Lynne Huffer, These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction, Duke University Press, 2025
Summary
A collage-style work in fragments, Lynne Huffer’s These Survivals brings together philosophy, memoir, poetry, and original multimedia artworks to articulate an ethics of living on a devastated planet. Focusing on climate change and mass species extinction, Huffer approaches ruination through assemblages rendered in sharp-edged prose, vibrant color images, and experimental features that include black-out poems, weather reports, and abecedarian essays. She considers her struggles with everyday life and confronts the immensity of extinction across the expanse of geological time, recognizing the self’s insignificance in the context of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year existence. As she moves across autobiographical, political, and literary registers, her abiding theme is the repeated phrase: the fragment remains while the whole crumbles. At every turn, Huffer insists on the fragmentary, provisional nature of anything taken to be whole as well as the impartial conditions under which we write, at times experienced as constraint and at others, freedom. Reveling in interruption, obliquity, and layering, Huffer opens space for thought to emerge in unexpected and innovative ways—ways that are grounded in the material practices of writing and living.
Maxine Podgainy, Lynne Huffer’s new book ‘These Survivals’ confronts extinction through collage, The Emory Wheel, Oct 8, 2025
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Huffer then took the microphone, sharing that various interests and social causes informed her text — from 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault to biology to feminist theory. She revealed that one of her inspirations behind writing about climate change and environmental issues was attending over 10 years of meetings with an Anthropocene reading group at Emory. Perspectives from scientists, social scientists and others in the humanities coupled with her extensive research of Foucault inspired Huffer to rethink her approach to history.
“Over the years, I’ve developed a take on Michel Foucault’s work that allows me to think about the Earth, archives and planetary time, or what’s known as deep time — geological time — through the lens of what Foucault calls genealogy, a method of writing that rethinks the present by approaching the past as fragmented, incomplete and radically discontinuous,” Huffer said.
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Foucault News 