Posthumous resilience and active withdrawal: Byronic contemplation of violence and vulnerabilities in the Anthropocene embodied in the sculpture of the Dying Gaul

Abstract

This paper focuses upon the famous sculpture of the Dying Gaul, situated in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, in order to read and to rethink discourses of resilience in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene poses fundamental questions to understandings of ‘bouncing back’ or imaginaries of ‘sustainable futures’. There can be no affirmative futural imaginaries if saving the world requires the destruction and sacrifice of innumerable others. Thinking with Byron’s reflections upon the Dying Gaul enables us to approach resilience from a radically different perspective, one that (read in conjunction with the work of Claire Colebrook, Karen Barad, Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand and Saidiya Hartman amongst other contemporary theorists) we call a ‘posthumous’ approach. ‘Posthumous resilience’ refuses the lure of affirmation, of imaginaries of salvage and salvation, and instead seeks to generate an ethic of ‘active withdrawal’ that points beyond the temporal and spatial constraints of the colonial, imperial, imagination. We conclude with a reflection on how posthumous discourses of ‘active withdrawal’ can be the basis of generative politics of refusal which hold open conceptions of justice and seek to break from cycles of violence.