The world was never more
than a regulative idea, a normative concept for planning
and implementing a global society. Because of its obvious
relations to the institutions of political power, which know
no limits in the use of force if necessary, this concept
has begun to crumble.
First published in 1989, Looking Back
on the End of the World raises provocative questions
about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social
systems that seem to have "surpassed history." Unlike
recent works that make history end with the consumer, or
project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed
into the future, the writers in these essays perform a
much more basic task: they argue that we can now think
through the "end of the world." The idea of a "unified
world," they claim, has given way to new sensibilities
about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions
such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and
offer positive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required
in a society without traditional subjects and institutions.
Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules
of the game, and any nostalgia for starting from the familiar
in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively,
the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those
moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections
and relations that announce all sorts of "ends."
