ABSTRACT
One crucial aspect of our temporal experience of the Anthropocene is a sense of futurelessness powered by a fear of imminent species extinction. This chapter shows how literature and literary theory have not only been concerned with this theme, but also with the (slightly different) fear that the human will survive its own demise as a mere residue, as a trace whose meaning it can no longer control. Shifting the issue from a fear of extinction to an anxiety over human insignificance, the chapter surveys four affective dispositions through which contemporary literature and philosophy confront that anxiety: denial (in the wildly popular genre of the post-catastrophe novel), detachment, indifference (in transhumanism and speculative realism), and outright misanthropy (in anti-natalism and exterminism). The chapter reads literary works by William Gibson, Ben Lerner, Donna Haraway, and Richard McGuire that engage with these different modalities in turn.
