Our autonomous reading group is a collective formed around a question and towards unknowing. We came together at the beginning of the summer, asking one other: “What is the Self at the End of the World?” Fruitfully, the question has led less to answers, and more to further questions, modes of inquiry, and pathways into fresh ideas and practices. It created a space to sit with destruction, newness, and the beyond. After all, what even are the self, the end, and the world?
We gathered weekly at a local anarchist library to explore texts and other media on radical ecology, Afropessimism, queer negativity, phenomenology, critical art history, political theory, and more. We ventured outside the limits of liberal humanist understandings of selfhood, towards a multidisciplinary understanding of what it is to “be” at the end of the World — understood broadly as the end of the Anthropocene, bordered nations, individual consciousness, and as perhaps the beginning of the Weirdness, the Real, transcendence, continuity, and revolution.
To get in touch:
by email: endoftheworld@riseup.net
on instagram: @endoftheworld.research
