Wordsworth’s Dream of Extinction

This short essay turns on the difference between, yet also the difficulty of separating definitively, representations of extinction and apocalypse. Apocalypse of course means revelation or unveiling (apo, “away” + kalupto, “cover”), whereas extinction means disappearance without residue. The word is interestingly tautological: extinguo is a third conjugation verb based on stinguo, which itself means to extinguish or put out, which in turn means that the ex-prefix adds almost nothing, just a little extra death: extinguo—to quench, extinguish, kill, destroy. The ex (from the Greek and ultimately Indo-European eks or ek, “out of”) is an x of excessive withdrawal, the mark of an extra extinguishing, and that tautology or stutter may offer the best help we can get if we are seeking a non-(or almost-non-) apocalyptic representation of extinction.

For this is in fact very hard to do. The difficulty of distinguishing stories of or about extinction from stories of or about revelation can be illustrated if we look closely at a few of the rhetorical tropes that sustain Ray Brassier’s recent Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Brassier is one of a number of younger philosophers loosely associated with what is sometimes called “speculative realism.” In this book he argues for the reality of extinction as the condition both of life and of thought. Yet this argument, committed to a hard-eyed acknowledgment of the nothingness of human things, repeats a sacrificial plot as it extracts meaning from the void. Here are some of the book’s closing sentences:

[I]t is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction. Senselessness and purposiveness are not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility. . . . [T]he will to know is driven by the traumatic reality of extinction, and strives to become equal to the trauma of the in-itself whose trace it bears. In becoming equal to it, philosophy achieves a binding of extinction, through which the will to know is finally rendered commensurate with the in-itself. . . . But to acknowledge this truth [of extinction], the subject of philosophy must also recognize that he or she is already dead, and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction.¹

This scene of “adequation without correspondence” of thought and (non)-being generates a sacrificial mini-narrative in which “the subject of philosophy” accedes to truth by “recogniz[ing] that he or she is already dead.” One could say that Brassier is rewriting in a darkly Hegelian idiom of cognition and recognition the economy of life and death that, as he had earlier recalled, Freud offers in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which a primitive organism sacrifices part of itself in order to create a protective shield against excessive stimuli: “By its death,” Freud writes, “the outer layer [of the organism] has saved all the deeper ones.”²

How do you go about realizing that you are already dead? It seems hard to avoid doing this except through a sublime turn that to some extent wards off the very truth being stated. Brassier’s line about being already dead echoes a dramatic sentence from Lyotard’s The Inhuman about the death of the sun that Brassier had quoted and discussed earlier: “Everything’s dead already if this infinite reserve from which you now draw energy to defer answers, if in short thought as quest, dies out with the sun.”³ Cropping and repeating—and at one point italicizing—the dramatic phrase “everything is dead already,” Brassier dwells on the solar catastrophe to come in some 4.5 billion years, which in turn leads him to ponder “the ultimate horizon, when, roughly one trillion trillion trillion (101728) years from now, the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment” (nu, 228). Brassier’s paragraph builds up a sublime scenario of universal death that culminates in a sentence that strains to convey what will be left when nothing is left: “Only the implacable gravitational expansion will continue, driven by...