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.
