derrida
remarks in ‘White Mythology’, what structures metaphor, the invisible
mark of the absent meaning that is always left to the ‘chance and risk’
of conjecture (WM, 241). The metaphor of extinction leaves blank the
relation between life and that which is extinguishable or quenchable.
Is life to be understood as fire, or light, or thirst? And, as there is
no language that escapes or gets outside of metaphor, ellipsis is also
what structures or makes possible language in general. Ellipsis turns
language into desire, into a thirst for or striving towards something
always unattainable. Or perhaps desire turns into language, turns in
language. ‘According to the elliptical syllogism of mimesis, the pleasure
of knowing always accommodates itself to the marking absence of
its object. It is even born of this accommodation. The mimeme is
neither the thing itself nor something totally other’ (WM, 240, n.43).
As such, ellipse becomes eclipse: one can only look at the sun when
it is hidden—either by the moon or language. One can never look
at it directly; one can never arrive in it or at it. The sun blinds
and burns.
When Kerans finds Hardman in the abandoned temple, the latter’s
condition seems to speak the fatal insatiability of the desire to get at the
sun. We read that his hand ‘rose like a hand from a grave and pointed at
the sun as if identifying it’ (170–1). The identification can only ever be
approximate, can only be made through the dark and protective glass
of an ‘as if’. And Hardman is now almost blind, his sight quenched by
too much light:

The dirt and raw sun-blistered skin around the deep eye sockets
turned them into blackened funnels, at the base of which a dull
festering gleam reflected faintly the distant sun. Both eyes were
almost completely occluded by corneal cancers, and Kerans guessed
that they would be able to see little more than the dying sun. As the
disc fell away behind the jungle in front of them and the dusk swept
Jemma Deer 13

like a pall through the grey rain, the man’s head raised itself painfully,
as if trying to retain the image that had burnt itself so devastatingly
upon his retinas, then slumped to one side against his stone pillow.
(171)

The object of Hardman’s attention appears only to disappear: as a

‘distant’ and ‘faint’ reflection; as a ‘burnt’ ‘image’. Even though it is
apparently the sun that is ‘dying’, shrouded by the ‘pall’ of dusk, it
is Hardman that ‘slump[s]’ in a death-like torpor against his ‘stone
pillow’, as if his life, or at least his reason for being, depended upon it.
And just as sight here ends in a failure to see, the journey southwards,
for Kerans and Hardman, can only fail to arrive—you can only go so far
south before you start moving away from the sun. The closest they will
come is the infinite equivocation of the equator, at which point any
further movement will be arrested, and the passage towards meaning
will have been revealed as irreducibly asymptotic.

Fifth fire: the ends of thought

In ‘The End of All Things’, Immanuel Kant imagines the end of
time, which, he suggests, can only be conceived as a ‘fall into total
thoughtlessness’.29 The notion, he writes, ‘that at some point a time
will arrive in which all alteration (and with it, time itself) ceases—this
is a representation which outrages the imagination.’30 The thought of
extinction as the extinction of thought is a thought that cannot get
going, that annihilates itself before it has even begun. But if we outrage
our imaginations for a time (for this time precisely, a time that calls for a
thinking of extinction), and accept that there will be an end to thought,
what will have been the end of thought? To what end do we think at
all? What would it ‘mean’ for human consciousness to go extinct? Or,
rather, since such an event would not mean anything to anyone, what
does the thought of extinction mean for us now, while we still live to
think?
A century or more after the dawn of psychoanalysis, we may (or
may not) have learnt to be wary of the reason of reason, but perhaps
we can still trust in the radically non-teleological, mindless ‘reasoning’
of evolution. Might we deduce an end for thought from the reason
for its beginning? In order to do so it will be necessary to pass
back from human reason (why?) to evolutionary reasons (what for?).
14 Oxford Literary Review

(Dennett notes how the difference between these two species of reasons
is, like all evolutionary difference, one of degree and not kind.31 ) From
an evolutionary perspective, for what did human consciousness evolve?
What is it about consciousness and its use of language (or even language
and its use of consciousness; Dennett wonders whether ‘we are just
apes with brains being manipulated by memes in much the way we are
manipulated by the cold virus’32 ) that was beneficial enough for it to
be reproduced? How did the symbiosis of the primate brain and words
make for perhaps the most successful and potent organism in earth’s
history so far: homo sapiens?
It is, again, a matter of speed. Genetic and memetic evolution are
structurally the same. They are both forms of evolution by natural
selection: ways of information being developed through reproduction
and modification. For billions of years of earth’s history, organic
reproduction was an effective, but slow, means of transmitting
information and refining ‘ideas’. In human language, information can
be passed on much more quickly and efficiently, bypassing the huge
energy expenditure needed to create a new generation of organisms.
Coupled with the inward reflection enabled by consciousness (organic
evolution can only test ideas in the real world, human minds can test
things imaginatively and therefore at orders of magnitude faster), this
was a ‘great acceleration’ the likes of which the planet had not seen.
This newfound speed left genetic adaption in the dust: the quickening
of human thought was the beginning of the end for many species of
megafauna in the Pleistocene, as well as being the main pressure of the
current end-Holocene extinction crisis.
So the answer to the ‘what for?’ question is speed. But I want to
suggest that the answer to the ‘why?’ question might be that too.
I opened this article by noting that the speed of genetic adaptation
is incommensurable to the speed at which conditions are changing,
the cataclysmic events of Holocene-Anthropocene transition. At the
evolutionary timescale, species have no more time to adapt to newly
hostile conditions than human beings in the blast zone of a nuclear
bomb would have to run away. Perhaps it is just by chance that the
evolution of a creature quick and clever enough to alter the planet’s
systems at every level is also the evolution of a creature that can
see and know what it is doing, and can place these acts into ethical
categories. (Or perhaps insight is a necessary symptom of acceleration,
Jemma Deer 15

a protective mechanism against the destructive force of blind speed.)

Either way, this chance is our chance, and the only chance for
innumerable other species of life on earth. Even if the notion of true
responsibility cannot be upheld against the undertow of unconscious
forces, human consciousness is the only process capable of responding
to today’s planetary transformations at the requisite speed. If we have
responsibility, then it is to act quickly.

Notes
1
Alfred Russell Wallace, Island Life: Or, the Phenomena and Causes of Insular Faunas
and Floras, Including a Revision and Attempted Solution of the Problem of Geological
Climates (1880) (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2013), 61.
2
‘The incipient sixth mass extinction that started during the Late Pleistocene
has been diagnosed by extremely elevated modern extinction rates compared
with background levels’; Matt Davis, Søren Faurby and Jens-Christian Svenning,
‘Mammal diversity will take millions of years to recover from the current
biodiversity crisis’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115:44
(Oct 2018), 11262.
3
Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven
Missives’, translated by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, in Psyche: Inventions
of the Other, vol. I, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford
University Press, 2007), 387.
4
Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse’, 400.
5
Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse’, 395, 405.
6
J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (London, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1992), 7. Further
references given parenthetically.
7
IPCC, Global warming of 1.5◦C. An IPCC special report on the impacts of global
warming of 1.5◦C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission
pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate
change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty, 1.4. Available online
at http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/, consulted 20 November 2018. Pagination
restarts with each chapter, and so the page numbers I reference are prefixed by
the chapter number; for example, ‘1.4’ is ‘chapter 1, page 4’.
8
IPCC, 3.176. The passage in the original is interspersed with parenthetical chapter
references that I have removed for clarity of reading.
9
IPCC, 3.172, 3.175.
10
IPCC, 3.175.
11
Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse’, 393.
16 Oxford Literary Review
12
Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland, California, University of
California Press, 2016), 38–9.
13
IPCC, 3.174.
14
IPCC, 3.174–5.
15
See, for example the citations of the IPCC Report, which include four papers that
have ‘irreversible/irreversibility’ in their titles.
16
James Hansen and Makiko Sato, ‘Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made
Climate Change’, in Climate Change: Inferences from Paleoclimate and Regional
Aspects, edited by André Berger, Fedor Mesinger and Djordje Šijački (Vienna,
Springer, 2012), 39.
17
‘Even if extinction rates slow to preanthropogenic background levels, recovery of
lost PD [phylogenetic diversity] will likely take millions of years’ (Davis, Faurby
and Svenning, 11262).
18
The King James Version translates this as ‘ye shall be as gods’. Here I have quoted
from the Revised Standard Version, to emphasise the similarity or like-ness that is
promised.
19
Daniel Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
(New York and London, Norton, 2017), 389.
20
Dennett, 193.
21
Derrida, ‘I Have a Taste for the Secret’, in Derrida and Ferraris, A Taste for the
Secret, translated by Giacomo Donis (Cambridge, UK, Polity, 2001), 76.
22
Dennett, 282.
23
To be clear, Dennett does not suggest—and nor would I—that language was
fully-formed and then consciousness popped into being. There would have been
an incremental co-evolutionary process where the unconscious repetitions of the
beginnings of language allowed for the differential structure of consciousness
to emerge, which provided the means for language to become more complex
(or differentiated), which in turn allowed for slightly higher comprehension, and so
on and so forth, up to the point that we have a mind capable of complex meaning,
intentional design and experiencing the world through what appears to be a ‘self’.
24
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs,
translated by David Allison (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973), 82.
25
Definitions and etymology of ‘extinction, n.’, ‘extinguish, v.’ and ‘quench, v.’,
OED.
26
See, for example: ‘The Retrait of Metaphor’, translated by Peggy Kamuf, in Psyche:
Inventions of the Other, vol. I, edited by Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford
University Press, 2007); ‘Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book’, in Writing
and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (London and New York, Routledge, 2001);
Jemma Deer 17

and ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of

Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago University Press, 1982).
27
Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, 225–6. Further references are given parenthetically,
with the abbreviation WM.
28
Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse’, 402, 403.
29
Immanuel Kant, ‘The End of All Things’ (1794), in Religion and Rational Theology,
translated and edited by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 227.
30
Kant, 227.
31
Dennett, 40.
32
Dennett, 254.