Beginning Again at the End: A Dialectics of Extinction Ben Ware
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2022 Number 107 & 108
Beginning Again at the End: A Dialectics of Extinction Ben Ware
Ben Ware pages 139-154
DOI: 10.3898/NewF:107-8.08.2022
Abstract
This essay makes three connected moves. First, it examines various modalities of ‘the end’ in philosophy and contemporary neoliberal culture, asking what new political lessons might be drawn from each. Second, it looks at different dialectical ideas of catastrophe: Gu¨nther Anders’ and Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s notion of ‘enlightened doomsaying’; and Maurice Blanchot’s and Theodor Adorno’s contention that only in the face of extinction does humanity become visible in the first place. Third, the essay concludes by proposing a move beyond Blanchot and Adorno. We don’t just need to look the negative (extinction) in the face, but to move into the zone of politics proper: to recognise that only the negation of this world – a world of converging and multiplying catastrophes – ends the prospect of the end of the world – understood not as a sudden death, but rather as an incremental decay, the slow unravelling of intimately entangled forms of life.
To cite this article
Ben Ware (2022) Beginning Again at the End: A Dialectics of Extinction Ben Ware, New Formations, 2022(107 & 108 ), 139-154. https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:107-8.08.2022