The End of the World (As We Know It): On Trauma, Collapse, and the Possibility of Otherwise
The End as Invitation
What if the world as we know it isn’t just ending—but needs to end?
Denise Ferreira da Silva challenges us to rethink the very foundations of modern thought, arguing that the structures we have been taught to see as natural, as inevitable, are in fact violent impositions. She reminds us that racial capitalism, coloniality, and the carceral state do not merely create crises; they are the crisis. And if this world—the one built on extraction, domination, and the policing of difference—has to be sustained through violence, why are we so afraid of its end?
Rather than seeing collapse as catastrophe, Ferreira da Silva invites us to imagine it as an opening. An end, yes—but also an otherwise.
Trauma, World-Making, and the Limits of Repair
For those of us working at the intersections of trauma, social justice, and education, this is a provocative shift. Trauma is often framed as something to be overcome, healed, or integrated into an ongoing story of survival. The language of “resilience” dominates much of the discourse—urging individuals and communities to recover, to adapt, to endure.
But what if we stopped asking people to endure the unendurable? What if trauma isn’t just a personal affliction but an embodied archive of the end of worlds—colonialism, displacement, forced assimilation, gendered violence? And what if, instead of helping people “return” to something, we asked what could be created beyond the systems that caused the harm in the first place?
Ferreira da Silva’s work aligns with Indigenous, Black feminist, and decolonial thinkers who remind us that healing is not about returning to “normal” when normal has always been structured by violence. Instead, she proposes something more radical: moving beyond the very frameworks that produced the conditions for harm.
Rethinking Ethics, Rethinking Knowledge
At the core of Ferreira da Silva’s work is the rejection of separability—the idea that the world consists of discrete, independent entities bound together by relations of power and measurement. Modern thought, rooted in European philosophy, has long insisted on the primacy of the self-contained subject—the one who observes, who defines, who dominates. This is the logic that structures nation-states, border regimes, prisons, and the human rights frameworks that ultimately serve to regulate rather than liberate.
To rethink the end of the world as we know it is to reject this logic entirely. It means recognizing that being is entangled rather than ordered, that ethics must be relational rather than juridical, and that knowledge must be generated through poethics rather than power.
In other words: the world does not need fixing. It needs unmaking.
An Invitation
This is not an easy shift. To release the idea of repair—to stop holding onto the world we know, even when it harms us—requires a different kind of courage. It requires a willingness to step outside of familiar narratives of progress, resilience, and survival, and to instead ask: What else is possible?
So I invite you to sit with this discomfort. To consider what it might mean to stop enduring this world and start unmaking it.
What would it take to stop repairing and start imagining? What practices—political, spiritual, embodied—might support us in thinking and being beyond this world’s limits?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Let’s think together. Let’s unmake, together.
References
Ferreira da Silva, D. (2014). Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World. The Black Scholar, 44(2), 81–97.
Ferreira da Silva, D. (2016). On Difference Without Separability. e-flux, 26.
Ferreira da Silva, D. (2021). Unpayable Debt. MIT Press.
Guenther, L. (2022). Abolish the World as We Know It: Notes for a Praxis of Phenomenology Beyond Critique. Puncta, 5(2).
Viveiros de Castro, E., & Danowski, D. (2014). Is There Any World to Come? Polity Press.
