Care at/as the End of the World

If, as we know, many strategies of care are teleological in nature, cast as a way to ensure the continuation or adaptation of/to the world rather than its radical overthrowing, then how do we think care otherwise? This paper will return to the temporal registers of care as a way of trying to think this through. The tying of cure to care tends to position care as a thoroughly future-oriented practice, one where the telos is the cure of whatever pathology has been identified, a making right of what has been diagnosed as wrong. But if, to modify Adorno, a right life cannot be made in a wrong world, then how can care become detached from a goal or terminus that might motivate it, toward an openness that could point us toward the “end of the world” (Wilderson 2018, 93)? How, in other words, can care be thought of not as in service of a goal, but rather be outside of and beyond what Sexton calls “(the restoration of) sovereignty” (2016, 593)?