Against Pessimism, or, the Education of Hope

Abstract

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.