Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

If the social movements of the early 2010s, such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, undermined Fukukyama’s claim that we had reached the end of history, it is the rise of the environmental-activist movement Extinction Rebellion (XR) that fundamentally disproves him. While the earlier movements failed to transubstantiate their initial reactivity into a positive set of Ideas, XR has successfully superseded its germinal negativity and embarked on what Alain Badiou terms a “generic truth procedure.” Marking the twenty-first-century return of emancipatory politics, it ought to be included in the historical sequence of political singularities, which includes the Paris Commune and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, although XR is more theoretically congruent with Rousseau than Marx. It is XR’s specifically ontological status which allows one to ascribe to it such a designation, as it marks a decisive break with the putative “order” of neoliberal politics and ideology. Situating itself in the gap opened up between life and law in the state of emergency, XR’s programme is heterogeneous, as opposed to merely antithetical, to the liberal-democratic tradition. To corroborate this claim, I use Badiou’s mathematical ontology and his theory of the generic truth procedure with which any genuine politics, viz. “being-together,” must cohere. Most aligned with Badiou’s conception of politics is XR’s indifference to particular identities which enables it to form a contemporary universality, weaving a diagonal through endless alterity without attaching an identitarian predicate. This fact renders XR an authentically transcultural political movement, local in origin but infinite in being.