Ben Ware is Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Art at King's College London where he is also a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy. He is the author of Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the 'Tractatus' and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2015); Living Wrong Life Rightly: Modernism, Ethics, and the Political Imagination (Palgrave, 2017); and editor of Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Thames & Hudson, 2019). His recent essays have appeared in e-flux journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and ESP magazine.

• Preface1 A Dialectics of Extinction2 Extinction Episodes: From the Sublime to the Demonic3 The Death Drive at the End of the World4 Beginning Again at the EndNotes

On Extinction is a formidable intervention. The end is too serious a matter to be treated as tragedy or heroic sacrifice; rather, as Ben Ware shows, thinking it requires the materialist dialectic and its predilection for comedy: stubbornly beginning again, and again.