Postscript, Posthuman: Werner Herzog's “Crocodile” at the End of the World

This chapter explores posthumanism, inscription, technics, and futurity in Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). Specifically, I discuss the relationship between the film’s preoccupation with paleoart and the birth of humanity on the one side and its representation of the nonhuman animal on the other. I argue, first, that Cave of Forgotten Dreams ends with an animal biography. Herzog’s postscript pivots away from his film’s documentary style and narrates a speculative fiction: a posthuman future in which supposedly mutated albino crocodiles outlive humanity. And I argue, second, that this animal biography discloses the technical interpenetration of human and nonhuman life. By putting Herzog’s film in conversation with the work of Georges Bataille, Bernard Stiegler, and Jacques Derrida, I demonstrate how even this posthuman postscript is not post-script. The “script” of humanity survives its own destruction and lives on in the irradiated bodies of Herzog’s crocodiles.