“Earth is the Alien Planet”: Concrete Island, abject landscapes, posthuman fictions: an illustrated lecture

In the Late Anthropocene, we’re all castaways on a soon-to-be-desert island earth. Global weirding is here to stay, eco-pocalypse looms, existential dread is the new normal, and philosophy has taken a “nonhuman turn,” away from the anthropocentric worldview of classic humanism. Philosophers like Eugene Thacker and writers of weird eco-fiction like Jeff Vandermeer conjure an anti-anthropocentric, even post-anthropocentric worldview: a mythology of the world without us.

J.G. Ballard got there first. In his short novel Concrete Island, he relocates Robinson Crusoe to the abject landscapes of postwar London. His tale of a car-crash survivor marooned on a traffic island maps a new, posthuman psychology that de-centers not only the self but the species, too, in preparation for the day, not long off, when as Nietzsche puts it in Human, All Too Human, the earth is but the “gleaming and floating gravesite of humanity.”

In “Earth is the Alien Planet,” Dery considers the ways in which Ballard problematizes “the human” and humanism, auguring a post-anthropocentric fiction for a post-Anthropocene planet, a World Without Us that neither he nor any of us will inhabit.