It’s try or die.

London, Author of several Books at the Intersection of Political Philosophy and Current Events. “Beginning again at the End: A Dialectics of Extinction,” New Formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, Volume 107-108, accessed via ProQuest / spp)

I. Capitalism as the time of catastrophe; catastrophe as capitalism’s chronic condition: this is the point from which radical thought needs to begin.

In the penultimate section of his magnum opus Negative Dialectics, Adorno, not for the first time, turns Hegel’s thought politically on its head: ‘The world spirit … would have to be defined as permanent catastrophe.’35 For Hegel, world spirit (Weltgeist) is the substance of history, the spirit of the world as it reveals itself in human consciousness; its aim is to make itself its own object, to discover its true nature and to become conscious of itself.36 At each stage of its development, world spirit realises itself in the forms of life of particular human societies: their political institutions, moral frameworks, cultural models and systems of knowledge. As Adorno makes clear, however, it is capitalism, ironically and perversely, that has now realised Hegel’s Weltgeist. To the extent that world history is an expression of the process of this new spirit, it is a history ‘leading not from savagery to humanitarianism … but from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’ (Negative Dialectics, p320). Contra the optimistic philosophies of Hegel and Kant, there is no progressivist ‘universal history’, just an emergency situation in which ‘the forms of humanity’s own global societal constitution threaten its life’.37 ‘The One and All that keeps rolling to this day – with occasional breathing spells – [is] the absolute of suffering’, Adorno writes (Negative Dialectics, p320). We should add here, however, that in our own time – a period of suffocating pandemics, murderous police chokeholds and megacities on the verge of asphyxiation – even this freedom to draw breath can now no longer be taken for granted.38

But Adorno also makes another dialectical move. While the chronic nature of catastrophe means that we cannot assume any progress that would suggest that humanity already exists and is therefore capable of making progress, progress can, nevertheless, still be thought. It ‘would be the very establishment of humanity in the first place, whose prospect opens up in the face of its own extinction’ (Progress, p145, emphasis added). It is the threat of extinction then – an end without remainder, ‘the most extreme, total calamity’ – which makes possible the realisation of humanity, the coming into being of what Adorno calls a ‘self-conscious global subject’ (Progress, p144).39 Paraphrasing lines from Hölderlin’s poem ‘Patmos’, famously cited by Heidegger in his lecture ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, we might say that for Adorno ‘out of the danger of human extinction, the saving power also grows’.40 Another point of connection is to Freud’s 1915 essay, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’. Writing in the midst of the great human extinction crisis of World War One, Freud observes:

War is bound to sweep away our conventional treatment of death. Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it. People really die; and no longer one by one, but many, often tens of thousands in a single day. [And yet, precisely because of death’s proximity,] [l]ife has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full potential.41 The difference between Adorno and Freud is, however, clear. For Adorno the threat of extinction compels us to think about how society as a whole might be rationally re-organised; whereas Freud’s much more modernist point is that through the encounter with the reality of mass death, life is once again enlivened, brought back to life.

II. The connection between the threat of extinction and the opening up of new subjective and political horizons is given one of its most suggestive explorations in Maurice Blanchot’s short essay ‘The Apocalypse is Disappointing’.42 In the first part of his essay, Blanchot turns to Karl Jaspers’ 1958 book The Atomic Bomb and The Future of Man. Blanchot reconstructs Jaspers’ argument along the following lines. Today humankind has the power to annihilate not only cities and specific populations, but also humanity as a whole. This is a point (as Günther Anders agrees) from which there is no going back; and therefore either humanity will disappear, or it will transform itself. Such a transformation will require nothing less than a ‘profound conversion’ (The Apocalypse is Disappointing, p101), a fidelity to something like the Rilkean maxim ‘You must change your life’. But Blanchot also detects something decidedly odd about the style and substance of Jaspers’ articulation. Despite the latter’s rhetoric of ‘change’, not to mention the urgency of the issue with which he deals, in his book nothing has changed (The Apocalypse is Disappointing, p102): there is nothing new at the level of language, politics, or indeed philosophical thought. How, then, to account for this repetition in the face of a new catastrophic horizon? Blanchot provides a clear answer: while Jaspers is preoccupied with the end of humanity, his real concern is less the atomic threat and more the extinction of the so-called ‘free world’ threatened by communism (The Apocalypse is Disappointing, p103). There is, therefore, no new thinking in Jaspers because reflections on the bomb serve merely as a pretext for returning to old formulas and oppositions: western ‘liberal freedom’ as the foundation of all values; death as preferential to ‘oppression’. While Jaspers argues that the atomic bomb and what he calls ‘explosive totalitarianism’ are inextricable (‘the two final forms of annihilation’), it is clear that if one must choose, then one’s ‘reason’ should be guided by a familiar Cold War logic: better dead than red; better the end of all things than the end of NATO.43

What, then, of Blanchot’s own reading of the extinction threat? His dialectics of annihilation attempts to open up the new. By putting into question the human species as a whole, the threat of extinction makes visible, for the first time, the idea of totality: a global human community (The Apocalypse is Disappointing, p105). But this totality exists only as a ‘negative power’. The humanity that is threatened with disappearance does not yet exist in any meaningful sense, but simply as an abstract idea. Indeed, because humanity has not yet been fully established, it is, strictly speaking, incapable of being destroyed, which is why Blanchot says (somewhat ironically) that extinction (or what he terms ‘apocalypse’) is ‘disappointing’ (The Apocalypse is Disappointing, p106). However, now that there is at least the idea of humanity as a whole, we should work to construct a real ‘human community’, a true ‘totality’, one that can, paradoxically, be fully destroyed because it fully exists. Blanchot says, without further elaboration, that this this new totality should be called ‘communist’ (The Apocalypse is Disappointing, p107).

III. Blanchot’s point, much like Adorno’s, is avowedly Hegelian: it is only by looking extinction in the face that humanity comes to glimpse the possibility of its own realisation. The prospect of the end places the idea of a new unity on the agenda; it opens up the potential of an awakening to the idea of totality. Or at least that’s the theory. But here we might ask if this dialectic still holds true – if indeed it ever did. Does danger signal the possible emergence of a saving power in the way that Adorno and Blanchot both seem to believe? From our present perspective, the answer to this question must be twofold. First, contra Blanchot, the catastrophe is no longer a future possibility, but (as I argue in the previous section) that which, in one respect, has already arrived. This is not (or not yet) the nuclear calamity which Blanchot speaks of, but rather the coming together of the planetary ecological crisis, the global epidemiological crisis, and a new period of war(s) and economic devastation. This catastrophic convergence, far from placing the possibility of a global humanity on the immediate horizon, has instead intensified a series of sad passions, alienating symptoms and damaging political attachments: surplus rage, surplus anxiety, cynical resignation, fetishistic splitting or disavowal, the addiction to numbing forms of enjoyment, the inability to enjoy, identitarian narcissism, collective paranoia, melancholic withdrawal, moral hypochondria, historical forgetting, false (or confected) remembering, delegating one’s pleasure, delegating one’s anti-capitalism, the desperate attempt to preserve the ‘human’ as it already exists under capitalism. What we are talking about here then is a new kind of traumatised psychic reality, a new wounded subjectivity, one which won’t be overcome by a dialectics of mortal fear (being scared ‘so much that we start fighting for our lives’),44 but which will instead require a political shift away from the time of endless suffering – a time that Althusser defines, simply, as ‘barbarism’:

What is barbarism? Regression while remaining in place, stagnation while remaining in place, of a kind which human history offers examples by the hundreds. Yes, our civilisation can perish in place, not only without rising to a higher stage or sinking to a lower stage that has already existed, but in accumulating all the suffering of a childbirth that will not end, of a stillbirth that is not a delivery.45

How, then, in such conditions might the idea of the whole be placed back on the agenda? Importantly, as Adorno and Blanchot remind us, ‘humanity’ does not (yet) exist; its existence in the future would require its political construction. We are therefore still living in prehistory (as Marx famously points out), at a stage prior to the actual creation of human society. But it is here precisely – and this is the second point – that we should radically re-politicise the Adorno/Blanchot dialectic. The possibility of a real human community won’t simply emerge in the face of pure negativity (through an encounter with the possibility of our own extinction); instead, it will require the realisation that this world (the world of unfolding catastrophe, illusory humanity, and ‘normalised’ barbarism) can itself be ended – ended through a conscious intervention into existing conditions.

The shift is therefore from the affective encounter to the zone of politics proper; and it hinges upon the recognition that only the collective negation of this world ends the prospect of the end of the world – understood here not as a sudden death, but rather as an incremental decay, the slow unravelling of intimately entangled forms of life. As Ernst Bloch points out: ‘The true genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical’.46 To terminate the threat of the end (as the biological end of all things) will therefore mean beginning again at the end (of prehistory): abolishing a mode of political and economic life which seeks to tether us all – the yet to be born – to a sick but undying present.