37Lawrence Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel With God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 425.
38Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), hereafter cited in the text as W; p. 135.
39Thoreau, ‘A Winter Walk’, The Major Essays, ed. Richard Dillman (Albany, NY: Whitston, 2001), pp. 146–60, p. 149.
40Thoreau, ‘The Natural History of Massachusetts’, hereafter cited in the text as NHM, The Major Essays, pp. 192–211, p. 193.
41Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience’, hereafter cited in the text as CD, Political Writings, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–22, p. 3.
42Thoreau, ‘The Maine Woods’, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, with notes by Robert F. Sayer (New York: Library of America, 1985), pp. 589–845, p. 596.
43Thoreau, ‘Life Without Principle’, hereafter cited in the text as LWP, Political Writings, pp. 103–22, pp. 118–19.
44Robert Lowell, ‘Waking in the Blue’, in Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 184.
45Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories, ed. Colleen Breese, introd. Regina Barreca (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), hereafter cited in the text as CS; p. 35.
46See for instance Parker, CS, p. 204.
47So, too, of course, have historians and literary critics, but more drily and unmisanthropically. For an instructive early example, see Frederick L. Paxson, The Last American Frontier (New York: Macmillan, 1910). Among numerous later instances, see Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Deborah L. Madsen, ‘Discourses of Frontier Violence and the Trauma of National Emergence in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove Quartet’, Canadian Review of American Studies, vol. 39, no. 2 (2009), pp. 185–204.
48Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper (New York: Signet, 1964), p. 167.
49Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Signet, 1961), hereafter cited in the text as LM; pp. 21–2.
50Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, introd. Andrew Sinclair, notes by Michael Lerner (London: Pan, 1972), hereafter cited in the text as HF; p. 272.
51Twain, ‘The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg’, in The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories (New York: Dover, 1992), hereafter cited in the text as MS; pp. 46–7.
52Twain, ‘The Mysterious Stranger’, in MS, p. 78, 83.
53Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, introd. Justin Kaplan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), hereafter cited in the text as CY; p. 144.
54Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (New York: Perennial, 1965), hereafter cited in the text as PW; p. 136.
55Robert A. Jelliffe, Faulkner at Nagano (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1956), p. 88.
56William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), hereafter cited in the text as AA; p. 103.
57Faulkner, Sanctuary (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), hereafter cited in the text as S; p. 147.
58Edmund Wilson, ‘William Faulkner’s Reply to the Civil-Rights Program’, in William Faulkner: Critical Assessments, ed. Henry Claridge (4 vols, East Sussex: Helm Information, 1999), vol. iv, pp. 347–53, p. 353.
59Faulkner, Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion, ed. George Garrett (New York: Modern Library, 1994), hereafter cited in the text as H, T and M; T, p. 372.
60Faulkner, ‘Speech of Acceptance upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature’ (New York: Spiral, 1951).
61Berkeley Carolyn Porter, William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 167.
62Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (London: Picador, 2006), hereafter cited in the text as NC; p. 4.
63McCarthy, The Crossing, hereafter cited in the text as TC, The Border Trilogy (London: Picador, 1998), p. 457.
64McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses, The Border Trilogy, p. 241.
65McCarthy, Blood Meridian: The Evening Redness in the West (London: Picador, 1990), pp. 43, 83.
66McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2007), p. 79.
67Hooker, ‘Meditation’, in Miller and Johnson, Puritans, p. 305.
Conclusion
1For which see Simon Critchley, Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2012); and Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2013).
2See Howard Hotson, ‘Big Business at the Heart of the System: Understanding the Global University Crisis’, at http://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2012/; and the home page of the World Economic Forum at http://www.weforum.org/ (both accessed 30 November 2014).
3See Steve Fuller, ‘Dark Ecology as the Higher Misanthropy’, http://slowlorisblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/dark-ecology-as-the-higher-misanthropy/ (accessed 7 November 2014).
4See Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment, http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/ (accessed 7 November 2014).
5Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2010), pp. 94–5, 101.
6Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 58.
7Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence, pref. Alain Badiou (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 31.
8Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. 49.
9Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 127.
10Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. 52.
11Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), hereafter cited in the text as QA; pp. 110–11.
12Irving Welch, Trainspotting (London: Norton, 1996), p. 187; quoted Halberstam, QA, p. 90.
13Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), hereafter cited in the text as NF; p. 2.
14On the evidence Stefan Herbrechter provides. See his Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
15See for instance Raymond Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999); Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).
16See their Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism (accessed 6 November 2014).
17See Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé: Quand l’impossible est certain (Paris: Seuil, 2004); and Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2003). For a detailed account of this contemporary nightmare and those who subscribe to it, see Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen and James Davis, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Death and Rebirth, foreword Doug Henwood (Oakland: PM Press/Spectre, 2012).
18Ihab Hassan, ‘Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture? A University Masque in Five Scenes’, The Georgia Review, vol. 21, no. 4 (1977), pp. 830–50, at p. 848; quoted Herbrechter, p. 35.
19Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), pp. 3, 35.
20Braidotti, Posthuman, p. 11.
21N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 286.
22Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 76. The second quotation is Braidotti’s paraphrase of Haraway, Posthuman, p. 58.
23Daniel Cottom, Unhuman Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 150.
24Ibid., p. 152.
25Ibid.
26James E. Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 38.
27Greg Garrard is wistful for such faith, but can g
ive no indication of a feasible political programme that would make the ‘voluntary global One Child Policy’ he espouses a reality (as I write, China has just reneged on such a programme). Almost all contemporary liberal, social-democratic and ‘resistant’ optimisms run up against the same problem: trying to provide answers to immensely serious questions in an era that has given up on any serious politics.
28See http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2006/08/01/eco-misanthropes-want-better-living-through-mass-death (accessed 6 November 2014). Scandalously, Pianka was alleged to be a big fan of Ebola.
29Greg Garrard, ‘Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy’, http://www.academia.edu/257407/ (accessed 7 November 2014). Cf. for instance Terre Satterfield, who shows how adept loggers have been in exploiting the negative connotations of eco-misanthropy in their struggle with their opponents. See Anatomy of a Conflict: Identity, Knowledge, and Emotion in Old-Growth Forests (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), pp. 121ff.
30John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2003), hereafter cited in the text as SD; p. 13.
31Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995), hereafter cited in the text as EW; p. 2.
32Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (London: Granta, 1998), pp. 2–3.
33Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), hereafter cited in the text as TF; p. 2.
34Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd (London: Heinemann, 2011), hereafter cited in the text as MT; p. 81, 113.
35Houellebecq and Bernard Henri-Lévy, Public Enemies, trans. Frank Wynne and Miriam Frendo (London: Atlantic, 2011), hereafter cited in the text as PE; p. 172.
36Friends and colleagues, in conversation.
37Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Dorna Khazeni, introd. Stephen King (London: Gollancz, 2008), hereafter cited in the text as HPL; p. 116.
38Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1997), p. 63.
39Pierre Bourdieu, interview with Günter Grass, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZNt1-Ncojs (accessed 7 November 2014).
40Houellebecq, Whatever, trans. Paul Hammond, introd. Toby Litt (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2011), hereafter cited in the text as W; p. 46.
41Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island, trans. Gavin Bowd (London: Phoenix, 2006), hereafter cited in the text as TPI; p. 133.
42See in particular Robert J. Schiller, Finance and the Good Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); and John Kenneth Galbraith, The Good Society: The Humane Agenda (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); also some of the work of Anthony Giddens.
43Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 195.
44See http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sexpistols/anarchyintheuk.html (accessed 7 November 2014). I quote all punk and rap lyrics from the excellent azlyrics archive.
45Quoted John Robb, Punk Rock: An Oral History, ed. Oliver Craske, foreword Michael Bracewell (London: Ebury Press, 2006), p. 163.
46Quoted ibid., p. 246.
47Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 114.
48Quoted Robb, Punk Rock, p. xi.
49Ibid., p. 78.
50Quoted Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 377.
51One obvious example would be the account of punk in that classic point of reference, Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979).
52Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), pp. xvi, 154 and passim.
53Cheryl L. Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), p. 161.
54Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 22–5.
55Rose, Black Noise, pp. 9–10 and passim.
56See Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 143.
57Keyes, Rap Music, p. 90.
58Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Of the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott, introd. Richard S. Peters (New York: Collier, 1978), p. 255.
59Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (2 vols, New York: Dover, 1969), vol. 1, p. 147.
60Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile ou de l’éducation, Œuvres complètes, vol. IV, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, with the collaboration of Pierre Burgelin, Henri Gouhier, John S. Spink, Roger de Vilmorin and Charles Wirz (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 190.
61Ivy Compton-Burnett, Mother and Son (London: Gollancz, 1955), p. 205.
62W. G. Sebald, After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 118.
63Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 192; Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 351.
64Gerard Manley Hopkins, Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2009), p. 167.
65Quoted Herbrechter, Posthumanism, p. 29.
66See for instance http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22002530 (accessed 7 November 2014), for details.
67Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, trans. Michael K. Bourdaghs (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 297–8, 307.
68See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
69Karl Wilhelm Goettling, Gesammelte Abhandlung aus dem Classischen Alterthume (Munich: Friedrich Bruckmann, 1863), p. 251. Goettling’s term is actually ‘proletariat’, but ‘people’ is what he means: the real people, not their ideal reconstruction.
70Kilminster died on 28 December 2015. The character of the tributes that have poured out since has been intriguing.
INDEX
Abelard, Peter here
Adorno, Theodor W. here
Alcibiades here
Alemán y de Enero, Mateo here
Alexander the Great here–here, here
Altman, Robert here
Ambrose, St here
Amis, Martin here
Anderson, John here
Anselm of Canterbury, St here
Antisthenes here
Aquinas, St Thomas here
Aristophanes here
Aristotle here
Arnauld, Antoine here–here
Artabatus (Persian general) here
Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh) here, here, here
Augustine of Hippo, St here, here–here, here, here, here
Augustus Caesar here, here
Austen, Jane here–here
Bacon, Roger here
Badiou, Alain here, here
Baines, Joseph here
Bakhtin, Mikhail here
Ballard, J. G. here
Bambaataa, Afrika here
Banville, John here
Barcos, Martin de here
Bataille, Georges here
Baudelaire, Charles here
Baudrillard, Jean here
Bayle, Pierre here–here
Beaufort, François de Vendôme, duc de here
Beckett, Samuel here, here–here, here, here, here
Bede, the Venerable here
Bell, Florence here
Benjamin, Walter here–here, here, here, here, here, here
Benton, Robert here
Bergerac, Cyrano de here
Bergman, Ingmar here
Bergson, Henri here
Berkeley, Bishop George here
Berlin, Isaiah here, here
Bernard of Clairvaux here
Bernhard, Thomas here
Bias of Priene here
Bion of Borysthenes here
Blanchot, Maurice here
Boileau (Nicolas Bo
ileau-Despréaux) here
Boswell, James here–here
Bourdieu, Pierre here–here
Boyle, Robert William here
Braidotti, Rosi here
Brassier, Ray here
Briggs, Julia here
Brooker, Joseph here, here
Broussel, Pierre here
Brown, Foxy here
Brutus here
Burke, Edmund here
Bush, G. W. here
Bush, Julia here
Bussy, Roger de Rabutin, comte de here
Butler, Josephine here
Buzzcocks (the) here
Byron, Lord George Gordon here
‘Caged’ here
Caligula here–here, here
Calvin, John here, here, here–here, here
Camus, Albert here
Carlyle, Thomas here
Carpenter, John here
Cartwright, David E. here
Cassius here
Cato, Marcus Porcius, the Elder here
Cato, Marcus Porcius, the Younger here
Céitinn, Séathrún (Geoffrey Keating) here
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand here
Chamfort (Sébastien-Roch Nicolas) here–here, here
Charles I (England) here
Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de here
Chouvigny, Claude de, baron de Blot L’Église here
Claudius here–here, here
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor here
Colmore, Gertrude here
Compton-Burnett, Ivy here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here
Comte, Auguste here
Condé, Louis de Bourbon, prince de, known as The Great Condé here–here
Conrad, Joseph here
Conti, Armand de Bourbon-Condé, prince de here, here
Coote, Sir Charles here, here
Coppola, Francis Ford here
Corelli, Marie here
Cornelia (Scipionis Africana) here
Cottom, Daniel here, here–here
Cotton, John here
Cousin, Victor here
Crimp, Martin here
Critchley, Simon here
Cromwell, Oliver here–here, here, here
Cronin, Anthony here, here
Damiens, Robert-François here
Dante Alighieri here, here
Danton, Georges here
David, Larry here
Defoe, Daniel here
Deleuze, Gilles here
Demetrius the Cynic here