Can Theory End the World?

My answer to the question of whether theory can save the world is threefold: First, the very idea of theory saving the world is ridiculous and a symptom of academic self-importance. Second, of course theory can save the world; all theory can do is hold the world together. This is precisely why theory should aim—with its last breath—to destroy the world of which it is so much a part. Finally, it is certain that the world cannot be saved; even so, theory can have no other task but to save the world.

Can Theory Save the World? Don't be Ridiculous!

Simply posing the question or entertaining the possibility of theory saving the world is utterly symptomatic of theory's Olympian self-importance, and explains why we are in this mess. If theory had not had such grandiose ambitions—escaping Western metaphysics, establishing an autonomous sexual difference, thinking alterity beyond Orientalism, decolonizing thinking—then it would not have become the alien, abstract, delusional, self-important enterprise that precludes everyday praxis. In addition to being useless theory may also have enabled some harms. The fetishized attachment to sexual difference in thinkers such as Luce Irigaray contributed to radical feminist transphobias (Godart 2016); the attention to the "future to come" beyond all calculation distracted Derrida from thinking about climate change (Cohen 2012); the resistance to hermeneutics of the self pushed Foucault towards neoliberal formalism (Dean and Zamora 2021); and posthumanism's zeal for thinking about the vibrant nature of matter and the volatility of bodies conveniently overlooked the colonial and racial histories that produced a world of so much available life that could be intuited in all its intensity, even if the technologies of life had always been racialized (Weheliye 2014).

The very notion that theory might save the world, that the problem lies with how we think, is perhaps more than symptomatic of theory's delusions of grandeur; it might be constitutive of the Anthropocene. It is just this notion of a theoretical "we" and the importance of how "we" think that drives the Anthropocene as a civilizing mission, as a geo-engineering enterprise, and as an ongoing neoliberal managerialism that considers how much "we" need to do or not do in order to keep going. The question of saving the world presupposes a world, and that in turn presupposes the shared horizon of sense that can be suspended and criticized or demystified. The refusal of the grand enterprise of theory and its accompanying presupposition of the world that could only be unified through the comportment of theoria unfortunately seems to have brought theory back in, and in the most banal of ways. To say that you do not theory is itself a theory, in the same way that "I don't do politics" amounts to a certain type of politics (status quo liberalism), and "I don't see color" amounts to a "racism? Me?" ethics. What does the Anthropocene amount to as a theoretical event if nothing other than an intensification of the global stewardship of thinking (Steffen et. al. 2011)? Rather than recognizing this new species unity and geopolitical "we" that can now understand itself as a planetary force, it would be far more ethical to pay attention to all the forms of care and justice that might end the world one tiny step at a time. This claim, however, seems to suggest that rather than trying to save the world through theory one ought simply to be kind; rather than assuming there is a global humanity that can act and think as one "we" might simply turn to the best that "we" can do (Singer 2009). Either this amounts to a utilitarianism, where one keeps this world and does the best one can (which is one more form of theory, and one where every action would be theoretical in its reflection on harms and benefits); or, one would—again via theory—insist that what has formed itself as the world is essentially brutal:

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