‘The Promised End’: Shakespeare and Extinction

Beginning with philosopher Ray Brassier’s idea of extinction – a cosmological fact according to contemporary science, an annihilation where matter itself dissipates into elementary particles, undoing the correlationist impulse to figure the autonomous human mind as the motor of history, “the thought of the absence of thought” (Nihil Unbound 229-230) – this chapter recontextualizes the critical tradition of Shakespeare’s futurity in a moment where economic, political, and ecological disasters loom ever larger. How might Shakespeare’s work help us theorize a future not of tradition, heritage, and continuity, but rather one of radical difference, loss, and discontinuity? This chapter first considers King Lear’s critical history as an allegory of religious apocalypse. Lear’s panorama of disaster is an invitation to speculate about futures radically different from and even hostile to present modes of social life. Lear’s recurrence in modern post-apocalyptic media becomes “disaggregated” across a variety of media and genres, from avant-garde film to contemporary novels. Unfolding from the Shakespearean original in multiple ways, but always expanding toward an apocalyptic horizon, King Lear and its various adaptations develop a grammar for imagining futures that, in representing the obliteration of the present (and its Shakespeare), might also suggest opportunities for radically different futures, and radically different Shakespeares.