Extinction via Capitalism is upon us - we need to imagine the end to enable anti-capitalist activism

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)

Surviving the threat of extinction will entail, at least in part, expanding our capacity for fear and anxiety and cultivating a renewed sense of the apocalyptic. As Anders puts it: ‘Our imperative: “Expand the capacity of your imagination”, means, in concreto: “Increase your capacity of fear”. Therefore: don’t fear fear, have the courage to be frightened, and to frighten others, too. Frighten thy neighbour as yourself.’ (Theses for the Atomic Age, p498.) We need then to become enlightened doomsayers.30 Anders distils this doomsaying metaphysics into a short parable which creatively retells the Old Testament story of Noah:

One day, [Noah] clothed himself in sackcloth and covered his head with ashes. Only a man who was mourning [the death of] a beloved child or his wife was allowed to do this. Clothed in the garb of truth, bearer of sorrow, he went back to the city, resolved to turn the curiosity, spitefulness, and superstition of its inhabitants to his advantage. Soon he had gathered around him a small curious crowd, and questions began to be asked. He was asked if someone had died and who the dead person was. Noah replied to them that many had died, and then, to the great amusement of his listeners, said that they themselves were the dead of whom he spoke. When he was asked when this catastrophe had taken place, he replied to them: ‘Tomorrow’. Profiting from their attention and confusion, Noah drew himself up to his full height and said these words: ‘The day after tomorrow, the flood will be something that has been. And when the flood will have been, everything that is will never have existed. When the flood will have carried off everything that is, everything that will have been, it will be too late to remember, for there will no longer be anyone alive. And so there will no longer be any difference between the dead and those who mourn them. If I have come before you, it is in order to reverse time, to mourn tomorrow’s dead today. The day after tomorrow it will be too late.’ With this he went back whence he had come, took off the sackcloth [that he wore], cleaned his face of the ashes that covered it, and went to his workshop. That evening a carpenter knocked on his door and said to him: ‘Let me help you build an ark, so that it may become false.’ Later a roofer joined them, saying: ‘It is raining over the mountains, let me help you, so that it may become false.’31

According to the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, what we discover in Anders’ Noah is an apocalypticism which signposts a way out of our current impasse when it comes to thinking the planetary catastrophe. For Dupuy, in Anders’ parable the catastrophe is both necessary – fated to occur – and a contingent accident – one that need not happen. The way out of this paradox, based on a new understanding of the relation between future and past, requires us to act as if the catastrophe has already happened – or is fated to happen – in order to prevent it from becoming true (a version of the famous ‘future anterior’ that we find in Lacan). By acting as if the catastrophe has already taken place – or will necessarily take place – we are able to project ourselves into the post-apocalyptic situation and ask what we could and should have done otherwise. ‘Let me help you build an ark, so that it may become false’ (Mark of the Sacred, p204).

Both philosophically and politically, however, Dupuy’s metaphysical ‘ruse’, which he extracts from Anders, turns out to be a dead end.32 First, it is not clear why thinking of the catastrophe as inscribed in our future as fate would necessarily mobilise us to act against it; especially if averting the worst turns out to be (as Dupuy suggests) an activity of ‘indefinite postponement’, an infinite extension of the present. The politics of Dupuy’s temporal metaphysics is liberal and survivalist, rather than emancipatory: by asking us to act ‘as if ’ the future is already a ruin, he gives no suggestion of a transformed society to come, merely the hope that we might succeed in preserving what already is. Second, to advocate acting ‘as if ’ the catastrophe is our implacable destiny is still to posit catastrophe as an existential dark cloud looming on the horizon. But this is like the case of the obsessional neurotic patient who fears the occurrence of a terrible event in the future (a mental breakdown, perhaps), forgetting that they have entered psychoanalytic treatment precisely because this terrible event has in fact already occurred.33

We don’t need to act ‘as if ’ the catastrophe has happened or will one day happen because – as the coronavirus pandemic already made clear – the future of recurring disasters linked to climate change and ecological destruction has already arrived. Our task is thus not to try to avert the worst by prophesying it, but rather to find ourselves within the current moment of crisis and catastrophe: to take the threat of extinction as our starting point and, in this context, to recall Walter Benjamin’s words that revolutions aren’t necessarily the locomotives of world history, but rather attempts by passengers on capitalism’s runaway train ‘to activate the emergency break’.34 The aim, as Benjamin powerfully puts it, is ‘to interrupt the course of the world’ (Paralipomena, p170).