On Extinction

What are we to think as we facing the sixth extinction moment? Kant's invitation to imagine an 'end of all things' no longer feels like just a thought experiment. Philosopher Ben Ware argues that we must accept this without looking away. In fact, extinction is the very lens through which we see our current reality. He argues that in order to map the catastrophic present, we will first need to take a tiger's leap into the past in order to construct a new 'dialectics of extinctions'.On Extinction takes us on a breath-taking philosophical journey. Bringing dialectical thought to bear on one of the most pressing issues of our times, Ware argues that radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst, but rather with beginning again at the end: bringing to completion a mode of political and economic life which tethers us all - the yet to be born - to a sick but undying present. To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need.

On Extinction is a formidable intervention. The end is too serious a matter to be treated as tragedy or heroic sacrifice; rather, as Ben Ware shows, thinking it requires the materialist dialectic and its predilection for comedy: stubbornly beginning again, and again. -- Alenka Zupancic, author of What IS Sex?
A sweeping tour of our crisis present.Ben Ware offers a series of incisive and unforgiving readings that guide and impel us through the wreckage of contemporary capitalism. -- Benjamin Noys, author of The Matter of Language
An important book for our time. On Extinction follows what the late Gustav Metzger always told me: it is not enough to talk about climate change, we have to talk about extinction. -- Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director Serpentine Galleries, London
Ben Ware's wonderfully lucid new book exposes the diabolical evil of the cult of capitalism in its limitless assault on life in all its forms. It is by going through the disaster that we will find the path to planetary liberation. An essentially, urgently necessary intervention. -- Richard Seymour, author of The Disenchanted Earth
Carefully researched, tightly constructed, and broadly accessible, Ware's argument is both subversive and indispensable. Whatever happens next, one thing is sure: this path-breaking book by one of the sharpest minds in contemporary philosophy will live on for a very long time. -- Dany Nobus, author of Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason
How should critical theory address the multiple catastrophes raging through the planet - war, pandemic, climate chaos, and the like - and the threat of human extinction that they pose? Ben Ware offers a lucid, illuminating, and erudite response of great value in recalibrating our thinking to address the terrifying world we now inhabit -- Alex Callinicos, author of The New Age of Catastrophe
What philosopher Ben Ware is asking, then, is for us to imagine-to internalize-the reality of human finitude, the end of us. Only then, he suggests, will we be able to take in the full horizon of what we've wrought and, perhaps, move forward into a new and radical version of our shared future. Lit Hub
In this bold, fast-moving philosophical essay, which is as elegant and erudite as it is forcefully argued, Ben Ware develops not simply an aesthetics or ethics of extinction but a politics capable of responding to its almost unthinkable existential challenge. This is a brilliant book, bristling with both provocative ideas and perceptive, often unexpected readings. -- Matt Beaumontt, author of How We Walk
In On Extinction, Ben Ware writes towards a collective time liberated from the paradoxical, narcissistic apocalypse narratives of the 21st century: that it is both too late for the planet and that we must urgently act now to save it. -- Autumn Wright Bullet Points
Deftly combining insights from philosophy, psychoanalysis and critical theory, On Extinction dialectically rethinks the end for an era in which the end cannot be thought. -- Thomas Waller Marx & Philosophy
On Extinction is rooted in modes of resituating, recapitulating, and redefining, in this case with regard to the extent to which critical theory and philosophy might be more usefully, rationally, and actionably hospitable to discussions of climate change, catastrophic events, and the end of human existence by establishing a 'dialectics of extinction' - a way of addressing the realities of our catastrophic present by coming to terms with extinctions, and extinction-level anxieties, of the past. -- Paul D'Agostino Art Spiel

Ben Ware is Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Art at King’s College London where he is also a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy. He is the author of Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the ‘Tractatus’ and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2015); Living Wrong Life Rightly: Modernism, Ethics, and the Political Imagination (Palgrave, 2017); and editor of Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Thames & Hudson, 2019). His recent essays have appeared in e-flux journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and ESP magazine.

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