Performing Terminal Care for Pending Extinction

• In Event: Finitude in Other Terms: Uncommoning Extinction - II

Abstract

Orangutan rehabilitation centers, which are a kind of wildlife center, respond to the crisis of pending extinction by offering sanctuary to displaced orangutans. These sites encourage orangutan reproduction and capitalize on species loss through the fostering of commercial encounters with the dwindling population of the world’s most solitary of all great apes, which are the only great ape found in Asia. Orangutan rehabilitation centers work as hospices for a dying species, as sites that offer terminal care for healthy individuals facing their species’ extinction. Efforts at performing terminal care seem to exemplify the performance of an anticipated finale, one in which witnesses are spectators and not participants. What would it take to recognize participation in a performance that hardly anyone wants to admit? In other words, how is the imagined, shifting pronoun of ‘we’ that is sometimes used in reference to the ‘Anthropos’ of the Anthropocene not a means of diluting culpability, but a means of recognizing differentiated forms of participation, responsibility, and harm? This paper thinks through extinction not as an apocalyptic spectacle, but rather as a boundless stage of unspectacular annihilation.

Author

• Juno Salazar Parrenas, The Ohio State University