That Shelley’s novel of universal apocalypse The Last Man harbors a critique of the idea of Man, of the Enlightenment, and of colonialism and empire, is not a new observation. An early and still powerful, if gestural, version of this argument was made by Barbara Johnson in her influential 1980 essay “The Last Man,” which reads the novel as an indictment of “a certain Western culture which can no longer take itself for the voice of humanity in its entirety” (10).

 For Johnson, the novel both mourns this Enlightenment universalism of Man while also limning its destructiveness, what she calls its “lethal universality,” figured (or disfigured), of course, by the plague that consumes the world (11). In what follows, I wish to deepen the critical line of inquiry initiated by Johnson and others to explore how the novel invites us to imagine other ways of being by modeling the abdication of the racialized position of Man. In step with this abdication, The Last Man makes it possible to inhabit the negative space of other, relational forms of life, though these other forms are only obliquely glimpsed and elicited in the diegetic space and time—which is also the prophetic space and time—of the narrative.

How does the novel delineate a form of life that is “postuniversal,” in Johnson’s words, but also not isolated in the particularity of an all too familiar individualism that detaches itself from any relation, political, ecological, or otherwise (10)? And where does Johnson’s interrogation of Enlightenment’s violent universalism via Shelley’s novel leave us today? By which I mean: where does this leave the “us,” the “we,” the possibility of community after Man, after the end of History that The Last Man portrays? This question takes on a deeper urgency and ominous resonance in the Anthropocene, the age of environmental crisis where “Man” (anthropos), or the idea of Man, has altered the very climate and earth system with his various projects and activity.

 As the contemporary discourse around the Anthropocene shows, the political question of the contested constitution of Man is always an ecological one, with differing conceptions of relation to the earth at stake. In fact, The Last Man also deals with a number of environmental issues like climate change, sea-level rise, seasonal disruption, and human-animal relations, but these specific ecological problems provide more of a backdrop to this essay, which is concerned with the political ecology of “Man” as a concept, as well as its alternatives: both what Man violently excludes and what would be otherwise than Man, undoing it. If both politics and ecology in their different ways deal with the question of relationality, it is normally assumed that politics is concerned with human relationality, and ecology with relational fields in the nonhuman world. It is the imperative of political ecology to question and undo this partition between the human and nonhuman in order to summon new forms of relationality and collectivity; but the abolition of this partition should also involve examining the production of nonhumanity or improper humanity within manufactured conceptions of the human—that which is necessarily excluded or degraded so that Man can be Man.

The issue of relationality foregrounded by political ecology is obviously a stumbling block for The Last Man, for to whom or what can the only man relate? Indeed, the question of relationality, community, and the solitary individual cuts across Johnson’s essay on the novel, which, evoking Nietzsche’s notion of the Last Man, asks on its first page: “The human here is apparently something that says ‘we.’ And what if men were reduced only to ‘I’? Would the word ‘man’ still have the same meaning if there were only one left? Would the end of man take place before or after the death of the last man?” (3). The connection between the “we” and the end(s) of Man comes more fully into view when we recall that Johnson’s essay on Shelley was originally given as a talk at a conference organized in 1980 by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the work of Derrida called “The Ends of Man,” after Derrida’s 1968 essay of that name. This latter essay ends with a haunting three-word query putting the community of Man in question: “But who, we?" (136; emphasis added). Derrida’s question(ing) of the “we” is further taken up by theorist Sylvia Wynter in her exposure and disruption of the racialized coloniality inherent in the idea of “Man.”

 To simplify, for Wynter, the historically specific notion or genre of humanity of Western Man “over-represented” itself, conflating its ideas of Man (which in the nineteenth century takes the form of homo oeconomicus) with the proper human as such, creating a false and hierarchical “we.” What Wynter names “[Man’s] over-representation as if it were that of the human” necessarily involved both the “invention” and “subjugation” of racialized “Human Others” in order to “fuel” and to justify Europe’s sovereign “global conquests and expansion” (“Map for the Territory” 128-29).

 The reflexive questioning of the “we,” often by putting it in scare quotes, has become a kind of theoreme or theory meme, an almost obligatory move in many strands of critical theoretical discourse.

 This is for good reason, but in addition to bracketing the “we” to draw attention to its contingent formations and naturalized exclusions, it is is also important to pay attention to what has been bracketed out by given notions of the “we” and of Man in order to disclose other forms of life, relation, and collectivity that move outside and against the paradigm of Man. The last section of this essay attempts to read for and think through images of these alternative forms, these omens of an “otherwise we-ness,” in The Last Man.

To arrive there, the next section builds on the paradigm of The Last Man opened up by Barbara Johnson and others and examines how the novel’s critique of Man centers upon a hierarchically differentiated concept of Man as a sovereign who is constantly engaged in projects, labor, improvement, and tasks. Man’s sovereignty is indexed by these projects, as well as by progress into a future that is only seemingly open to possibility but in fact necessitates a reproduction of the world as it is, preventing other forms of existence from blossoming. This means the novel’s conception of Man faces an apparent paradox: on the one hand, (white, European, especially English) Man is the finished, highest telos of being, the summit of both humanity and earthly creation (“the triumph of man”); on the other hand, and at the same time, Man is constitutively open (indeed the being most open) to possibilities that he actualizes through tasks and projects, which only reproduce Man and the world as correlative structures.

For example, later in the novel, when Verney addresses England as “the triumph of man,” he attributes this chauvinistic civilizational triumph to “thy children, their unwearied industry and lofty aspiration,” that is, their ambitious projects and tasks (LM 324).

However, this paradigm of (European) Man’s sovereignty established through a dialectic of project and progress collides with and is undone by the forces of abdication, inoperativity, interruption, and aimlessness that permeate The Last Man. This theme of abdication begins with the narrator’s relinquishment of authorship and authority to the Sibylline prophecy, which she transcribes and translates, and continues through the constant abdications of sovereignty, authority, and direction in the narrative, up to the plague that interrupts all futurity. Along the way, the novel creates apertures and overtures for imagining other, relational forms of life that do not hew to the colonial and ontological protocols of Man or what Lisa Lowe calls the “colonial divisions of humanity” (7). One example of this life other than Man, a life without sovereignty, is evoked by the last man himself, Lionel Verney, who on the last page of the novel begs for a task that would afford him a teleological orientation: “I long . . . to have some task, however slight or voluntary, for each day’s fulfillment” (LM 470; emphasis added). Condemned to wander the ravaged and empty earth without task, both the last man and The Last Man disclose an image of what might be other than Man, an image that in its very isolation invites us to imagine a relational existence without ground or telos, after the end of History and in its ruins. In this way, the last man’s tasklessness embodies Georges Bataille’s famous concept of life after the end of History as a “negativité sans emploi,” which we might here translate as "negativity without task" (369).

That “Man” is a construct was understood and explored more thoroughly, and literally, by Mary Shelley than perhaps any other Romantic author (this is of course one of the many lessons of Frankenstein). In The Last Man, one way that the construction of Man is recapitulated is through the autobiographical microcosm of the last man Lionel Verney himself, who was orphaned along with his sister Perdita and grew up in a state he himself describes as “savagery” (LM 29). He gradually leaves this “savage” state and enters the subtly (and punningly) racialized “paled demesne of civilization” only when subjected to a sovereign, a “master hand” (27, 29; emphasis added). When their long-lost family friend Adrian, a prince and the son of the abdicated and final King of England, comes to Cumberland, Verney almost immediately falls under Adrian’s noble spell. Throwing off his “war against civilization,” Verney follows Adrian down the path of progress into civilization, which is progress into the domain of Man: “I now began to be human,” Verney writes (29). He goes on to compare his newfound claims to participate in both civilization and Man to nothing other than the primal scene of colonialism itself, the year 1492: “I felt as the sailor, who from the topmast first discovered the shore of America; and like him I hastened to tell my companions of my discoveries in unknown regions” (31). This is yet another indication that “Man” in the novel is not a universal category but a contingent, colonial one, whose conceptualization is inextricable from the divisions of 1492 and what Wynter calls its “new world view.”

 To become Man is to enter into a relation of coloniality and to assume whiteness. Man’s supposed universality is constituted by its exclusions, exceptions, segregations, and gradations of (especially racial and gendered) differentiation. Verney’s own trajectory throughout the novel follows the path of Man itself, from “savagery” to sovereignty to lastness, to being without task—and as Emily Steinlight writes of Verney “As soon as he is last, he is no longer man” (71).

Lord Raymond, the figure based on Byron, also embodies a mania for tasks, especially projects for improvement and civilization. After he assumes sovereignty (becoming Lord Protector of England), we are told: “Raymond was occupied in a thousand beneficial schemes . . . He was continually surrounded by projectors and projects” (106). These projects are nothing other than an index of Raymond’s sovereign power, his desire for domination both ecological (“the elements”) and political (“man”): “He looked forward to entire dominion over the elements and the mind of man” (117). Indeed both Raymond and Adrian take up the civilizing task of fighting with the Greeks in a war against the “barbarism” of the Muslim forces of Turkey, people who are described explicitly in terms of stillness and refusing the advancing progress of civilization.

 Crucially, Raymond envisions his civilizing war in relation to a futurity that is endlessly renewed and reproduced in future generations, always advancing in a testament to the glory and sovereignty of Man: “Other generations will arise, and ever and for ever will continue . . . to be gloried by our valour” (194). It is this endless progress that “exalt[s] the race of man and make[s] this little globe a dwelling of the mighty” (194). The fact that this exaltation of Man as a supposed “we,” a “race,” requires war against and the eradication of other, non-European groups of human beings (not to mention the earth itself) reveals a concept of Man caught up in the “over-represented” (Wynter) violent universalism that The Last Man adumbrates and ultimately unworks.

A passage from the end of Chapter 15 demonstrates more acutely the intimate connection between tasks, the idea of Man, and the reproduction of the world (that is, the world constituted by the exclusions inherent in the idea of Man, the world of Shelley’s day continued into ca. 2100). Verney observes a group of “enterpriz[ing]” young Etonian boys and attempting “to read the future man” through their youth, sees them as “the future governors of England; the men, who, when . . . our projects completed or destroyed for ever . . . were the beings who were to carry on the vast machine of society; here were the lovers, husbands, fathers; here the landlord, politician, soldier” (227).

 It is precisely the youth and open possibility of the young Etonians that will afford them the futurity and the new “projects” that will simply reproduce the world as it is and “carry on the vast machine of society” (we might think of Lee Edelman’s work on the child and futurity here).

 Importantly, this same passage links this logic to the reproduction of Man: “Thus man remains, while we the individuals pass away” (228). The reproduction of the world—the sovereign world of governors and landlords and soldiers and the institution of Eton—and the reproduction and preservation of the being Man are co-constitutive (it’s no accident that Verney also quotes Edmund Burke in this passage). As we have seen, Man remaining, and remaining as sovereign, is powered by progress and advancement. “Advance,” Verney apostrophizes the young men repeatedly, “Advance! . . . May your progress be uninterrupted and secure; born during the spring-tide of the hopes of man, may you lead up the summer to which no winter may succeed!” (228).

The conscious irony here of Verney addressing future generations in the past while writing from a position after the extinction of humanity is superseded by a doubled irony in the passage of which Shelley could only have been dimly aware: that is, the formulation of Man’s advancement, projects, and industry begetting a long winterless summer, an eerily prescient image of global warming’s coming endless summer in the Anthropocene, the age of Man.

The novel’s interest in improvement and its connection to the imbricated logics of tasks, futurity, Man, and the reproduction of the world is illuminated by the recent critique of improvement by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. Drawing on Wynter and others, Harney and Moten link the Enlightenment’s colonial and racialized idea of Man to the imposition of tasks of improvement that actually keep things in place: what they call “man’s perpetually stilled motion” in “eternally prospective completion-in-improvement” (84, 89). The idea of Man is constituted by the differentiation and subjection of certain racialized groups who are set aside as in need of being “endlessly improved . . . on their endless way to becoming Man,” a telos infinitely deferred (85). For Harney and Moten, this murderous anthropological paradigm of work, tasks, and improvement is also irreducibly a problematic of political ecology, as it leads toward the “destruction of the biosphere” and “socioecological disaster” (85, 88). The demand for improvement, which is essential to capitalism, is indeed first directed against the earth itself, as in discourses of land improvement and enclosure.

 So it is in this light that we should read the various discourses in The Last Man on tasks, projects, and schemes for improvement—tasks that index the sovereignty of (European) Man, who lords over the spheres of the political and the ecological and in doing so obscures their inextricability.

 The next section will further explore the dimensions of Man’s racialization through Verney’s encounter with a figure who is constitutively denied entry onto “the bright noon-enlightened highway of mankind” (LM 157).

Early in the third and final volume of The Last Man, Verney and his family are preparing to depart England with Adrian and the few remaining English survivors of the plague. After a visit to London, Verney returns to his home in Windsor to come upon the body of his young son Alfred, who has just died of the disease. Before he reaches Alfred, however, he has a strange physical encounter with an unnamed, plague-infected “negro half clad” (the novel’s only explicitly Black character), from whom Verney appears to contract the plague by breathing in the sick man’s breath. Given that Verney is the lone character to actually recover from the plague, the scene of his contracting disease—and thus his possible inoculation—would appear to be a crucial one, yet this extraordinary passage has proven difficult to interpet. It is a grim scene, even for so bleak a novel as this, and one that has vexed commentators, who often gloss over it rapidly.

 But by engaging work in Black Studies that interrogates the racialized determinations of Man, this narrative episode can be read both as developing the novel’s critique of Man as a racialized and exclusionary mechanism (whose most paradigmatic exclusion is blackness) and also as opening the possibility of a form of relationality that is other than Man—a possibility ultimately rejected by Verney. ‘Here is the event, in Verney’s first-person—or rather, last-person—narration: "I threw open the door of the first room that presented itself. It was quite dark; but, as I stept within, a pernicious scent assailed my senses, producing sickening qualms, which made their way into my very heart, while I felt my leg clasped, and a groan repeated by the person that held me. I lowered my lamp, and saw a negro half clad, writing under the agony of disease, while he held me with a convulsive grasp. With mixed horror and impatience I strove to disengage myself, and fell on the sufferer; he wound his naked festering arms round me, his face close to mine, and his breath, death-laden, entered my vitals. For a moment I was overcome, my head was bowed by aching nausea; til, reflection returning, I sprung up, threw the wretch from me, and darting up the staircase, entered the chamber usually inhabited by my family. A dim light shewed me Alfred on a couch; Clara trembling, and paler than whitest snow, had raised him on her arm" (336-37). The macabre scene unfolds in a kind of dark netherworld. Verney’s actions seem instinctive, but the resulting picture is that the “negro half clad,” literally bare life, is denied entry into the Kingdom of Man. His half-clothed state and the language used to describe him (“wretch”—a favorite epithet of Frankenstein for his creature) indicate Verney’s judgment of his nonhumanity before he physically throws the man off. We don’t know the Black man’s name, his language, his situation, his relation to any person or place in the world, nor where he comes from or how—he is simply dropped off there by the narrative, as if transported from another world. He is in the house but out of place: an instance of pure deracination. It’s not clear in the novel whether the global slave system has been abolished in the late twenty-first century (it appears not), but in the year of the book’s publication, 1826, this Black character would certainly have been associated with British enslavement (slavery was not completely abolished in the British Empire until the 1840s). Further, as Siobhan Carroll has noted, Verney’s depiction of his house, with its “dark[ness],” “pernicious scents,” disease, sounds of groans, and general horror, closely resembles contemporary descriptions of slave ships (12).

Peter Melville is right to remind us that the context of this scene is that of home and family—Verney has rushed into his home, looking for his wife and child.

It appears that at least part of Verney’s violent rejection of the dying man stems from his judgment of the incongruity of blackness and domestic sociality, from which blackness is not only barred but seen as an interference. As Saidiya Hartman writes, “In short, the slave exists out of the world and outside the house” (169). Indeed, what if this passage evinces not so much a “lapse . . . of sympathy” on Verney’s part, as Melville argues, but rather demonstrates the normal operation of sympathy as it is structured to (not) work upon those not viewed as human, those not part of what the novel calls “the family of man,” or any family at all (Melville 835; LM 261)?

 This reading would allow us to see this episode as exposing the cracks in the false “we” of Man that the novel ruins, a “we” from which blackness is constitutively excluded but also to which blackness here presents some alternative, otherworldly, fleshly embrace.

Let us look at this scene in closer detail. What is the nature of this particular encounter, so different from other encounters in the novel where Verney reacts to the diseased and dead without fear and even sometimes with care? Verney perceives it to be a violent struggle, describing himself as being “clasped” and “grasp[ed],” and responds accordingly, recoiling in disgust and forcefully “thr[owing] the wretch from me.” In the chapter just before this scene, the plague had been directly associated with the notion of “flesh,”

 and likewise here Verney sees the Black man not as a coherent body or person but as a mass of decaying flesh, with the pun on “wound” intensifying the sense of festering decay: “He wound his naked festering arms round me.” Yet one might also see this collision of flesh from the dying man’s perspective, from the (non)place of exclusion, as the demonstration of and invitation to an altogether different entanglement outside of Man and Man’s sovereignty, a sharing of woundedness indexed both by the plague and by blackness (and their mutual identification).

 This embrace is an insistence on inextricable relationality even as Verney seeks to “disengage [him]self” from their precarious enmeshment. Following Alexander Weheliye’s recent theorization of flesh inspired by Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and others, we can think of the flesh here as a wound or “vestibular gash in the armor of Man, simultaneously a tool of dehumanization and a relational vestibule to alternate ways of being” (44).

The possibility of differentiating these two antithetical and simultaneous meanings of the flesh—as brutally violent reduction versus an antechamber to a new common life—depends in part upon whether vulnerability, the wound or “gash” in Man, is distributed to certain “others” as a sacrificial burden to bear or whether it is shared and generalized (indeed the very word “plague” derives from Latin plaga, which can mean both a “strike” and the “wound” or “gash” such a strike causes). The former is the case in this scene, as Verney chooses disengagement over entanglement.

Instead of perceiving the encounter as a violent struggle, as Verney does, being attentive to the action of the dying man as an embrace and a kiss on the mouth (the intense homoeroticism of this scene is too often unremarked)

 helps outline the relational and “alternate ways of being” that Weheliye sees flesh pointing towards and that The Last Man opens onto. Read this way, Verney’s failure is not in his refusal to see the Black man as included in Man but his refusal to “unMan” himself (to repurpose a verb Verney himself earlier uses)

 his refusal to abdicate the sovereignty of Man and affirm some shared fleshly entanglement with a (non)person marked by slavery. Another passage from Sexton prompts a final reflection on this critical scene from the novel: ‘In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—“above all, don’t be black” (Gordon 1997: 63)—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that “resides in the idea that ‘I am thought of as less than human’” (Nyong’o 2002: 389). In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos (“Social Life” 23). Given that pathology is in the first instance concerned with the understanding of disease, Sexton’s comment is remarkably apt for a novel about universal plague and for the scene I have been discussing in particular. What would it mean for Verney to have been able to affirm an “embrace of pathology” in the novel, to perform an act not of sympathy but what we might call sympathology? Perhaps it would look like not simply aiding the dying man but staying on the floor, staying entangled, sharing the damage of the plague as mutually vulnerable beings and inhabiting and generalizing this vulnerability in a common passivity; it might look something like death, or William Blake called “self-annihilation.” This negative image in the novel (the whole narrative is, recall, a prophecy), what doesn’t happen, adumbrates the opening for the affirmation of the “less than human” (Sexton quoting Nyong’o) and thereby other than Man: the life that is cast off on the ground, without work and task, and “unsovereign.”

 Having a glimpse of what is other than Man is in fact something upon which Verney constantly speculates, as we’ll see in the next section.

But instead, Verney separates himself and survives. He does appear to contract the plague in this scene,

 but as an inoculation rather than a fatal case. Verney refuses to embrace pathology, refuses to join what is (forced to be) outside of Man, and rather than helping or joining the Black man, throws him off and, moreover, feeds on his dying life by using the literally abject man (“threw . . . from me”, cf. Latin ab + iactus) as a sacrifice for his own immunization; they do not share the wound or the vulnerability of flesh in common dehiscence. Not only is the unnamed Black character not fully included in the proper category of Man but his not being Man is precisely what allows Verney to be Man. Verney (again, almost literally) parasitically feeds off his disease, subjection, and abjection; he becomes inoculated and able to reproduce himself even as the world around him disintegrates. In this way, the scene is a microcosm of the more general constitutive exclusions of Man that the novel probes and stages. Alongside the already radical interrogation of Western humanism, colonialism, and imperialism in The Last Man, a trajectory brought out by Barbara Johnson and others, reading the novel in dialogue with work in Black Studies further radicalizes our understanding of the limits and the outsides of Man. In addition, such a reading offers another understanding of this crucial hinge of the whole novel—namely, reframing the question as to why Shelley had the last man, the one character to survive the plague, contract it from the only character explicitly racialized as Black. This analytic bears on Romanticism’s political ecology more generally in fundamental ways; it prompts a rethinking of the category of ecological and nonhuman relationality according to “racial blackness” as the “paradigmatic figure of the nonhuman”—a paradigm consolidating precisely in the Romantic era—which as such aligns with all “earth’s vulnerable inhabitants,” and the earth itself (Karera 46, 52).

While the first two parts of this essay delineated the novel’s idea of Man, the last section argued Verney’s refusal to unMan himself took the form of his refusal to embrace the pathology of the plague and the dying Black man. Embracing and inhabiting the plague would mean acceding to the forces of interruption that the plague both figures and ushers in.

 The plague is a shifting figure in the book, conjuring both the “lethal universality” of Man (Johnson) and what interrupts this structure of universality (in this way it recalls Derrida’s discussion of the pharmakon, or indeed, Weheliye’s conceptual framing of the flesh). The plague, whose movement is often described in terms eerily rendolent of the Englightenment, like advancement and progress,

 is what short-circuits the reproduction of the world. It undoes the logics of sovereignty, tasks, progress, and futurity and, on another level, exposes their violently differentiating mechanisms and effects. Yet the plague is only the most prominent harbinger of the forces of negativity—interruption, inoperativity, aimlessness, ruination, and especially abdication—that pervade The Last Man. In fact, it is possible to delineate a dialectic of abdication among all of the taskmasters and project mongers of the novel, in addition to one on the second-order level of the novel itself. First of all, the main characters’ relation is set in motion, before they meet, by the last King of England abdicating the throne in the year 2073; the young would-be king Adrian then renounces any claims to the throne, amounting to an abdication; Raymond, whose very name suggests kingship over the world (cf. roi, rey + monde, mundo, etc.), renounces sovereignty over England on the cusp of achieving it, then later actually does assume the sovereignty of the Protectorship (called a “task” (150) only then to abdicate the throne and give up on “his various projects” (149); yet another sovereign, Ryland, assumes then abdicates the Protectorship. Indeed, the end of Man is consistently described as the end of sovereignty.

 Even near the end of the novel, with the plague finally gone and almost everyone on earth dead, Verney describes the plague itself in terms of abdication: “She [the plague] abdicated her throne” (426). In The Last Man, sovereignty cannot hold itself in place, and its continual ruination gestures toward the unsovereign life and community that the novel invites its readers to consider.

Alongside the acts of abdicating sovereignty, there are also several images toward the end of the novel, both figurative and literal, of relinquishing the rudder, reins, or pilotage, of giving up direction and directionality, of refusing to have a goal, telos, or task. “We took our hands therefore away from the long grasped rudder,” Verney sighs after leaving England (413).

 At an earlier moment of despair, he enjoins “man” to abdicate his sovereignty as the “lord of creation,” and to embrace dispossession: “Lie down, O man . . . give up all claim to your inheritance” (316).

 Then there is, of course, the last man, Verney, whom I designated at the beginning of this essay as a paradigmatic figure of tasklessness. Even while relinquishing the hope for improvement (“I form no expectation of alteration for the better”), in the novel’s final paragraph Verney longs in vain “to have some task” (470). Although his tasks have been abdicated for him, Verney remains trapped in the paradigm of Man, and trapped in isolation; his solitary wandering recalls Victor Frankenstein’s isolation at the end of that novel, not least as Frankenstein on his deathbed cries: “ My task is unfulfilled" (Frankenstein 177).

The novel does little to limn these “other shapes” of—or than—humanity, except to suggest the possibility that they could exist, and, in foregrounding the force of inoperativity and abdication, the possibility they would be unsovereign, without task, detached from the sovereign imperatives of progress and the colonial, racial apparatuses of division that marry such imperatives. To close, I will suggest a final image of a taskless, unsovereign, relational life other than Man that the novel bequeaths to readers. Mere pages from the end, the last man wanders through the deserted city of Rome and takes in its museums and monuments: "I gazed at each statue, and lost myself in a reverie before many a fair Madonna or beauteous nymph. I haunted the Vatican, and stood surrounded by marble forms of divine beauty. Each stone deity was possessed by sacred gladness, and the eternal fruition of love. They looked on me with unsympathizing complacency, and often in wild accents I reproached them for their supreme indifference—for they were human shapes, the human form divine was manifest in each fairest limb and lineament. The perfect moulding brought with it the idea of colour and motion; often, half in bitter mockery, half in self-delusion, I clasped their icy proportions, and, coming between Cupid and his Psyche’s lips, pressed the unconceiving marble" (465). In quite Blakean language, Verney experiences these statues as presences that have “the human form divine” and human “lineament[s] but are not Man. He partakes in some strange communion with the figures, losing himself in a Rousseauian “reverie” as he and the statues gaze upon one another. The statues themselves seem to be perpetually, purely in relation, dispossessed from themselves and “possessed by sacred gladness, and the eternal fruition of love.” What is “eternal fruition”? Given that “fruition” denotes the realization of some potentiality, trajectory, project, or task, “eternal fruition” indicates the absolute non-presence of any task. That which is always, eternally in fruition has no need of a projected task or process of coming into fruition; it simply is. The statues thus enflesh a common, taskless existence. Their “supreme indifference” is indifference to the world of differentiation itself, the world of tasks and progress, of improvement, deferral, and futurity: the world of Man.

 As the pun on “unconceiving marble” suggests, the statues have no child gestating or project into futurity; there is no work or task to be fulfilled, no condition to be improved, nothing to be accomplished or realized, because existence is always already “eternal[ly]” in fruition, immanently what it is—let be. The name for this release, this immaculate nonconception, is love: “the eternal fruition of love.”

One of the wagers of this essay has been its preliminary attempt to place Mary Shelley in dialogue with theoretical discourses, especially in Black Studies, on the “abolition of Man” and the “dethroning of Man and uttering new forms of life” (Weheliye 138; Walcott 192). Continuing to do so can help reframe Romanticism by sharpening our attention to the constitutive exclusions and erasures of Romanticism’s world (which is our world) and also by revitalizing the speculative habits inherent in Romanticism’s critique of Enlightenment and, more generally, its critique of the proper. Following this path would be one way of taking up Verney’s final inscription, an overture to a coming community written on a building to no one or to no Man: “Friend, come! I wait for thee!” (LM 456).

On the last day of February 2020, I received an email letting me know that this Romantic Circles Praxis volume on Political Ecology, with my essay on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, was kicking back into gear for publication. This same day, Feb. 29th, 2020, was the day of the first reported death in the United States from the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19 (though it would later be discovered there had been at least two earlier undetected deaths). This essay was finished in the summer of 2019 essentially as is, and while I have decided not to make any substantial or timely changes to it in light of the current moment, the pandemic seems to demand some extra reflection from readers of The Last Man. It is certainly eerie to return to my own essay and to Shelley’s monumental novel of twenty-first-century plague now, in mid-May 2020, as COVID-19 ravages on into what looks to be a grim summer and year ahead. Though long overshadowed in popular consciousness by Frankenstein, The Last Man was quickly thrust into the news in the early days of the pandemic, mentioned prominently in The New York Times,

 The New Yorker, and elsewhere. It seems poised to be the novel for the novel coronavirus, expected to teach us something in a time when “all the world has the plague” (LM 242). But like prophecy, literature does not give easy lessons and always exceeds any time or conditions that would await its proper arrival. Of course, and despite the “all” encoded in the pan of pandemic, all the world does not have the plague—infection and fatality numbers in the United States show huge racial disparities, with Latinx, Indigenous, and especially Black people disproportionately suffering. The racial parameters of who counts as Man continue to enforce a differential vulnerability, with some protected and others sacrificed as a kind of social inoculation. Perhaps, as Sexton suggests in a different context, this world itself is the pathogen for such a situation

—all the world does not have the plague, rather this world, “this waste world,” is the plague (LM 293).