Worlding without end? Geographies of the human, the posthuman, and the inhuman: An abyssal perspective

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Critiques of relational and posthuman geography have targeted the persistence of Man as a privileged figure of agency, seeking to unsettle the subject long taken to anchor modern critique. This paper argues that a deeper condition remains less examined: not simply the persistence of Man, but the continuing demand that violence, rupture, and repair become occasions for further worlding. Engaging Kathryn Yusoff's Geologic Life as a pressure point, the paper reads her inhuman geography as one of the most sustained attempts to displace Man by turning to earth, geos, rift, and inhumanity. What this clarifies, for us, is not only the status of Man, but the status of geography itself. Geography does not recede when Man is displaced. We read it as the foundational ontological operation of modernity: the historical condition through which earth is organised as world and through which worlding becomes the terrain on which critique must operate. Tracing how concepts such as capacity, repair, generativity, relation, and opacity function within this operation, we posit an alternative analytic of abyssal geography. Abyssal geography does not provide alternative worlds or deeper immanence but a diagnostic of the regime in which critique is repeatedly organised through the labour of worlding.