Ben Ware begins his book by setting out the context and purpose plainly. On Extinction is a ‘philosophical and psychoanalytical critique of our damaged times.’  The Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at King’s College. London then proceeds to take his readers on a dizzying journey, in the company of some outstanding thinkers. Before the book begins to take steam even, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Judith Butler, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel jump out from the pages to alternatively startle and regale the reader!

Ben Ware defines extinction or the end by employing the highly imaginative notion of ‘apocalyptic jouissance.’ According to this notion, an end not only infuses the emotions of anxiety and dread, but also informs a paradoxical sense of enjoyment and wild excitement that transcends trivial pleasure. Ben Ware also attempts to explain the concept of extinction in terms of capitalism. Impending and past catastrophes such as pandemics, threat of nuclear calamities, climate change etc. not just lead to pessimism and resignation but also birth inexplicably opposing emotions such as enjoyment, identitarian narcissism, and a time of endless suffering which French philosopher Louis Althusser simply calls ‘barbarism.’

The author also cleverly introduces dark and introspective movies and television shows for advocating a dismantling of the capitalist system. One striking example being Darren Aronofsky’s 2019 film Mother! A poet, simply named ‘Him’ (a role essayed by Javier Bardem) and his wife, also unnamed and the ‘mother’ in the movie (Jennifer Lawrence) lead a serene existence in a home which the couple assiduously restore after it was destroyed in a fire. The tranquility and peace of the couple does not last long, courtesy a stream of uninvited guests. Beginning with the arrival of a doctor and his wife, the house is soon teeming with an unruly band of barbarians who fornicate, trash and dirty the place at random. Finally, the violation of the place extends to the desecration of mother herself when her body is repugnantly violated. As Ware informs his readers, an ecological interpretation of ‘mother’ here might mean Mother Nature or Gaia (goddess of earth). While Gaia in all her benevolence creates a veritable paradise for her children, the latter view such creation as a resource ripe for wanton plunder.

Ironically, the violators of mother are integral constituents of nature. This perverse feature is emblematic of what the French philosopher Jacques Lacan describes as ‘nature’s rottenness’ (‘pouritture’), from within which seeps culture as ‘antiphusis’ (anti-nature). A riveting section on Walter Benjamin’s frighteningly prophetic text Experience and Poverty – penned in the early 1930s – that mulls discomfiting ways in which new technologies will result in a novel kind of “poverty of human experience characterized by excess rather than lack: a suffocating abundance of new ideas and styles that produce a feeling of generalized exhaustion; a sense that, from culture to people, everything has now been ‘devoured”, provokes a surprisingly contrarian reaction from Ware. In a reassuring vein, he opines that Benjamin’s warning’s may not necessarily be a terrible thing. His Cassandra like proclamations ought to inspire humanity to try and “begin again.”

Ben Ware tries to convey to his readers that only in the wake of an existential crisis such as the threat of extinction, does mankind become not just visible, but also relevant. He draws inspiration from the works of Gunther Anders, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Maurice Blanchot and Theodor Adorno to bolster this claim. The Swiss American composer Ernest Bloch once famously remarked, ‘The true genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical.’ Ware by concluding in a vein like Bloch asserts that the biological end of all things may as well 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.”