Extinction Temporalities: Rethinking TimeSpaces, Knots of Life and the Sixth Extinction in the Necrocene

By using the Necrocene nomenclature as opposed to the term Anthropocene as a concept to describe the extinctive and necrotic logic of capitalism, this essay analyses the multiplicity of non-linear, uneven multispecies knots of life in the Sixth Extinction. Namely, it focuses on the desynchronization of the relationships between elements and lifeforms in the current global paradigm. This is done scrutinizing three different events that intertwine non-human ecosystems, human ecosystems and beyond-life-and-death agents through a New Materialism, Multispecies Studies and Environmental Humanities lens grounded in theoretical reviews and analyses. Relying on the connection between death, extinction and capitalism, this article generates, through the different cases of analysis, an alternative narrative for the current epoch while challenging anthropocentric views of time, space and ecology and, thus, reconnecting New Materialism and Historical Materialism as disciplines that can be generative if intertwined.