SubStance

We live in a time of crisis. Economic crisis, ecological crisis, refugee crisis. Scholars talk about the end of history, the end of politics, the end of nature, the end of the world as we know it. Racism and neo-fascism are on the march pretty much all over the Western world; Mexican children are torn away from their parents at the US border; temperatures are rising everywhere (the summer of 2018 in Denmark, of all places, was nearly tropical for months on end); islands of microplastic accumulate in the Pacific, and the latest news: Europe’s taxpayers have been swindled of €55 billion, as revealed by the so-called #CumExFiles.¹

So the old question bears repeating: What is to be done? Or, perhaps more accurately, what kinds of affective attitudes are appropriate and adequate in a situation like this? That is certainly not a question to be posed to the politicians that we are stuck with, but a question to be directed to academics, activists and artists, in particular those of the left. I even want to boil the problem down to this – simplified and radicalized – problem: Pessimism or optimism?

Marxists and anarchists discussed the question in the 19^th century and György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno all discussed it the first half of the 20^th. Optimism or pessimism? And here we are now, and the question has not been resolved, or lost its relevance. American philosopher Eugene Thacker’s latest book, Infinite Resignation, opts for pessimism. And in these times of mandatory optimism and positive psychology, it would indeed appear as if a withdrawal into a pessimist resignation is the only sensible response today, as Thacker, and others, have argued. In fact, the current climate crisis seems to both produce and justify Thacker’s version of a kind of cosmic, speculative pessimism. [End Page 97]

This review-essay of Infinite Resignation, however, is a rather skeptical and critical one. It is based on the conviction that an altogether contrary argument could be made, one that goes hand in hand with the rather risky ambition of recovering a project of radical hope too often neglected by the left. The review is thus not a traditional one: It falls, or rather breaks, into two parts: First, a walkthrough of Thacker’s book. Then – after this appraisal of philosophical, cultural and political pessimism, which takes up the greater part of the text – I will provide a tentative formulation of an alternative position and project. To this end, I draw upon the work of Ernst Bloch, while trying to avoid, on the one hand, what Robert Musil called the utopianism of the status quo and, on the other hand, the pessimism that seems to be so much in vogue in certain critical circles these days.

Infinite Resignation is a book on and of philosophical pessimism. It is a book that makes an argument for pessimism, though in actual fact the book is not that interested in developing a traditional, proper argument; it follows another tradition and relies, rather, on a set of rhetorical devices, as if recognizing from the very outset that pessimism and rational argumentation are like oil and water, or Hegel and Schopenhauer. It is, in any case, a book that begins with a sigh. The sigh of disappointment from which pessimism springs. And there are a lot of philosophical sighs in the first part of the book, in the form of numerous aphorisms and various short statements, which ultimately and very deliberately remain a series of fragments, never adding up to a unified, coherent whole. These fragments circle around the classical leitmotifs of pessimism: The futility of existence, the insignificance of being human when considered in light of both biological death and cosmological infinity. It is a philosophy made up of paradoxes and negations, misanthropy and black comedy: “Two kinds of pessimism: ‘The end is near” and ‘Will this never end?’” (25); “Pessimism is the introduction of humility into thought. But how to distinguish humility from futility?” (26); “The only thing...