THE EMBRYONIC AFFECT OF THE MATRIX OF EXHAUSTION

THE EXHAUSTED OF THE EARTH

Politics in a burning world      by Ajay Singh Chaudhary

“Here we might begin to think through palpable pressure and embryonic affect, of the inchoate affects of socioecological climate, of the novel affects attributed to climate directly, but also much more broadly of the affective matrix of exhaustion”-

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It is now a cliché in some circles to say that all politics is climate politics. Yet it is also common to not take this seriously. The ways in which climate change is affecting society are not always easy to recognize, and left politics often fails to seriously integrate the climate dimension. Moreover, Marxist attempts to directly address climate change and other aspects of the ecological crisis are often insular. 

As Ajay Singh Chaudhary observes in The Exhausted of the Earth, “Marxological debates – incredibly prolific in eco-Marxist literature – aren’t particularly germane to climate politics.” Chaudhary’s book, intended as a corrective to those trends, offers much that is helpful for thinking about the politics of climate change.

 

The Exhausted of the Earth situates its arguments against the threat of right-wing climate realism—understood as “a political-ecological scenario of the concentration, preservation, and enhancement of political and economic power.” Such a scenario, Chaudhary argues, “is not only plausible and possible, but probable.” Today, right-wing responses to climate change often don’t involve outright denial; they simply aim for “maximal extraction for maximal maintenance or cash out that much better.”