Internal Memo to Comrades Lost in the Struggle Against Everything and Therefore Nothing
We belong to a time after the end (of history). But when we talk about living on “after the end,” we must always bear in mind two distinct yet mutually reinforcing meanings of this phrase.
The first hypothesis is that we have gone beyond the end in the sense of already having achieved utopia: technological advances which make our lives more comfortable, coupled with the disappearance of abject poverty and the diffusion/decentralization of authority have each in their own way rendered revolution obsolete. Capitalism is the worst possible system — except for all the others (there truly is no alternative to capitalism). America is “mission accomplished,” “utopia achieved.” Now, of course this view is paradoxical (after all, “a realized utopia is a paradoxical idea,” says Baudrillard. “America is powerful and original; America is violent and abominable. We should not seek to deny either of these aspects, nor reconcile them”). …Yet a paradox cannot as such be contradicted or opposed.
The other hypothesis: we have gone beyond the end insofar as we have recognized the “impossibility of ending,” the futility of conceptualizing an end. There is no telos of history, no goal of humanity, no ultimate realization of freedom. In a phrase, we have reached the end of the end. Living on after the end would thus involve the elaboration of an ethics and a politics, of a culture and a form-of-life, of a science and a wisdom which have no ultimate foundation or purpose. In this sense, the concept of the end of history can be taken literally: not as an achieved utopia or telos, but as the end of the very concept of an end of history — again, the end of (the idea of) the end.
The two hypotheses don’t contradict one another in the slightest: the end-of-the-“end of history” is the end of history. That is, the end — the goal of human history — has always (secretly) been the dissolution of the very idea of history ending: a self-negation which paradoxically realizes itself in the same stroke (this is Hegel’s real meaning).
Abandoning the idea of a universal realization of human freedom (i.e. the end of history) paradoxically leaves us with the possibility of multiple/multiplicative, unlimited freedoms (just as abandoning the idea of universal axioms leaves us with the possibility of unlimited, though still contingent, truths — just as with the uneasy coexistence of Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries for example). We arrive at an impotent position and therefore at a potent imposition: it is for us to determine what happens next, after the end.
