Who Would You Kill to Save the World? by Claire Colebrook (review)

We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.

(Nietzsche 15)

Claire Colebrook’s Who Would You Kill to Save the World? joins a seemingly endless list of short books on the end of the world. Travis Holloway’s How to Live at the End of the World (2022), Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer’s Theory for the World to Come (2019) and Ben Ware’s On Extinction (2024) all cover, at varying levels of insight, the strength of the apocalyptic narrative in modern culture. These follow in the wake of more sustained, and analytically rich contributions like Eva Horn’s The Future as Catastrophe (2018) and Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s Allegories of the Anthropocene (2019). There is by now a well-established canon of (post-)apocalyptic texts, and each is treated to a thick palimpsest of interpretations and analysis. It is a crowded field.