On Extinction

Reviews / Votes

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 <i>What IS Sex?</i> 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 <i>The Matter of Language</i> 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 <i>The Disenchanted Earth</i> 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 <i>Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason</i> 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 <i>The New Age of Catastrophe</i> 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 <i>How We Walk</i> 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 *