""The End" is not the End": Nishok G U reviews "On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End" by Ben Ware (Keywords: Crises;Revolutionary Politics;Renewal;Dialectics;Psychoanalysis)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 1 ("Marx and Philosophy")

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We live in an age of extinctions and endings: extreme climate events, the sixth mass extinction of species, global pandemics, political and economic instabilities, massive social and cultural upheavals, the renewed possibility of nuclear annihilation, accelerated development of AI, and more that could not only end the human race but life on earth as we know it.

These terrifying developments, Ben Ware writes in one of the most evocative passages in his 2024 book, On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End (Verso Books, 2024), have “intensified a series of sad passions and alienating symptoms: surplus rage, hyper-anxiety, cynical resignation, the addiction to numbing forms of enjoyment, identitarian narcissism, collective paranoia, melancholic withdrawal, historical forgetting… What we are talking about here then is a new kind of traumatized psychic reality, a new wounded subjectivity.”

In a time of converging crises, Ben Ware’s book is a timely, creative, radical, slightly counterintuitive but ultimately generative reflection on the many catastrophes we face today. I say counterintuitive because instead of seeing extinctions solely as world-ending events, he sees in them – in a classic dialectical fashion – a possibility of resurgence and renewal. They are an opportunity to perform a “Master Reset” on all domains of human life: philosophical, political, economic, social, cultural and ecological. His enduring question throughout is: Can we begin again at the end? 

But what would it even mean to begin again at the end, philosophically, politically, and otherwise? And more importantly, how do we do that? In a conversation from last year, Ware remarked that the history of modern European philosophy can be re-read as a history of thinking about extinctions or the end of the world. In fact, he begins his book with one such example from Kant. In his late essay, “The End of All Things,” Kant claims that it is the idea of the final end that gives worth to the lives of rational beings, without which “creation itself appears purposeless… like a play with no resolution and affording no cognition of any rational aim.” Endings have not only been a chief concern of modern Western philosophy; contemporary popular culture is also obsessed with them too, as seen in the recent explosion of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films.

The history of modern European philosophy can be re-read as a history of thinking about extinctions or the end of the world.

Ware picks out two ways endings have been imagined in contemporary cinema. One is the end as a sublime event, “as a spectacular catastrophe, an abrupt and violent intrusion from elsewhere.” This is a familiar trope, where an external event (such as a massive meteorite) brings about mass extinction. But this, Ware thinks, has the effect of displacing “all evil from inside the world (capitalist economic and social relations) to outside (the chaotic universe itself).” Framing the end as a sublime event thus serves as a psychic defence against facing up to the reality that the present state of the world, where late capitalism’s depredation of our politics, culture, and ecology is allowed free rein, is never going to end. It is with this in mind that Ware evokes Fredric Jameson’s famous line: “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.”

This connects to the second idea of the end understood as stuckness, as endless repetition, “an end that seems to play out endlessly.” This is the idea that the horror that is our present will go on forever, repeat itself on a loop, with no change or transformation in sight. This is, in fact, a constant refrain throughout the book. Ware quotes Eric Cazdyn to make the point that “we have entered a new chronic mode, a meantime with no end… an undying present that remains forever sick.” Shortly after, he goes on to say: “We appear to find ourselves stuck in an arrested time: unable to move either fully forwards or fully backwards… [our] expanding present acquires the character of a limbo state.”

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Several “solutions” have been proposed as a way out of this “limbo state”. Ware critically considers two such controversial responses to the contemporary crises – anti-natalism and de-extinction – both of which, he thinks, fall terribly short.

The philosophical core of anti-natalism is this: human life, any human life, is such that the quantum of pain far exceeds the quantum of pleasure, so the best thing would be never to have been born at all. But as we are already here, the next best thing would be to end ourselves, either by engaging in voluntary mass suicide or by refusing to procreate and adding new life to this tragic existence. The ecological variant of this thought, which Ware calls “ecological anti-natalism,” goes as follows: all of nature’s woes are due to human beings, so the only way to protect and save nature is to kill ourselves.

Ware raises two objections against anti-natalism. One is that it equates existence with suffering, without being sensitive to the fact that suffering and misery are unequally distributed in a world ravaged by inequalities. It thus reifies the current matrix of human relations and endorses an apolitical explanation of society’s pathologies. Second, and more importantly, anti-natalism has no imagination of an alternative future. It tacitly endorses the idea that there is no real alternative to capitalism. Though anti-natalism rightly calls into question the uncritical optimism that animates much contemporary liberal politics, it also keeps us stuck in a “dull presentism” in which “the possibility of new collective forms of life remains eternally repressed.”

Ware thinks that the philosophical pessimism underlying anti-natalism is not radical enough. In fact, it might, in the end, be very optimistic

But the anti-natalist, a sympathetic reader might think, has not bothered to imagine a different future because any such future will be tragic and full of suffering too. By giving up on the possibility of a better future, they simply stay true to their fundamentally pessimistic worldview. However, Ware thinks that the philosophical pessimism underlying anti-natalism is not radical enough. In fact, it might, in the end, be very optimistic. It has been said, most famously by Adorno, that we cannot live right in a wrong world. But the anti-natalist at least hopes to die right in a wrong world. For Ware, however, this hope is ultimately misplaced, for capitalism is so rotten from the inside that even death and dying cannot be meaningful or salient in a world organised by these destructive relations.

Next, onto de-extinction or resurrection biology. (What a theological-sounding name for a contemporary branch of biological science!) As the name suggests, de-extinction attempts to bring back extinct species through the use of genetic technologies. First, de-extinction has been proposed as a response to the enormous biodiversity loss we are witnessing today, a supposed bulwark against the sixth mass extinction. Second, it is meant to inject some hope against the doom and gloom that typically characterizes contemporary ecological discourse. However, given that the circumstances causing the current extinctions are only getting worse, it is not clear what recovering extinct species is supposed to achieve. And, we are still largely in the dark about the consequences of restoring these animals back into the wild.

Beyond these standard criticisms, Ware argues that de-extinction is only the most extreme instance of what he calls the “anthropocentric sublime,” i.e. “an attempt to create new forms of wonder and awe on the back of planetary wreckage… This attempt to fill out nature’s “lack,” to cork the ecological hole, is quite clearly a drive towards mastery.” On the one hand, it positions itself as the new “ecological theology.” It hopes to fix climate change and reverse mass extinction and “save” nature by trying to bring back to life long-dead “charismatic megafauna.” But, on the other hand, this ecological theory is at its core apocalyptic. What underlies it is a perverse tenet of bio-capitalism: living things reduced to mere packets of genetic code that can be controlled, manipulated, and traded.

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Where else do we look if these contemporary responses to the converging crises are not good enough? How do we actually begin again at the end? I will highlight three strands of Ware’s thinking on this.

First, Ware talks about the idea of “looking extinction in the face,” especially in relation to the Lars von Trier film, Melancholia (2011). The moment of transformation for the severely depressed protagonist, Justine, comes when she is lying by the side of a creek, completely naked, gazing up at the sky and seeing the planet Melancholia hurtling towards Earth – a moment of actually looking extinction in the face. Instead of striking terror or inducing despair, such a moment completely enlivens and transforms Justine. She is born anew in that moment. Ware thinks this is because she can finally begin again from zero. She reaches the point of the end, of extinction, of nothingness, not to stop there, but to go beyond nothing, to unleash “the joy of new things.”

Any politics that is informed by psychoanalysis has to recognise that total redemption of human subjects will necessarily and always fail.

Building on the work of Simone Weil, Ware suggests that we can engage in a process of “revolutionary decreation,” through which “the subject enters a ‘zone of daring’ and experiences its own symbolic death as a necessary part of a creative process of rebirth, of beginning again at the end.” This is nothing less than an attempt to redeem humanity. But Ware’s firm grounding in psychoanalysis spurs him to add a few caveats to what is at stake in this undertaking. What are we talking about when we talk about redeeming humanity? First, any politics that is informed by psychoanalysis has to recognise that total redemption of human subjects will necessarily and always fail, not because revolutions are doomed to fail (as cynics would have us believe), but because alienation is a constitutive feature of human subjectivity.

What revolutionary decreation or redemption can and should be aimed at is the more modest goal of undoing and transcending what Ware calls “surplus alienation.” All we can hope to create, Ware argues, is a “future of liberated, classless neurotics – neurotic because that just is the basic structure of human speaking beings – who, no longer subject to the mute compulsion of life-devouring market logic, are now able to realize actual freedom and genuine creativity in both their everyday actions and their collective relations with others.” This is the re-imagined vision for a redeemed humanity that a psychoanalytically-informed politics can take us towards.

The second strand of Ware’s thinking involves breaking free of outmoded forms of temporality and reimagining our relationship with time itself. According to Ware, we typically take two attitudes to world-ending catastrophes. We either think they are going to arrive tomorrow (which never quite arrives and only recedes endlessly into the horizon) and thus never get around to action, or we are called on to act “as if” the catastrophe has already happened, so that we act now in order to prevent the worst from happening.

On the one hand, then, we are told it is already too late. No matter what we try to do now, it will not matter much, for the moment to act has already passed. Alternatively, we may think there is still time to intervene meaningfully, but that window is closing fast, so we had better act now. He finds both to be problematic: “While ‘too late’ leads in the direction of melancholic inaction, ‘act now’ imitates various forms of narcissistic hyperactivity.” Ware recommends a third approach, which is to situate oneself within the moment of catastrophe – for it is already here, as evidenced by recurring and extreme weather events, mass extinction of species and global pandemics.

One way to think about beginning again at the end is to say that it involves a will to create from zero.

The third and final strand concerns the nature of revolutionary activity itself. Early on in the book, Ware asks a provocative question: “How might we imagine a future that is not simply an extension of the blighted present?” The French philosopher Claude Lefort believed that the best revolutions of the past had a double movement of time built into them: “[T]hey turned towards the past, but only as a precondition for ‘opening on to the future.’” The nature of revolutionary activity is such that it reaches back into the past, summons it back to life by realising its revolutionary potential in the present, and, in the process, creates a radically different and more liveable future.

As we have seen, one way to think about beginning again at the end is to say that it involves a will to create from zero. But this does not mean that we have to start from scratch entirely. And such a thing is not possible anyway. As Ware puts it, “There are, strictly speaking, no blank pages on which the text of history can be written.” We have inherited pages that are already “overwritten by the hands of previous generations.” The goal of revolutionary activity is simply to make these texts from the past legible to the present generation, i.e. “an actualization of a past that has not yet fully existed, a past that still remains ahead of us in time.”

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Let me end by raising two concerns with this otherwise remarkable book. In the final chapter, Ware evokes Walter Benjamin’s idea of “political barbarism” as a way of confronting capitalism’s ills and transforming society from within:

It is by rupturing the omnipresent present – the present as stuckness – that politics is able to bring the past back into being, to retroactively awaken the blocked possibilities of previous failed revolutionary attempts. In this respect, the new political barbarism will strive towards what Marx calls the conscious completion of old work.

A central figure for political barbarism is the destructive character, who, as Benjamin puts it in his essay of the same name, “knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away… Not only by brute force; sometimes by the most refined means… What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.” And this kind of politics, most strikingly, is carried out with a laugh, which is to say a “barbaric laugh.”

If he is not advocating for violence, why are there such explicit references to violence, aggression, and destruction in the text?

In a similar vein, Ware talks about the idea of the “revolutionary demonic”: “Like the demonic, revolutionary activity is itself marked by a terrifying excess: it negates what we understand as ‘ethics’, ‘politics’, ‘subjectivity’, and in this respect it shakes reality to its very core. There really is a sense in which revolutionary upheaval is monstrous, horrifying and sublime.” And once again, in the final chapter, Ware says, “the new, both experientially and materially, can come about only through a fully accomplished destruction. Against capitalist destruction, what is needed is the ‘rejuvenating’ and ‘cheerful’ destruction of capitalism itself”.

All these passages hint at the place and problem of political violence, which is an issue that any radical politics has to confront. What is the nature of political violence? Are there acceptable and unacceptable forms of it? Can violence be “ethical,” so far as revolutionary politics is concerned? Unfortunately, Ware does not take up these questions in the book.

Furthermore, his own attitude and views on violence are not fleshed out. Is he advocating for political violence? If so, what kind and form(s) of violence? How does he justify this proposal? On the other hand, if he is not advocating for violence, why are there such explicit references to violence, aggression, and destruction in the text? What role do they play in the larger scheme of the book or his argument? Are they merely for rhetorical effect? Or do they have larger philosophical as well as political purposes?

Another problem is Ware’s restricted reading of “the present.” Ware, who gives a dialectical twist to almost every concept and idea in the book, does not sufficiently explore the dialectical potential and possibilities of the present. As I have shown, the present is predominantly associated with stuckness, deadness, a blight that needs to be resisted or escaped from. But the present is and can be so much more than that. While I understand the impulse to avoid the dangers of a status quo-maintaining politics, there is another side, as it were, to the present, which is best embodied and exemplified by many of our richest contemplative traditions.

They can help us not only rethink the present (from a site of stuckness to one of liberation), but also change our relationship to it (from aversion or rejection to thoroughly inhabiting it). The oft-repeated mindfulness meditation instruction of “coming back into the present moment,” instead of ignoring the past or denying the future, is aimed at creating enough spaciousness within oneself such that one can open to and stay with difficult truths and harsh realities (of the kind that Ware exposes in his book) and, in doing so, genuinely and consciously make a different choice, a radical choice, and thus move towards new, even hitherto unimagined, possibilities and futures.

The 'present' is predominantly associated with stuckness, deadness, a blight that needs to be resisted or escaped from. But the present is and can be so much more than that.

There is also a certain instrumentality to Ware’s treatment and understanding of the present. It is largely seen as a mere means or a stage for enacting the “conscious completion of old work” or a springboard for moving into a “radically different future.” But what he does not adequately recognise is the uniqueness and singularity of each moment (“You can’t step into the same river twice”) that requires a special kind of sensitivity and (non-instrumental) attention, in order to “reveal” its nature and potentialities.

Even decisions and choices about which revolutionary “pathways” to follow are best made following an intimate engagement with the moment that is here and now. That is perhaps the best way to know what the most appropriate course of action for this moment is. Not all of our many pasts are actually accessible to us right now. Not all of the many possible futures are actually open to us right now. So, even if one were to think, like Ware, that the game of revolution is played in the fields of pasts and futures, a close and attuned engagement with the present is indispensable in order to know which pasts and futures one could and should lean into. Without it, our actions, including revolutionary ones, would be far less effective and transformative in the world. The dialectical, generative, and, dare I say, revolutionary potential of the present is so immense yet, sadly, underexplored and underemphasized in this book.

What is more ironic is that the words that most resonate throughout Ware’s book – the idea of beginning again at the end – immediately bring to one’s mind the famous Zen instruction: “Begin again!” And to my mind, that’s indication enough of the immense generative potential and cross-learnings that can come from putting revolutionary politics in dialogue with our contemplative practices across various traditions. The resultant “meditative politics” can teach us not only how to begin again at the end, but also how to begin again in the here and now.

Nishok G U is a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, India. He works on environmental philosophy. He is one of the managing editors at The Philosopher.

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