Extinction risks are inevitable in a world of capitalism - only the aff accesses solvency for the root cause

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)

If modern philosophy can’t stop returning to the idea of the end, then the same is also true of contemporary culture. Within culture, however, the fantasy of the end takes a number of distinct forms which we will need to be theoretically attentive to. In the 2021 film How it Ends, the central character Liza (Zoe Lister-Jones) decides how to navigate her last day on earth. Sporting an inconspicuous Chanel leather backpack, and with her younger self (her ‘metaphysical YS’) in tow, Liza walks the streets of suburban Los Angeles attempting to settle accounts with her parents, friends and various ex-lovers, before a lifedestroying meteorite finally strikes the earth. The impending prospect of mass extinction is here a breezy affair, involving breakfast pancakes, psychedelic drugs, and a sentimental singalong with the indie-folk performer Sharon Von Etten. In this version of apocalypse, there is no social breakdown, no struggles over access to resources, and no tooled-up military personnel patrolling the streets. Indeed, the film’s key ideological manoeuvre is to displace all evil from inside (capitalist economic and social relations) to outside (the chaotic universe itself), while at the same time presenting annihilation as part of the mildly eccentric everyday run of things. The end is, consequently, not only something over which the characters have no control, but also something which they can enjoy as pure unadulterated spectacle.

We might refer to this particular fantasy of the end as the end as sublime event: that is, the end as spectacular catastrophe, as an abrupt and violent intrusion arriving from elsewhere. According to Alenka Zupančič, the idea of the end as involving a ‘total destruction of the earth’ is, at least in our own period, bound up with a broader ideological shift that occurs at the end of the Cold War: one emblematised in Francis Fukuyama’s infamous thesis that world history has reached its categorical conclusion since there is no longer any viable alternative to Western liberal capitalism.17 Rather than signalling a final end, however, what this argument announces is precisely the opposite: the impossibility of an end, and specifically the impossibility of ending capitalism or of capitalism as we know it ever coming to an end. This, as Zupančič points out, plays a crucial role in restructuring the limits of political thought and imagination: ‘the end, or any kind of serious transformation’, can now only be conceived of as coming catastrophically ‘from the great Outside’ (The End of Ideology, p834).

We can, however, add a double dialectical twist to this argument. The fantasy of a world-destroying end, which clearly both predates and lives on beyond Fukuyama’s utopian vision of posthistoire, might be seen to operate in a curiously two-fold sense. First, this fantasy functions as a kind of psychic defence: the idea of a sublime ending provides a protective shield against the real horror that history no longer has any aim or purpose, meaning that we might now have arrived at something like a new chronic mode, which may well be a state infinitely worse than death.18 Second, rather than signalling capitalism’s (Fukuyamist) triumph, the fantasy of a final end is, we might say, an effect of an internal disturbance within capitalism itself. As George Caffentzis writes, ‘whenever the ongoing model of exploitation becomes untenable, capital has intimations of mortality qua the world’s end’.19 But because there is never anything secure about the capitalist model, this apocalyptic fear becomes part of capitalism’s own chronic condition: the fantasy of capital is inseparable from the anxiety about the apocalypse of capital.

Taking the two points together, we thus arrive at an intriguing paradox: the idea of a final end is a defence against the idea that the present state of things will never end; but this is itself a fantasy which conceals the (repressed) truth that the spectre of the end is precisely what haunts capitalism. Ultimately, then, we might conclude that the recurrent fantasy of a sublime end has its material basis in capitalism’s anxiety about its own ability to reproduce itself over time. It is as if the system secretly knows that it is moving inexorably in the direction of its own extinction.20