Extinction thinking

I've sent off an abstract to a conference about extinction. Here it is:

Extinction is an ethical event—and an exercise of power: an irreversible withdrawal that refuses negotiation, reversal, or redemption. The extinct Other cannot answer, nor be restored without renewed violence or simulation. Yet extinct beings continue to press upon the present as ethical weight, shaping landscapes, memory, and modes of attention. Ethical relation, this paper argues, persists even when reciprocity becomes impossible.

Drawing on ecological encounters and philosophical work on opacity and withdrawal, I critique how contemporary responses to death—in conservation, biotechnology, and AI—often refuse this irreversible ending. Such responses seek resurrection, replay, or indefinite intervention, converting the dead into data, spectacle, or consolation. Extinction thus exposes power's persistent overreach: first in producing disappearance, and again in insisting disappearance must be reversible. Power operates doubly here: as destruction and as denial of destruction's finality.

Against this, I argue for an ethics of implicated staying that neither masters nor abandons the dead, oriented within inevitable harm rather than outside it. Death here is kairotic closure—a timely, irreversible ending—whose ethical force lies in the demand to stop, refusing further availability to intervention or optimization. By reframing extinction as irreversible withdrawal rather than loss-to-be-corrected, this paper offers a vocabulary for living with ghosts without turning them into instruments of governance or technological promise.

See what happens.

The muntjacs are not going extinct any time soon, but I did find, by Kairos, the skull of a very small one.

Maybe an extinct species of miniature muntjac??