June 10th, 18:00–20:00 – Hörsaal 02 (Erdgeschoss, Neue Universität) SHOULD HUMANITY END? - Apocalypse and the World to Come

“Should Humanity End? Apocalypse and the World to Come” is a philosophical event hosted by the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies in collaboration with the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. It is part of a broader exploration of the transformations of our present and their implications for how human beings understand themselves, their world, and their shared existence.

Ecological, technological, and political transformations are intensifying apocalyptic images and narratives. However, the most pressing question of our present is not how we can avert the end of humanity, as such an outlook is doubly misleading. It is doubtful whether we would ever be capable of doing so, or whether sufficient time remains, but more fundamentally, it reflects an ideological distortion that obscures a more decisive problem: Should humanity end? Rather than being captivated by ever-new scenarios of impending doom, it is far more urgent to ask: How exactly will humanity come to an end? And as if that were not enough, we must consider that the humanity that might be wiped out, and whose extinction we fear, perhaps does not even exist yet. Will it ever come to exist? If it does not, what exactly are we trying to preserve? And after all, can we really coherently argue for the prevention of extinction if humans are constantly excluded from humanity in the first place? This means the question “should humanity end?” cannot be separated from the question “whose humanity?” and whether the concept is worth preserving at all or needs to be broken open entirely.

The apocalyptic present takes multiple forms. The unfolding ecological catastrophe is marked by critical thresholds in the Earth system that trigger self-reinforcing and largely irreversible changes. It echoes earlier fears associated with the nuclear threat, which, already in the mid-twentieth century, conjured the spectre of humanity’s total annihilation. At the same time, we are being driven toward an uncertain future marked by the rapid development of AI and the emergence of new information and data regimes. In our war-torn present, we observe renewed attempts at an aggressive reorganisation of global space—a return of history after its supposed end. Pointing beyond the globe, we are witnessing a remarkable revival of space travel, accompanied by new fantasies of colonization and exodus from these contradictions. A privileged fraction of humanity is setting out for other planets: whether to ensure survival on Earth amid resource scarcity, or to leave it behind as a devastated body in the face of approaching catastrophes.

But we need to rethink how we approach such an outlook. We must step back from modes of questioning the present that obscure the ongoing continuity of catastrophe, and from the assumption that catastrophe is something humanity stands before, as a subject weighing its options. What today’s ecological, technological, and political crises demand, above all, is clarity about what exactly is at stake when we speak of “the future,” “the world,” or “humanity”. Spectacular visions of total destruction and annihilation are misleading, as it is not merely humanity’s survival that is in danger. What is revealed as precarious is the very being of the human, the space of the common, and the non-human world on which any common world depends. Other ways of living, and other forms of life, are foreclosed by that centring — and their foreclosure is not incidental to the catastrophe but constitutive of it. This requires us to view the quasi-apocalyptic events and processes of the present as genuinely ambiguous phenomena. They confront humanity and the world with their end, precisely by calling into question the very idea of such totality.

Does the historically burdened concept of humanity not obscure the fact that it is itself grounded in exclusions and dichotomies? That the world was never simply shared, and its apparent commonality always rested on exclusions, inequalities, and a particular image of the human being whose universality was always more claimed than real? Should we understand, with posthumanist thought, the end of the human not as loss but as a possible transformation beyond its inherited form? Or is it necessary, precisely at the moment when humanity anticipates its own annihilation, to recall that the concept has always been bound up with revolutionary hopes—and that humanity itself may not yet exist?

So, what end does “humanity” have in mind for itself, and is this even a task it can claim as its own? And will the world to come – in, against, and through apocalyptic destruction – still be defined as human, or want to?