Apocalypse, it seems, is everywhere. Preachers with vast followings proclaim the world's end and apocalyptic fears grip even the non-religious amid climate change, pandemics, and threats of nuclear war. But as these ideas pervade popular discourse, grasping their logic remains elusive. Ben Jones argues that we can gain insight into apocalyptic thought through secular thinkers. He starts with a puzzle: Why would secular thinkers draw on Christian apocalyptic beliefs--often dismissed as bizarre--to interpret politics? The apocalyptic tradition proves appealing in (...) part because it theorizes a special relation between crisis and utopia. Apocalyptic thought points to crisis as the vehicle to bring the previously impossible within reach, thus offering apparent resources for navigating challenges in ideal theory, which tries to imagine the best and most just society. By examining apocalyptic thought's appeal and risks, this study arrives at new insights on the limits of ideal theory and utopian hope. (shrink)

“The apocalypse of hope” and other comparable flourishes in the writings of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre on political violence strike an alarming tone. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advocates the way of revolutionary violence as the inevitable consequence of colonialism and its systematic exploitation of colonized natives. In his role of agent provocateur, Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s influential and controversial work characteristically dramatizes this redemptive promise of violence: “to gun down a European is to kill two (...) birds with one stone…there remains a dead man and a free man.” This notorious pronouncement constitutes itself as an act of violence—we must feel threatened—meant to incite the latent counter-violence behind, in Sartre’s diagnosis, the false consciousness of bourgeois toleration and understanding. Could Sartre’s bold statement be spoken today without violent condemnation? This statement claims that, against the dehumanization of colonial oppression, only revolutionary violence allows for the colonized natives to constitute a “people” and recreate themselves in the image of a new humanity forged from the experience of liberation. For Fanon in particular, the recreation of humanity is impossible without the birth of a national consciousness and a revolutionary culture. As Fanon writes, “[w]e believe that the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists.” This reach toward a new humanism through the praxis of revolutionary violence points directly to the problem of beginnings. As Arendt observes in On Revolution, “[r]evolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.” Anti-colonial violence, for Fanon, inaugurates the beginning of political life; the colonized native reconstitutes himself as a βίοσ πολιτικόσ capable of both speech and praxis. For Sartre, anti-colonial violence reveals the dialectical necessity of world history in its struggle towards genuine universality and the utopia of a “classless” society. (shrink)

“The apocalypse of hope” and other comparable flourishes in the writings of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre on political violence strike an alarming tone. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advocates the way of revolutionary violence as the inevitable consequence of colonialism and its systematic exploitation of colonized natives. In his role of agent provocateur, Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s influential and controversial work characteristically dramatizes this redemptive promise of violence: “to gun down a European is to kill two (...) birds with one stone…there remains a dead man and a free man.” This notorious pronouncement constitutes itself as an act of violence—we must feel threatened—meant to incite the latent counter-violence behind, in Sartre’s diagnosis, the false consciousness of bourgeois toleration and understanding. Could Sartre’s bold statement be spoken today without violent condemnation? This statement claims that, against the dehumanization of colonial oppression, only revolutionary violence allows for the colonized natives to constitute a “people” and recreate themselves in the image of a new humanity forged from the experience of liberation. For Fanon in particular, the recreation of humanity is impossible without the birth of a national consciousness and a revolutionary culture. As Fanon writes, “[w]e believe that the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists.” This reach toward a new humanism through the praxis of revolutionary violence points directly to the problem of beginnings. As Arendt observes in On Revolution, “[r]evolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.” Anti-colonial violence, for Fanon, inaugurates the beginning of political life; the colonized native reconstitutes himself as a βίοσ πολιτικόσ capable of both speech and praxis. For Sartre, anti-colonial violence reveals the dialectical necessity of world history in its struggle towards genuine universality and the utopia of a “classless” society. (shrink)

Русская культура с самого её начала уже была устремлена к непостигаемым для других народов высотам, и поэтому во все времена звучал в ней голос с неба, говорящий: это скиния Бога с людьми, где Он будет жить с ними; они будут Его народом, а Он будет их Богом. К этой гармонии стремилась она, и хотя теперь многие из русских людей заблудились во тьме невежества и неверия, но стоит лишь заблудшим обратить взоры к новому небу, звёзды русской культуры укажут им верный путь (...) к истине и к праведной жизни, а за ними непременно пойдут и другие народы. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens-typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and incredible obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future? This (...) book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in narratives like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world. (shrink)

The thoughts of apocalypse can either be intense and demanding, or lead to the risk of abandoning the present to a state of inertia and impotence. The apocalypse can be, in fact, the moment of the Last Judgment. In this case, justice is related to the revelation of truth. But the apocalypse can also be the revelation of the end of any truth, i.e. the revelation that the history doesn’t have any meaning, that the end is as (...) endless as it is hopeless. This article takes up “the apocalypse of Blanchot.” It shows that by thinking that the apocalypse has always already occurred, history is not what leads to an end, but is rather the responsibility to an endless end. In that sense, for Blanchot, history is not the redemption of contingency as eternity; rather, what must be historicized is the eternity of the end. (shrink)

Beginning with Jacob Taubes and Günther Anders on eschatology, apocalypse and political theology, including Saint Paul and Frankfurt School critical theory along with bombs and power plants (energy/climate), this essay parallels a re-reading of Tracy B. Strong’s political reading of Nietzsche on Jesus (and love) with Taubes, Anders and Carl Schmitt on politics (and technology). Highlighted throughout is the politically charged (and inherently esoteric) context of Gnosticism for philosophy and theory for Taubes but also for Anders.

The thoughts of apocalypse can either be intense and demanding, or lead to the risk of abandoning the present to a state of inertia and impotence. The apocalypse can be, in fact, the moment of the Last Judgment. In this case, justice is related to the revelation of truth. But the apocalypse can also be the revelation of the end of any truth, i.e. the revelation that the history doesn’t have any meaning, that the end is as (...) endless as it is hopeless. This article takes up “the apocalypse of Blanchot.” It shows that by thinking that the apocalypse has always already occurred, history is not what leads to an end, but is rather the responsibility to an endless end. In that sense, for Blanchot, history is not the redemption of contingency as eternity; rather, what must be historicized is the eternity of the end. (shrink)

pt. 1. lecture 1. Meet the beast ; lecture 2. Medieval formulations ; lecture 3. The Reformation, the apocalypse revived ; lecture 4. Prophecy and science I, Francis Bacon ; lecture 5. John Milton and freedom of the press ; lecture 6. New Heaven, new earth, modern democracy ; lecture 7. Andrew Marvell, poet of the Republic ; lecture 9. The universe as matter, the universe as spirit -- pt. 2. lecture 10. The hope of Israel, the origins of (...) toleration ; lecture 11. Anti-Antichrist, the limits of prophecy ; lecture 12. Prophecy and Science II, prophecy and progress ; lecture 13. The apocalypse and the American Revolution ; lecture 14. Antichrist and the post-apocalyptic age, cold war ideology ; lecture 15. Antichrist and the post-apocalyptic age, Martin Luther King, Jr. ; lecture 16. Antichrist and the post-apocalyptic age, belief against politics. (shrink)

The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. By Stephen J. Shoemaker. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 260. $59.95, £52.

Apocalypse. To most, the word signifies destruction, death, the end of the world, but the literal definition is "revelation" or "unveiling," the basis from which renowned theologian René Girard builds his own view of Biblical apocalypse. Properly understood, Girard explains, Biblical apocalypse has nothing to do with a wrathful or vengeful God punishing his unworthy children, and everything to do with a foretelling of what future humans are making for themselves now that they have devised the instruments (...) of global self-destruction. In this volume, some of the major thinkers about the interpretation of politics and religion— including Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt— are scrutinized by some of today's most qualified scholars, all of whom are thoroughly versed in Girard’s groundbreaking work. Including an important new essay by Girard, this volume enters into a philosophical debate that challenges the bona fides of philosophy itself by examining three supremely important philosopher of the twentieth century. It asks how we might think about politics now that the attacks of 9/11 have shifted our intellectual foundations and what the outbreak of rabid religion might signify for international politics. (shrink)

The hearers of the Apocalypse of John are set in another world in which lambs conquer and suffering rules, where victims have become the victors.

The hearers of the Apocalypse enter another universe, a temporary arena in which the norms and realities of everyday life are laid aside and a vision is opened of the final reign of God.

[Author note: There is a video explainer of this paper on youtube at the new work in philosophy channel (search for surname+deepfakes).] -/- It is widely thought that deepfake videos are a significant and unprecedented threat to our epistemic practices. In some writing about deepfakes, manipulated videos appear as the harbingers of an unprecedented _epistemic apocalypse_. In this paper I want to take a critical look at some of the more catastrophic predictions about deepfake videos. I will argue for three (...) claims: (1) that once we recognise the role of social norms in the epistemology of recordings, deepfakes are much less concerning, (2) that the history of photographic manipulation reveals some important precedents, correcting claims about the novelty of deepfakes, and (3) that proposed solutions to deepfakes have been overly focused on technological interventions. My overall goal is not so much to argue that deepfakes are not a problem, but to argue that behind concerns around deepfakes lie a more general class of social problems about the organisation of our epistemic practices. (shrink)

An erudite and witty collection of Umberto Eco's essays on mass culture from the 1960s through the 1980s, including major pieces which have not been translated into English before. The discussion is framed by opposing characterizations of current intellectuals as apocalyptic and opposed to all mass culture, or as integrated intellectuals, so much a part of mass culture as to be unaware of serving it. Organized in four main parts, "Mass Culture: Apocalypse Postponed," "Mass Media and the Limits of (...) Communication," "The Rise and Fall of Counter-Cultures," and "In Search of Italian Genius," Eco looks at a variety of topics and cultural productions, including the world of Charlie Brown, distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, the future of literacy, Chinese comic strips, whether countercultures exist, Fellini's Ginger and Fred, and the Italian genius industry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos by Keith LemnaAaron WilliamsThe Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos by Keith Lemna (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico, 2019), xxx + 488 pp.Keith Lemna has done the theological world a great service. In The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos, he offers the English-speaking world for the first (...) time a monograph on the thought of the Oratorian Louis Bouyer. Bouyer is undoubtedly one of the theological giants of the twentieth century. Born in Paris in 1913, he was ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1936. After only three years as a Lutheran clergyman, he was received into the Catholic Church at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Wandrille. Then ordained as an Oratorian priest in 1944, he taught from 1946 to 1962 at the Institut Catholique de Paris and abroad for the three decades following.1 He is most well-known for his work on the liturgy both before and after the Second Vatican Council. With fifty books to his name, including a nine-part synthesis on Christian doctrine, the breadth of his theological vision and work is astounding. In France he is considered one of the four preeminent theologians of the post-World War II era, and his theological contemporaries in Europe, such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, always held the Oratorian in high regard.2 Yet, in the English-speaking world, much of his work has gone without comment.3 Thankfully, into the void steps this excellent work by Lemna. [End Page 1353]Anyone familiar with the Bouyerian corpus knows the challenge of approaching it. With its vast array of subject matter, ranging from biblical to liturgical to historical to spiritual to speculative theology, one wonders whether there is any one thread woven throughout the varied strands, a single theme around which the whole sprawling corpus can be understood. In fact, there is, and Lemna has deftly identified it. For Bouyer, the fundamental question of theology is the world's relation to God.4 The structure of the first six books of his nine-part treatise on systematic theology attest to the priority of the question with the first three works addressing the question of the world, or the economy of creation and salvation, and the latter three works addressing the question of God, or theology properly speaking: the doctrine of the Trinitarian God. Interestingly, though Bouyer's work on theological cosmology, Cosmos, is the third book in the series, it was, in fact, the last of the six to be written. In this sense, as Lemna points out, "Cosmos is a capstone monograph... summarizing in important ways the decisive first six volumes" (xiv). Theological cosmology fully illuminates the God–world relation as Bouyer sees it, and since this relation sits at the heart of his thought, Cosmos is for Bouyer both his "most personal, as well as most speculative work" and indeed, "opens up the meaning of his other writings" beyond the dogmatic sphere (25). One could, then, scarcely choose a better entry point into the wide theological world of this "mind with a very special character," as Joseph Ratzinger saw him.5The Apocalypse of Wisdom is an expansive commentary on Bouyer's cosmology at the heart of which is a liturgical, even nuptial, vision of the whole of creation known and loved in the mind of God from all eternity, as the uncreated Wisdom of God. In creation God freely gives existence to the world ex nihilo, so that it might return to him in a liturgical song of praise and thanksgiving, as the Bride of his eternal Son, the eschatological and cosmic Church, created wisdom now made glorious and radiant through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As Lemna puts it, "Bouyer shows that cosmology should be a pursuit of wisdom, but that Wisdom is ultimately a gift revealed or uncovered by means of apokalypsis in the re-creative interventions of the divine Word and Holy Spirit in history" (xvii). The wisdom of man seeking a unified vision of the whole of reality [End... (shrink)

This book is a protest against some geopolitical agendas that are pushing the world toward a major global war and possibly toward a nuclear apocalypse. As an antidote, Fred Dallmayr issues a call to people everywhere to oppose this rush to destruction and to restore the "wholeness of humanity" through the quest for just peace.

Theorizing resistance -- Hellenistic rule in Judea : setting the stage for resistance -- Interaction and identity in Seleucid Judea : 188-173 BCE 78 -- Recreating the empire : the sixth Syrian war, Jason's revolt, and the reconquest of Jerusalem -- Seleucid state terror -- The edict of Antiochus : persecution and the unmaking of the Judean world -- Daniel -- Enochic authority -- The apocalypse of weeks : witness and transformation -- The book of dreams : see and (...) cry out. (shrink)

I explore an intriguing area that has crept under the radar of today's science‐and‐theology conversation, namely, scientific studies of the big miracle and catastrophe stories of the Bible (e.g., Noah's flood, or the plagues of Egypt). These studies have proposed naturalistic explanations for some of the most spectacular and unlikely of the biblical miracles. While the scientists believe their naturalistic interpretations represent a major advance in understanding the stories, professional biblical scholars show little interest, or are openly disdainful. I will (...) point out the striking parallels with the foundational “catastrophism‐uniformitarianism” controversy in nineteenth‐century geology, and will suggest that the debate also takes us toward a novel kind of natural theology when we consider the biblical miracle and catastrophe texts. Here, the spectacular scientific explanations do not deny the miraculous character of the biblical stories so much as provide a uniquely modern purchase on their transcendent quality. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger a vu dans l'avènement grec de la vérité comme identification de l'être et de la raison l'origine du dispositif technologique planétaire qui rend aujourd'hui possible l'annihilation de l'homme et du monde. Cette catastrophe met en évidence la finitude de la vérité ontologique, ainsi que son opacité à l'originaire, d'emblée renvoyé dans le néant. L'affaire de la pensée exige aujourd'hui de surmonter la décision qui a inauguré notre destin. Heidegger a tenté de le faire à partir de Hölderlin, dans (...) une lecture qui identifie le mystère de l'originaire à la Terre et subordonne le réenracinement de la vérité à l'avènement d'une ultime figure du divin. Jean Vioulac propose une alternative au néopaganisme heideggérien. En suivant la voie ouverte par saint Paul qui pense le Logos comme mystère, ou celle de Maître Eckhart, qui identifie l'originaire avec l'abîme de la déité, c'est l'incarnation de la vérité, et non son enracinement, qui s'avère susceptible de sauvegarder le mystère. L'incarnation du Logos s'impose ainsi comme un "autre Commencement", antagoniste au Commencement grec bien qu'en étroite connexion avec lui. Dans cette perspective, le christianisme constitue non plus un obstacle au projet philosophique de Heidegger. Au contraire, il se révèle dans Apocalypse de la vérité comme la condition de possibilité de son achèvement. (shrink)

We inhabit a time of crisis-totalitarianism, environmental collapse, and the unquestioned rule of neoliberal capitalism. Philosopher Jean Vioulac is interested in and worried by all of this, but his main concern is how these phenomena all represent a crisis within-and a threat to-thinking itself. In his first book to be translated into English, Vioulac radicalizes Heidegger's understanding of truth as disclosure through the notion of "the apocalypse of truth." This apocalypse works as an unveiling that reveals the finitude (...) and mystery of truth-a full confrontation with truth-as-absence. Engaging with Heidegger, Marx, and St. Paul, as well as contemporary figures including Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek, Vioulac's book presents a subtle, masterful exposition of his analysis before culminating in a powerful vision of what he terms "the abyss of the deity." Here, Vioulac articulates a portrait of Christianity as a religion of mourning, waiting for a god (Jesus) who has already died, a form of ever-present eschatology whose end has always already taken place. With a preface by Jean-Luc Marion, Apocalypse of Truth presents a major contemporary French thinker to English-speaking audiences for the first time. (shrink)

Si les notions d’« apocalypse » ou de « fin du monde » paraissent étrangères au vocabulaire philosophique, une analyse des différentes connotations de ces expressions dans l’imaginaire des mythes et de la littérature montre à quel point elles constituent pour les philosophes des interrogations toujours renouvelées. Et celles-ci visent aussi bien, comme l’article souhaite le suggérer, la question du mal et de la mort – mort de l’homme mais aussi « mort de Dieu » selon les analyses nietzschéennes (...) – que les théories scientifiques de l’évolution de l’univers. L’espérance portée par le dernier mot de l’Apocalypse, « Viens ! » sonne dès lors comme un appel à l’interprétation, à la pensée. (shrink)

Wheeler Winston Dixon _Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Culture_ London: Wallflower Press, 2003 ISBN 1-903364-74-4 169 pp.

Winner of the Premio Iberoamericano Book Award in 1997 What form does the crisis of modernity take in Latin America when societies are politically demobilized and there is no revolutionary agenda in sight? How does postmodern criticism reflect on enlightenment and utopia in a region marked by incomplete modernization, new waves of privatization, great masses of excluded peoples, and profound sociocultural heterogeneity? In _No Apocalypse, No Integration _Martín Hopenhayn examines the social and philosophical implications of the triumph of neoliberalism (...) and the collapse of leftist and state-sponsored social planning in Latin America. With the failure of utopian movements that promised social change, the rupture of the link between the production of knowledge and practical intervention, and the defeat of modernization and development policy established after World War II, Latin American intellectuals and militants have been left at an impasse without a vital program of action. Hopenhayn analyzes these crises from a theoretical perspective and calls upon Latin American intellectuals to reevaluate their objects of study, their political reality, and their society’s cultural production, as well as to seek within their own history the elements for a new collective discourse. Challenging the notion that strict adherence to a single paradigm of action can rescue intellectual and cultural movements, Hopenhayn advocates a course of epistemological pluralism, arguing that such an approach values respect for difference and for cultural and theoretical diversity and heterodoxy. This essay collection will appeal to readers of sociology, public policy, philosophy, cultural theory, and Latin American history and culture, as well as to those with an interest in Latin America’s current transition. (shrink)

This article interrogates the relationship between two apparently disjointed themes: the consensual presentation and mainstreaming of the global problem of climate change on the one hand and the debate in political theory/philosophy that centers around the emergence and consolidation of a post-political and post-democratic condition on the other. The argument advanced in this article attempts to tease out this apparently paradoxical condition. On the one hand, the climate is seemingly politicized as never before and has been propelled high on the (...) policy agenda. On the other hand, a number of increasingly influential political philosophers insist on how the post-politicization of the public sphere have been key markers of the political process over the past few decades. We proceed in four steps. First, we briefly outline the basic contours of the argument and its premises. Second, we explore the ways in which the present climate conundrum is predominantly staged through the mobilization of particular apocalyptic imaginaries. Third, we argue that this specific presentation of climate change and its associated policies is sustained by decidedly populist gestures. Finally, we discuss how this particular choreographing of climate change is one of the arenas through which a post-political frame and post-democratic political configuration have been mediated. (shrink)

Some years before the Scriblerians brought a comic realism to bear on the themes of prophecy and apocalypse, Mandeville gave millenarians a taste of their own medicine by showing – in the conclusion to The Grumbling Hive – that a land free of the offences decried by the pious would indeed prove to be ruinous. In so doing he inaugurated a tradition of secularised apocalypse that finds one of its most famous expressions in the Dunciad. Both Pope and (...) Mandeville make use of the millenarian motifs of Elkanah Settle’s pageants for Lord Mayor’s day, and though the Williamite politics of The Fable of the Bees was deeply inimical to the Tory wits (as appears in the satires of the Scriblerians), time has exposed a paradoxical congruence between Pope and Mandeville that underlies their official enmity. (shrink)

Cette étude se place à la croisée de trois auteurs qui laissent entrevoir, à l'horizon du nucléaire, la persistance d'un même questionnement autour du concept inattendu de "déception". Le nucléaire, qui semble accompagné par une multiplication sans retour des discours sur la fin, emporte jusqu'à l'idée même de fondement, exposant la raison à l'effondrement de son "principe" et entraînant le "désappointement" du programme rationnel de la modernité. La raison semble alors incapable de se soustraire au règne du simulacre qui "instrumentalise (...) les idées mais ne les pense plus" (Levinas). Face à la recrudescence des discours catastrophistes, il s'agira alors de "démystifier l'apocalypse" et "l'alternative du tout ou rien qui transforme en un pouvoir quasi mystique l'arme de l'atome" (Blanchot). Derrida, Blanchot et Levinas, proposeront trois analyses qui semblent nous "dissuader" de penser le phénomène nucléaire selon le critère d'une vérité conventionnelle car il se présente sous les traits d'une "apocalypse sans apocalypse, sans révélation de sa propre vérité, sans savoir absolu" (Derrida). Trois apologies paradoxales qui élèvent le désastre nucléaire au rang de principe "d'époque", tout en suspendant ce geste dans l'insignifiance d'une absence de révélation et l'effondrement du sens, exposant la pensée à une "déception", un "dessaisissement", qui s'avèrent essentiels à son renouveau. Il semblait d'autant plus important, à l'heure de la post-vérité, d'analyser cette éthique de la déception qui reconduit la raison hégémonique à sa "fission" inhérente."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Winner of the Premio Iberoamericano Book Award in 1997 What form does the crisis of modernity take in Latin America when societies are politically demobilized and there is no revolutionary agenda in sight? How does postmodern criticism reflect on enlightenment and utopia in a region marked by incomplete modernization, new waves of privatization, great masses of excluded peoples, and profound sociocultural heterogeneity? In _No Apocalypse, No Integration _Martín Hopenhayn examines the social and philosophical implications of the triumph of neoliberalism (...) and the collapse of leftist and state-sponsored social planning in Latin America. With the failure of utopian movements that promised social change, the rupture of the link between the production of knowledge and practical intervention, and the defeat of modernization and development policy established after World War II, Latin American intellectuals and militants have been left at an impasse without a vital program of action. Hopenhayn analyzes these crises from a theoretical perspective and calls upon Latin American intellectuals to reevaluate their objects of study, their political reality, and their society’s cultural production, as well as to seek within their own history the elements for a new collective discourse. Challenging the notion that strict adherence to a single paradigm of action can rescue intellectual and cultural movements, Hopenhayn advocates a course of epistemological pluralism, arguing that such an approach values respect for difference and for cultural and theoretical diversity and heterodoxy. This essay collection will appeal to readers of sociology, public policy, philosophy, cultural theory, and Latin American history and culture, as well as to those with an interest in Latin America’s current transition. (shrink)

In the Anglo-American cultural sphere, the growing awareness of global warming and ecocide has coincided with the proliferation of a much discussed, post-apocalyptic imaginary that transports us to uninhabitable planetary futures. These “fictions,” as E. Ann Kaplan notes in a discussion of their mobilising potential, act as “memories for the future” which make us “identify with future selves struggling to survive.” This article turns to Günther Anders’s notion of “apocalypse-blindness” (1956) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to set out an (...) alternative way of understanding the powerfully sentimental force such images of doom convey. While seemingly turning our gaze to the future and onto the devastating impact of consumerist lifestyles, I argue that this doom-ridden imaginary also entails a sentimentalisation of our own “inability to feel” and be sufficiently affected by the reality we know ourselves to be contributing to. As such, it bears witness to the trauma of “not being able to adequately feel” what one already knows. By revisiting The Road, a text that occupies a central role in discussions of the potentials and cathartic pitfalls of post-apocalyptic fiction, I suggest that its political potential lies in this confrontation with the limits of feeling. And the politics it opens onto does not hinge on images on ruin, but on a yearning for a socially sanctioned right to feel and express the fear representations only seem able to convey in an inadequate, anaesthetic manner. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to save "the sexual" from the oblivion to which certain strands in queer theory tend to condemn it, and at the same time to limit the risks of anti-politics and solipsism contained in what has been termed antisocial queer theory. It takes a journey from Sigmund Freud to Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem, from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to Teresa de Lauretis, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Tim Dean, and from all of these thinkers (...) back to Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes. At the end, through readings of Bruce LaBruce's movies on gay zombies, the elitism of antisocial queer theory is brought into contact with popular culture. The living dead come to represent a dispossessed form of subjectivity, whose monstrous drives are counterposed to predatory desires of liberal individuals. The reader is thus lead into the interstitial spaces of the Queer Apocalypses, where the past and the future collapse onto the present, and sexual minorities resurrect to the chance of a non-heroic political agency. (shrink)

Proper interpretations of symbols of authority are important for navigating both our cultural settings and the contours of Scripture. This paper looks at the ways the Book of Revelation contrasts images of competing authoritative kings, asking the question, who is worthy of worship, Caesar or Christ? In the African Folk-Islamic context of the Makua-Metto people of Mozambique, familiar national and traditional symbols of authority provide a framework for a robust reading of John’s Apocalypse.

It has been made clear for quite some time that if the Bible has become a classic of Western culture because of its normativity, then the responsibility of the biblical scholar cannot be restricted to giving readers clear access to the original intentions of the biblical writers. It must also include the question: ‘What does a reading of the biblical text do to someone who submits to its world of vision?’ This is a question that has been especially significant in (...) the study of apocalyptic literature, as all apocalypses are hortatory. The implication is that, even in the historical context in which the text was first produced, there is room to consider the earliest stages of audience interaction with the text. Interestingly, most studies making use of this model do not address what the implications of this kind of ‘reading as performance’ might be for today’s reader. This research argued that in the understanding of the biblical text as an oral performance, there is a need to leave room for all that happens to a text after it leaves the author’s hands. The method proposed urged ‘performers’ of texts to pay attention to how they bring themselves to interpretation. More specifically, this method aimed to make use of ritual and liturgy as the rhetorical or performative context within which biblical texts functioned and still function. This research thus proposed a liturgical-functional reading reading of biblical texts which integrates affective reading and the deliberate move from cognitive to affective processes. (shrink)

Before the start of the COViD-19 global pandemic, I stumbled across Bryan Hall’s book ‘an ethical guidebook to the zombie apocalypse’. I was instantly drawn to the ‘zombiefied’ image of Rodin’s the Thinker on the cover, and so I made an impulsive purchase on a rainy day. On my return home, I filed it unread on my bookshelf where it lay undiscovered - until the lockdown came. Stories began to emerge of a changing world, a growing sense of pandemic (...) panic and a readjustment to a new world and a new way of life - and I remembered my zombie book. With time on my hands, I began to read - and the echoes between the zombie apocalypse and COViD-19 grew more vivid and more real. It became harder to tell truth from fiction as I read of a virus that was spreading around the world, causing society to implode, law and order to breakdown and a sense of right and wrong to be blurred. So, on our return to school, after our lockdown, I was inspired to use the zombie apocalypse as my tool to inspire my year 10 Philosophy elective class – most of whom were just beginning their Philosophy studies. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a Kantian reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein's early notions of immortality and the problem of life. I argue that, in spite of his rejection of the assumption of temporal immortality as a solution to the problem of life, Wittgenstein's understanding of the problem itself reflects the Kantian setting of his early system. Moreover, while there is no room for any postulates of practical reason in Wittgensein's early thought, God and immortality are still notions that figure in (...) his preferred solution to the problem of life. (shrink)

Here is the final volume of Norman O. Brown's trilogy on civilization and its discontents, on humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature. Following on his famous books _Life Against Death_ and _Love's Body_, this collection of eleven essays brings Brown's thinking up to 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Brown writes that "the prophetic tradition is an attempt to give direction to the social structure precipitated by (...) the urban revolution; to resolve its inherent contradictions; to put an end to its injustice, inequality, anomie, the state of war... that has been its history from start to finish." Affiliating himself with prophets from Muhammad to Blake and Emerson, Brown offers further meditations on what's wrong with Western civilization and what we might do about it. Thus the duality in his title: crisis and the hope for change. In pieces both poetic and philosophical, Brown's attention ranges over Greek mythology, Islam, Spinoza, and _Finnegan's Wake_. The collection includes an autobiographical essay musing on Brown's own intellectual development. The final piece, "Dionysus in 1990," draws on Freud and the work of Georges Bataille to link the recent changes in the world's economies with mankind's primordial drive to accumulation, waste, and death. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to explore the value of psychoanalysis in the early twenty-first century through reference to Freud, Lacan, and Stiegler’s work on computational madness. In the first section of the article I consider the original objectives of psychoanalysis through reference to what I call Freud’s ‘normalisation project’, before exploring the critique of this discourse concerned with the defence of oedipal law through a discussion of the post-modern ‘individualisation project’ set out by Deleuze and Guattari and others. (...) Tracking the development of ‘the individualisation project’ in history, I consider its connections with the cybernetic theories of Wiener and Shannon in the psycho-cyber-utopianism of the 1990s, before moving on to consider the other side of the psychoanalytic-cybernetic interaction through a discussion of Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the second section of the article. In reading Lacan’s seminar on Freudian drive in terms of the cybernetic repression of death, I set up the conclusion to the article which involves a discussion of Bernard Stiegler’s ‘survival project’ that relies on a recognition of the limit of death in order to produce human significance and oppose the madness of our contemporary computational reality. (shrink)

An asteroid colliding with the earth could cause the extinction of our species. Is this a risk worth worrying about? More important, is it a risk worth doing something about? Richard A. Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, who produces more books in his leisure hours than most authors do working full time, thinks it is.