Political Breakout

The book is totally preoccupied with thinking beyond existing political thought and institutions. It recognizes that irrespective of who or where we are, and no matter if we know it or not, "we" now all live in "the end times." Most explicitly, this moment is expressed by evolutionary biology, making clear that planetary life is at the start of the sixth extinction event - a situation indivisible from climate change impacts. The already unstable geopolitical "state of the world" and its dangers will amplify the coming eco-environmental conditions, resulting in population displacement, resource stress, critical conditions of food security, and conflict. Globally, across all political ideologies, existing institutional politics demonstrate an incapability of responding to these situations.

There is an evident temporal disjuncture between how extant politics is positioned in time and the moment of an ever-accelerating end times. Effectively, political institutions, their theory and practice, are out-of-step with terminal speeding "defuturing" events. As the book makes clear, this situation needs to be fully recognised. At the same time, there are visions and political positions presenting themselves as directing what will come after the end times. Viewing these positions indicates that the future will be plural and contested. In one direction, technology and corporations will become even more powerful (as a critique of the literature on "accelerationism" shows). But at the other extreme, a huge swathe of displaced humanity is almost certain to be abandoned.

In the face of these prospects, new political thinking and practices are essential. But this will not come from the existing political paradigm. Such change needs a new political imagination. Responding to this need is a primary focus of the book. To do this, the influence of Spinoza on political imagination provides a key point of engagement and departure.