When one door closes, open another door. Another one, and another, and another and another. When you run out of doors, demolish the building, ignore the rubble, build another. Repeat.
In “On Extinction: Beginning Again At The End,” Ben Ware challenges readers not only to open new doors but to stare directly at the rubble we have created. It is only then that we might understand extinction and truly begin again.
“On Extinction” begins by examining the concept of extinction itself — what it is, what it means and if it can even be imagined or realized by humanity. Ultimately, Ware argues, total extinction cannot be fully understood without the existence of a global community. In the face of contemporary global issues like climate change, this makes sense. The only way we can understand extinction and extinction-level threats is by understanding that we are only a small part of a unified whole — that all of humanity, not just our family or country, faces the same threat.
Ware then boldly explores what it means to look squarely at extinction and our own mortality. He contemplates and then rejects anti-natalism and other radical responses to global turmoil, turning instead to an idea of total surrender and selfless sacrifice for each other. In doing so, Ware builds a clear critique of capitalism as an economic and cultural institution, arguing that we might “begin” at the “end” of our acceptance of current global economic norms.
The ideas in “On Extinction” are difficult not only to process but also to understand. Ware’s writing, however, is refreshingly lucid despite the book’s fast pace and complex subject matter. As a student with only some philosophy experience, I found it a bit difficult to read, but accessible nonetheless.
Ware guides readers through a wide variety of thinkers. In the first five pages alone, he explores Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Judith Butler and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Phew. Ware also builds off of Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan and Karl Marx, and pulls examples from Sigmund Freud, Sophocles and Franz Kafka.
Although he works with a large and intimidating pool of ideas, Ware’s argument is clear and well organized. His expertly chosen examples from film and literature help to sharpen and clarify notoriously difficult theories. At the end of “On Extinction,” I felt like I had taken a crash course on Kant, Kafka, Freud, Marx and ecocriticism.
Ware is clearly well read and makes an interesting, intelligent argument. However, I often found his thinking idealistic and at times hypocritical. For example, Ware advocates for a breakdown of the capitalist system yet critiques almost all critical works he mentions as participating within that system. In some of his examples, like Netflix’s “Squid Game,” he describes what sounds like a very similar critique to his own, then rejects it as a way for viewers to release guilt he deems inherent to the system while they continue to participate in it.
If that is the case, then all criticism can be devalued as passive participation, even Ware’s own work. Though this isn’t his argument, given that he advocates for a kind of radical resignation from the system, his high standards for criticism have the unintended consequence of discouraging any kind of criticism, whether within the system or not.
Ware’s ultimate conclusion — that we must resign from participation in the capitalist system — is idealistic and unproductive in practice. Ware argues that it is by resigning that we might be able to transcend traditional temporal space and revert to the past. The future, he argues, should look like a kind of neobarbarism. We should not only look at the dirt and rubble of all we have knocked down but live in it, accepting the damage we have already done.
Though Ware rejects nihilism and pessimism throughout the book, his end conclusion feels defeatist. I agree that global crises require global cooperation and understanding, but why must we resign to the rubble and dirt? Why not look at it in the way he suggests and assess a way to rebuild more productively?
I think that Ware would argue that resignation itself is a radical rebuilding. I, however, am not convinced.
However, “On Extinction” is radically unique and well thought out. With the help of “Melancholia,” modern art and “Ninotchka,” among other things, Ware eloquently describes what it really means to start over, to end so that it is possible to begin. Ware stares unflinchingly at our own destruction, at the rubble left behind, and dares to ponder what’s next.
Daily Arts Writer Claire Rock can be reached at rockcl@umich.edu.
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