How can human beings learn to coexist with the rest of the living world as mortals? This vast question leads this contribution to a reflection on educational concepts that lend themselves to conceiving subjectivity in light of finitude and relationality—as opposed to transcendent subjectivity (Wallin, 2014)—and that hinges on the consideration of death as a site shared with the more-than-human world, and of human mortality linked to the fate of this planet (Radomska et al. 2019). To this end, I draw on Rosa’s edifying research read by Wallenhorst and colleagues (2020), which they propose to integrate into an emerging and pressing educational thought for the Anthropocene. Two dynamic, contingent processes are analysed by the authors: that of ‘resonance’ and ‘resistance’, both of which I take up here. Resonance refers to the poetic aspect of relations with the world, from which it is possible to envisage education as creating the conditions for such responsive relations, grounded in sensitivity, affectivity and imagination, and potentially transformative (see also Todd, 2020). The poetic relationship, itself having political worth, can be pedagogically enacted through encounters with living and dying more-than-human beings in the form of an experience that arouses both curiosity and mourning (Despret, 2021a; 2021b). Resistance focuses on the necessary struggles against supremacist ideologies and the destructive impact of neoliberal capitalism, based on unlimited access to and exploitation of the world. Resistance, which I further elaborate using Ross's (2024) concept of ‘defense’, requires an acute awareness of death and precarity that these ideologies seek to erase. These two distinct yet intertwined processes are fruitful to think with for developing pedagogies attuned with what remains largely repressed in educational thought: the death of other humans and other species, of environments, and our own (Wallin, 2015; Bengtsson, 2019). I therefore argue that learning to coexist on this planet as finite, interdependent beings requires a sensitive perception of the living world and the cycles of life and death on which each depends and to which each is subject, combined with anti-capitalist and anti-colonial ‘situated struggles’ (Ross, 2024) where efforts to build democratic communities still seem to be the only viable solution in an age of anxiety and despair. Through this dual axis (poetic/political) and their respective pedagogical registers (resonance/resistance), awareness of finitude and of harmful/unjust species death can unfold and contribute to nurturing a posture of attentiveness and care oriented towards solidarity and cooperation.

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