Hugo Reinert

• Jordheim, Helge; Op de Beke, Laura; Bjordal, Sine Halkjelsvik; Zuiderveen Borgesius, Leonoor; Brenna, Brita & Flatø, Emil Henrik [Show all 9 contributors for this article] (2022). Fossilization, or the matter of historical futures . History and Theory. ISSN 0018-2656. 61(1), p. 4–26. doi: 10.1111/hith.12250. Show summary

  In this contribution to the “Historical Futures” project, the Lifetimes Research Collective adds to the geological turn currently underway in historiography by presenting a theory of fossils and fossilizations as a way of rethinking the concept of “historical futures.” We proceed by addressing two pivotal speech acts in Western historiography, in the broad sense: the “fossil question,” which was first raised in the middle of the seventeenth century, about how a solid can end up inside another solid and the nineteenth-century Marxist slogan for the modern world, “all that is solid melts into air.” Transported into the early twenty-first century and faced with the challenges of the Anthropocene, both take on new meanings and perform new tasks. In this article, we experiment with different ways of thinking and writing fossils into more general questions of historiography and historical theory by investigating how they affect conceptualizations of historical time. Furthermore, we demonstrate how fossilizations indicate possible trajectories for new materialist speculations, distributing agency to various matters, physical and virtual, in the Earth's crust as well as in museums and video games. Finally, we ask how a theory of fossilization can be seen to decenter the human subject by exploring the processes of decomposition and solidification taking place in the human body. In this way, the arrangements of timescales and lifescales that have given rise to disciplines like history, geology, and biology are destabilized in favor of open-ended historical knowledge ventures that transgress temporal and epistemological borders.

• Münster, Ursula; Schroer, Asu Schroer; Van Dooren, Thom & Reinert, Hugo (2021). Introduction: Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction; Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights. Cultural anthropology. ISSN 0886-7356.
• Münster, Ursula; Van Dooren, Thom; Schroer, Asu Schroer & Reinert, Hugo (2021). Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction. Cultural anthropology. ISSN 0886-7356.
• Reinert, Hugo (2020). The Inhabited Sky: Notes on a celestial zoology. In Jørgensen, Dolly & Jørgensen, Finn Arne (Ed.), Silver Linings : Clouds in art and science. Museumsforlaget AS. ISSN 9788283050899. p. 104–111.
• Reinert, Hugo (2019). Requiem for a junk-bird: Violence, purity and the wild. Cultural Studies Review. ISSN 1446-8123. 25(1), p. 29–40. doi: 10.5130/csr.v24i1.6387. Full text in Research Archive
• Reinert, Hugo (2019). Les crânes et le cochon qui danse. Terrain. ISSN 0760-5668. p. 52–67. doi: 10.4000/terrain.18076.
• Reinert, Hugo (2019). The skulls and the dancing pig : Notes on apocalyptic violence. Terrain. ISSN 0760-5668. p. 1–15. doi: 10.4000/terrain.18051. Full text in Research Archive
• Reinert, Hugo (2019). The Midwife and the Poet: Bioaccumulation and Retroactive Shock. Environmental Humanities. ISSN 2201-1919. 11(1), p. 137–151. doi: 10.1215/22011919-7349455. Full text in Research Archive
• Reinert, Hugo (2019). The Haunting Cliffs: Some notes on silence. Parallax. ISSN 1353-4645. 24(4), p. 501–512. doi: 10.1080/13534645.2018.1546726. Show summary

  The article is about a space defined by the absence of birds. It is an attempt to examine certain aspects of silence—both the idea of it, and the experience—in the context of catastrophic species collapse and, more broadly, the unfolding planetary processes that some call the Sixth Extinction. Specifically, I am interested in experiences of silence that follow the disappearance or extinction of a species in a landscape. What happens when species disappear? What is to be done in (and with) the silence that they leave behind? What is the shape of such a silence and how is it to be approached, conceptualised, described, analysed? What might it have to say (so to speak) about issues such as climate change, biospheric collapse or the epochal geological ruptures of the Anthropocene: phenomena that unfold on scales defying those of human life or the human body, making themselves available to experience primarily in fragmentary, mediated or speculative forms?

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• Reinert, Hugo (2019). "The Stone that Ran to Paris: Some reflections on climate justice and geological agents".

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