982021, issue 2
Mammoth, or: the Dialectic of Human Afterlife
Stefan Niklas
It is a troubling thought: Humanity might be at its best only in hindsight, when its
afterlife will be its sole mode of existence. In other words, only when humanity will no
longer exist in the ‘actual’ sense – not as humanity, at least – but as a retroactive projec-
tion, will it nally become the fulllment of its own Concept. Yet, who will project it?
I nd this troubling thought expressed in aphorism 74 of Minima Moralia, called
“Mammoth”. Here, Adorno refers to the reported discovery of a well-preserved dino-
saur (not a mammoth, which is in fact nowhere mentioned except for the title1). This
specimen is said to have outlived its kind, being a million years younger than all other
known specimens. How the enormous gap in the timeline of that species could be
explained – whether it is due to false assumptions about this specic discovery or the
earlier ones – is not Adorno’s concern. His focus is rather on the public imagination
that absorbs such paleontological information alongside “the repulsive humoristic craze
for the Loch Ness Monster and the King Kong lm” (§ 74), thus treating all these
dierent phenomena and sources on the same imaginative plane.
There are two functions Adorno ascribes to this occupation of the public
imagination. The rst one goes roughly like this: In familiarizing themselves with
the gigantic images, people imaginatively prepare for the terrors of the “monstrous
total State”, desperately trying “to assimilate to experience what dees all experience”
(§ 74). The result is a happily fatalistic anticipation of the end of spontaneity as the heart
of human life.
However, Adorno is quick to admit that this cannot be all there is to it. He
therefore adds the second function which confronts happy fatalism with its dialectical
inversion: miserable hope. “The desire for the presence of the most ancient is a hope
that animal creation might survive the wrong that man has done it, if not man himself,
and give rise to a better species, one that nally makes a success of life” (§ 74). It is
mostly in this quote that I nd expressed the speculative thought about the realization
of the suppressed better possibilities of humanity – i.e., the better species which is to
arise only after humankind has made way for it by suspending itself. For if a dinosaur
can live a million years beyond its ocial extinction, thereby taking its kind into the
future, maybe humankind could do the same.
Admittedly, the quote could also be read as saying that hope for the better species
means the abolition of all things human. The animals suering under the human rule
over the world would then be surviving the oppression, even outliving their oppressors,
and, nally, be left alone in peace. It would be left in the unoppressed paws and ippers
of these animals then to make life a success. This interpretation, however, would not only
be prone to a fatalistic kind of romanticism, but it would also jump to a constitutively
external standpoint that potentially invalidates the central impulse of Minima Moralia
to oer immanent critique of society and humanity at large. Furthermore, it creates the
epistemic and logical problem that this vision of life as either successful or failed (rather
than indierent) is after all a projection of the human mind. And it is the human mind
which imaginatively passes on this vision to the animals. If making life a success means
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to realize the good life, and if the good life means “entering a truly human[e] state”, as
the Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002, xiv) suggests, then humans – or humanity – cannot
yet be ruled out of the speculation entirely. The question, or paradox, is rather how
humanity – i.e., the existing human species – could abolish itself without abolishing the
claim of humanity – i.e., the humane state which humans, apparently, are themselves
unable to enter. In a way, this is a variation, or rather a farewell to the Übermensch-theme
where the idea of humans uplifting themselves by way of their own will and strength
is given up.
Besides the kind of Hegelianism that explains the problem of simultane-
ously abolishing and not abolishing something in terms of “sublation”, I consider the
mammoth-aphorism to express a transposition and complication of the Warburgian
motif of Nachleben – meaning afterlife as material remembrance – which Adorno
himself praises in his Aesthetic Theory (1997, 5). Early modern Europeans had to know
enough about ancient Greek culture to be able to arm the respective “pathos for-
mulas” (Warburg) while transforming their meaning (including a great deal of misun-
derstanding and misrepresentation) in its acts of reappropriation. Analogously, though
on the scale not just of historical cultures, but of evolutionary (or even cosmic) species,
those who will come after the abolition of humanity will still have to be human enough
to identify with the conserved remnants of the human life-form; but at the same time
they have to be suciently beyond humanity – or in any case beneath it – to make a
fresh new start in realizing the hitherto unrealized better possibilities of that human
heritage. The unmentioned mammoth of Adorno’s aphorism might indeed be an
adequate image to describe this: Returning from the ice in one piece, this specic
specimen is still dead, but its life-form can be re-enacted (to borrow a concept from R.
G. Collingwood) in more than one sense. It can be re-enacted theoretically by using
the evidence the specimen provides for understanding and learning from the kind of
life the mammoth was leading. Beyond that, the mammoth may even be reconstructed
genetically, meaning that the mammoth as an organic life-form could literally be res-
urrected as a living species. Its appearance in a world in which the mammoth had
been extinct, however, would still amount to a real-life re-enactment, a simulation, or a
performance of mammoth-life in a non-mammoth-world.
So, what could this mean for the question of humanity outliving itself in the
(metaphorical or cryonic) ice? As with all transgressive consequences of thought, it is
not only the understanding but mostly the imagination that must do the job here. It
does so by calling on the nexus of speculative possibility. What the human mind needs,
in other words, is a medium that oers the seemingly impossible standpoint of thinking
and complementing humanity in hindsight; a way of imaginatively experiencing the
afterlife of humanity in order to make the better possibilities, which remained sup-
pressed, tangible In speculative ction the imagination has indeed found a powerful
medium for doing just that.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (which, among other things, is about creating
a necessarily selective archive as the eponymous foundation for the reconstruction of
humanity after its psychohistorically prognosticated downfall); Liu Cixin’s Death’s End
(the concluding novel of the Trisolaris trilogy which, among other things, radicalizes
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the problem of gathering material that can be stored for the future remembrance of
humankind, and which also spells out the fate of humans that are no longer human
without being sub- or superhuman); Joanna Russ’ We Who Are About To [Die] (which
amplies the troubling nature of the problem of human afterlife, by having the pro-
tagonist, among other things, meditate about how pointless a record of human history
would be which nobody will nd, or which will be found by creatures that will not be
able to understand it at all); or Dietmar Dath’s The Abolition of Species (which takes the
subjunctive standpoint of the advanced animal kingdom after humanity’s irrecoverable
downfall), and many, many other science-ctional artworks may each be interpreted
as contributions to taking the impossible vantage point of anticipated hindsight from
which the unrealized – often surprising and never denite – possibilities of the human
species can be explored.
The minimal morale of this, I believe, is that through speculative ction –
which, for sure, is an outlet of the culture industry – we can in a way experience
humanity in hindsight already. In other words, a vital sense for the better possibilities
– which, presumably, will remain unrealized – is itself not only possible but actual, and
is in no way compelled to surrender to the dogmas that claim to already know how to
tell the better possibilities from the worse. It is only speculation! And luckily so, because
speculative ction – despite speculation’s bad name in unimaginative society – does not
mistake itself for “the way things truly are”, as some non-ctional metaphysics may have
done. As ction it is the playful try-out behavior of rigorously imaginative minds. The
thought that humanity might become humane only in hindsight does not appear any
less troubling in this way, but at least its conscious ctionalization has more to oer than
just fatalism (happy or not), or the stale kind of solace that is attractive only to the fanatics
who comfort themselves by holding that life will truly begin only after it has ended.
For as long as the promise of humane humanity remains constitutively unful-
lled, we will have to be content with hope. And as far as Adorno is concerned, this
hope is miserable. It will still be enough to defy complete surrender.
Not only does joking about the ‘mammoth in
the room’ force itself onto the mind or the reader
of this aphorism, also was “mammoth” in fact the
nickname of Max Horkheimer, to whom Adorno,
the “hippo”, had dedicated the Minima Moralia.
(Thanks are due to Josef Früchtl for reminding me
of Horkheimer’s nickname.)
1
Notes
Stefan Niklas is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at
the University of Amsterdam where he is part of the
Critical Cultural Theory group. His work focusses
on aesthetics and the critical philosophy of culture.
Biography
1012021, issue 2
Adorno, Theodor W. 2005. Minima Moralia. Reflections
on a Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N.
Jephcott. London: Verso.
Adorno, Theodor W. 2001 [1951]. Minima Moralia.
Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Translated
by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London/ New York:
Continuum.
Asimov, Isaac. 1951. Foundation. New York: Gnome
Press.
Collingwood, Robin G. 2005. The Idea of History.
Revised Edition with Lectures 1926–1928.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dath, Dietmar. 2008. Die Abschaffung der Arten.
Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Dath, Dietmar. 2013. The Abolition of Species.
Translated by S. P. Willcocks. London: Seagull
Books 2013.
Horkheimer, Max & Theodor W. Adorno. 2002.
Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments.
Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Liu, Cixin. 2016. Death’s End. Translated by K. Liu.
New York: Tor Books.
Russ, Joanna. 1977. We Who Are About To…. New
York: Dell Publishing.
Warburg, Aby. 2010. Werke in einem Band. Berlin:
Suhrkamp.
References
