While the figure of the misanthrope appears throughout both literary history and the history of philosophy, evaluations of human worth seem to take on a new urgency in the Anthropocene. For David Cooper (2018), misanthropy is defined “not as hatred or dislike of one’s fellow human beings, but as a dark, negative appraisal of human existence […] a verdict based on a perception of our failings as ubiquitous, pronounced and entrenched.” As human impacts on the planet and other species become increasingly difficult to ignore, we are witnessing an unprecedented proliferation of misanthropic sentiments across literature, philosophy, political movements, and popular culture. In 2012, Greg Garrard coined the term “disanthropy” to describe the desire for a world without humans that he sees reflected in an array of contemporary film and literature. The longing for a humanless world expressed in such works, and the emergence of anti-natalist and voluntary human extinction movements, is expressive of an increasingly mainstream conviction that the earth would be better off without us. 

Despite misanthropy’s growing centrality to contemporary structures of feeling, it has been little explored in critical scholarship. A handful of recent publications address the philosophical stakes of misanthropy (David E. Cooper and Toby Svoboda) and its historical traces (Joseph Harris and Andrew Gibson), but there is a lacuna in current work regarding the nature of contemporary misanthropy and its cultural manifestations. This reticence may be due to the unease that some scholars have expressed about the eugenic implications of calls for radical depopulation that are often associated with misanthropy. Moreover, misanthropy may seem to provide us with little political purchase or ground from which to act. Misanthropy’s historic figuration as a distinctly white, Western, and male affect (often ascribed to figures such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) also seems to do little to encourage its critical potential for intersectional theory. This historic association bespeaks of the privilege to voluntarily give up on humankind, requiring as it does that one is not already in a position of being forced to fight for survival.

This seminar encourages a reckoning with such problematics while also inviting a consideration of the critical possibilities of the misanthropic position. We encourage papers interested in tracing the ways in which contemporary misanthropy manifests (as a response, for instance, to climate change, animal exploitation, or racial injustice); considering the aesthetic forms and narrative structures associated with contemporary misanthropy; exploring the affective toll of misanthropy; or the possibilities for optimism that might be opened by misanthropic thought. We also encourage considerations of the relationship between misanthropy and related discourses such as Afropessmism, anti-natalism, queer negativity, and philosophic pessimism.