HOSTING THE GHOST: ON LIMBO AESTHETICS / Alienocene 9

– It’s not the first time in history that the possibility of vhumanity’s extinction is taken seriously. Let’s think about Günther Anders, highlighting humanity’s capacity to produce its self-destruction thanks to the atomic bomb; let’s think about Hans Jonas, warning us that “the peaceful and constructive use of worldwide technological power” could jeopardize the existence as such of future generations.4 Nowadays, the ecological apocalypse is a welldocumented reality dubbed the Sixth Extinction. The Sixth Extinction does not consist first, as we could believe, in a dramatic fall in the number of species, but in a general decline in animal populations, this de-population is preparing a disappearance of species even greater than what we can already see. What I call the “great depopulation” jeopardizes human life, for human beings will not survive the collapse of the living world.

The great depopulation does not only threaten life, but also death: if the socalled future generations don’t exist, then they will not be able to become ghosts. If they cannot become ghosts, they will not be able to send emissaries in the present. Something seems to vanish, the image of the future is blurred, its outline disappears day after day, and my voice feels something like a void, like the absence of an absence, the echo of words that I cannot remember. I feel like the ghost of a ghost, believe me or I will not even have the possibility to speak to you any longer, I will become some sort of naked nothingness, a gloomy version of Alice’s Cheshire cat:

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Foto: Sylvia John

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