Extinction first doesn’t rely on a static universal humanity, it resists the contingent universality imposed by threat of annihilation

(Daniel P., postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative THE IMMANENT APOCALYPSE: HUMANITY AND THE ENDS OF THE WORLD A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy)

For my part, I see no inconsistency between, on the one hand, Foucault’s avowed antihumanism and endorsement of the situated struggles waged by the ‘specific’ intellectual and his endorsement of the peculiar situation of the atomic scientists on the other. Instead, I believe it would be a tremendous mistake to assume that Western humanists somehow possessed a monopoly on universalism or that any mention of totality revives all that was most dubious in traditional Western metaphysics. Foucault himself seems to takes for granted that, to rephrase his earlier claim slightly: because ‘the atomic scientists had a direct and localized relation to scientific knowledge and institutions’ (or ‘specific position in the order of knowledge’), they could credibly ‘articulate a discourse that could at the same time be the discourse of the universal’ because ‘the nuclear threat affected the whole human race and the fate of the world.’194 At issue here is the difference between two types of universalism that both crop up in Foucault’s work and are easy to confuse but reward keeping separate. This involves what philosopher and Foucault scholar Colin Koopman lucidly identifies as “a crucial distinction between universality and universalizability, or what might be described as a distinction between eternal universals and historical universals, or in yet another way as necessary universality and contingent universalizability.”195 Expressed in these terms, it is clear that almost all claims to ‘necessary universality’ in human affairs have rightly come to be viewed with reflexive suspicion over the course of the last half century. At the same time, there have also been many who have permitted the belief that “the whole is the false”196 to be the last word in political wisdom while overlooking the ‘contingent universalizability’ of a growing number of phenomena that can credibly claim to impinge on the lives of every living human being. Universal death did not exist when Foucault was born in 1926. It became universal at a terrestrial scale when the creation of massed stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons breached the biological threshold of modernity by introducing the power to kill life itself. There is nothing necessary about the prospect of universal death by hydrogen bomb, just as the prospect of annihilating all complex life in nuclear fire or a tide of synthetic viruses robbed the whole order of terrestrial Nature of any lingering claim it might have had to being ‘necessary.’ What remains is a near infinitude of contingent processes that collectively make up the continuous flux of a finite Earth. Within this welter, it has become possible for human beings to initiate new processes that universally impinge on the survival of all human beings, and even all complex life. While it remains urgently necessary to treat all contingently universal claims with careful scrutiny, the introduction of the power to kill life itself into human affairs means that the critical thinkers of today should not be too hasty in concluding that “whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat”197 or that “despite their claims to universality…‘end of the world’ discourses are more specifically concerned about protecting the future of whiteness.”198

**********************Footnote 198

Audra Mitchell and Aadita Chaudhury, “Worlding Beyond ‘The’ ‘End’ of ‘The World’: White

Apocalyptic Visions and BIPOC Futurisms” in International Relations (2020), pp. 309-332; 310

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When the biological threshold of modernity was crossed and the politically modern world born with the first thermonuclear explosions, the death of the sum total of all living human beings became a source of contingent universalizability that every subsequent generation must continually keep at bay. There are indeed many who can justly be accused of taking an interest in the immanent apocalypse less out of concern for all human beings or solidarity with all earthly life, but instead out of a desire to preserve their privileged place in the existing order or because “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”199 (Here the millions of dollars in billionaire philanthropy that is pouring into existential risk research centers such as Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute affords ample food for thought.)200 This being said, on a planet where death itself has become contingently universal, nothing would be less critical than to reflexively assume that all appeals to human universality are necessarily a ruse of power. The reality of collective life on Earth has become a political concern contingently, but no less urgently. It is seventy years since this realization broke on Arendt and almost a half century since it dawned for Foucault. Contemporary political and critical theorists must begin to directly address the new forms of non-humanist universality that have arisen alongside the immanentization of the apocalypse or risk missing increasingly planetary contexts within which all specific political struggles are now being waged.