But something is causing these statements to be irrevocably read and experienced through a new drama, not the drama of life and death, but a form of death that begins and ends in Nonlife—namely the extinction of humans, biological life, and, as it is often put, the planet itself—which takes us to a time before the life and death of individuals and species, a time of the geos, of soulessness. The modifying phrase “insofar as” now foregrounds the anthropos as just one element in the larger set of not merely animal life but all Life as opposed to the state of original and radical Nonlife, the vital in relation to the inert, the extinct in relation to the barren. In other words, it is increasingly clear that the anthropos remains an element in the set of life only insofar as Life can maintain its distinction from Death/Extinction and Nonlife. It is also clear that late liberal strategies for governing difference and markets also only work insofar as these distinctions are maintained.
Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism Elizabeth A. Povinelli
