Pushed to the Brink

How does the climate crisis bump up against the limits of our knowledge? This mixed-media triptych is an experimental collaboration between a philosopher and a sociologist. Part 1, a three-panel visual extinction collage, exposes the discontinuities of geological time across three Anthropocene landscapes composed of Holocene fragments. Part 2, a collaborative erasure poem, cuts into well-known “man in the wilderness” writings through a queer feminist practice of erosive counterwriting. Part 3, a dialogue, engages philosophical and practical questions about the epistemic limits that constrain thinking about extinction and climate. Taken together, this three-part collaboration models experimental practices whose genre-bending approach to planetary crisis aims to stimulate new thoughts, new affects, and new modes of engagement.