The connection between the threat of extinction and the opening up of new subjective and political horizons is given one of its most suggestive explorations in Maurice Blanchot’s short essay ‘The Apocalypse Is Disappointing’. In the first part of his essay, Blanchot turns to Karl Jaspers’s 1958 book The Atomic Bomb and the Future of Man. Blanchot reconstructs Jaspers’s argument along the following lines. Today humankind has the power to annihilate not only cities and specific populations, but also humanity as a whole. This is a point (as Günther Anders agrees) from which there is no going back; and therefore either humanity will disappear, or it will transform itself. Such a transformation will require nothing less than a ‘profound conversion’. But Blanchot also detects something decidedly odd about the style and substance of Jaspers’s articulation. Despite the latter’s rhetoric of ‘change’, not to mention the urgency of the issue with which he deals, in his book nothing has changed: there is nothing new at the level of language, politics, or indeed philosophical thought. How, then, to account for this repetition in the face of a new catastrophic horizon? Blanchot provides a clear answer: while Jaspers is preoccupied with the end of humanity, his real concern is less the atomic threat and more the extinction of the so-called ‘free world’ threatened by communism. There is, therefore, no new thinking in Jaspers because reflections on the bomb serve merely as a pretext for returning to old formulas and oppositions: Western ‘liberal freedom’ as the foundation of all values; death as preferential to ‘oppression’. While Jaspers argues that the atomic bomb and what he calls ‘explosive totalitarianism’ are inextricable (‘the two final forms of annihilation’), it is clear that if one must choose, then one’s ‘reason’ should be guided by a familiar Cold War logic: better dead than red; better the end of all things than the end of NATO. 62 What to make then of Blanchot’s own reading of the extinction threat? His dialectics of annihilation attempts to open up the new. By putting into question the human species as a whole, the threat of extinction makes visible, for the first time, the idea of totality: a global human community. But this totality exists only as a ‘negative power’. The humanity that is threatened with disappearance does not yet exist in any meaningful sense, but simply as an abstract idea. Indeed, because humanity has not yet been fully established, it is, strictly speaking, incapable of being destroyed, which is why Blanchot says (somewhat ironically) that extinction (or what he terms ‘apocalypse’) is ‘disappointing’. However, now that there is at least the idea of humanity as a whole, we should work to construct a real ‘human community’, a true ‘totality’, one that can, paradoxically, be fully destroyed because it fully exists. Blanchot says, without further elaboration, that this new totality should be called ‘communist’. 63 Blanchot’s point, much like Adorno’s, is avowedly Hegelian: it is only by looking extinction in the face that humanity comes to glimpse the possibility of its own realization. The prospect of the end places the idea of a new unity on the agenda; it opens up the potential of an awakening to the idea of totality. Or at least that’s the theory. But here we might ask if this dialectic still holds true – if indeed it ever did. Does danger signal the possible emergence of a saving power in the way that Adorno and Blanchot both seem to believe? From our present perspective, the answer to this question must be twofold. First, contra Blanchot, the catastrophe is no longer a future possibility, but (as previously argued) that which, in one respect, has already arrived. This is not (or not yet) the nuclear calamity that Blanchot speaks of, but rather the coming together of the planetary ecological crisis, the global epidemiological crisis, and a new period of inter-imperialist war and economic devastation. This catastrophic convergence, far from placing the possibility of a global humanity on the immediate horizon, has instead 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, the desperate attempt to preserve the ‘human’ as it already exists under capitalism. What we are talking about here then is a new kind of traumatized psychic reality, a new wounded subjectivity, one that won’t be overcome by a dialectics of mortal fear (being scared ‘so much that we start fighting for our lives’ 64 ), but which will instead require a political shift away from the time of endless suffering – a time that Althusser defines simply as barbarism:
What is barbarism? Regression while remaining in place, stagnation while remaining in place, of a kind which human history offers examples by the hundreds. Yes, our civilisation can perish in place, not only without rising to a higher stage or sinking to a lower stage that has already existed, but in accumulating all the suffering of a childbirth that will not end, of a stillbirth that is not a delivery.
How, then, in such conditions, might the idea of the whole be placed back on the agenda? Importantly, as Adorno and Blanchot remind us, ‘humanity’ does not (yet) exist; its existence in the future would require its political construction. We are therefore still living in prehistory (as Marx famously points out), at a stage prior to the actual creation of human society. But it is here precisely – and this is the second point – that we should radically re-politicize the Adorno/Blanchot dialectic. The possibility of a real human community will not simply emerge in the face of negativity (through an encounter with the prospect of our own extinction); instead, it will require the realization that this world – a world of converging crises and political stuckness – can itself be ended; ended through a conscious intervention into existing conditions. The shift is therefore from the affective encounter to the zone of politics proper; and it hinges upon the recognition that only the collective negation of this world ends the prospect of the end of the world – understood here not as a sudden death, but rather as an incremental decay, the slow unravelling of intimately entangled forms of life. As Ernst Bloch points out: ‘The true genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical.’ 66 To terminate the threat of the end (as the biological end of all things) will therefore mean beginning again at the end (of prehistory): abolishing a mode of political and economic life which seeks to tether us all – the yet to be born – to a sick but undying present.
First published by Verso 2024 © Ben Ware 2024
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