These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction

A collage-style work in fragments, Lynne Huffer’s These Survivals brings together philosophy, memoir, poetry, and original multimedia artworks to articulate an ethics of living on a devastated planet. Focusing on climate change and mass species extinction, Huffer approaches ruination through assemblages rendered in sharp-edged prose, vibrant color images, and experimental features that include black-out poems, weather reports, and abecedarian essays. She considers her struggles with everyday life and confronts the immensity of extinction across the expanse of geological time, recognizing the self’s insignificance in the context of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year existence. As she moves across autobiographical, political, and literary registers, her abiding theme is the repeated phrase: the fragment remains while the whole crumbles. At every turn, Huffer insists on the fragmentary, provisional nature of anything taken to be whole as well as the impartial conditions under which we write, at times experienced as constraint and at others, freedom. Reveling in interruption, obliquity, and layering, Huffer opens space for thought to emerge in unexpected and innovative ways—ways that are grounded in the material practices of writing and living.

Lynne Huffer is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and the author of, most recently, Foucault’s Strange Eros.