Looking Back on the End of the World

First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocativequestions 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 theconflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essaysperform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the "end of the world." Theidea of a "unified world," they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essaysevaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offerpositive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required in a society without traditional subjectsand institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and anynostalgia 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 categoriesdissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of "ends." And otherthings besides.