Noémie Mil-Homens Cavaco
Fulbrighter at Miami University
The concept of the Apocalypse has paradoxically become hard to grasp in Apocalypse-obsessed Western societies. The term tends to be increasingly overused in contemporary culture (such as literature, mediatic discourses, films, and video games). As a result, as highlighted by O’Hear (2015:122), “there is a general, secular, tacitly understood cultural understanding” of the word ‘apocalypse’: it has become a “convenient short-hand” for massive catastrophe.
Originally, the Apocalypse (“to uncover, to reveal” in Ancient Greek) emerged as a religious literary genre, of which the Christian “Book of Revelation” is the best-known example. It did not only refer to the destruction of the material world on Earth, as it primarily focused on the hope and desire for a new, transcendent one.
On the one hand, according to some scholars, this has changed since its secularization, which coincides with the Industrial Revolution (Engélibert, 2019). As explained by Foessel (2020:60), the ideology of “progress” promised a “kingdom without apocalypse”, a heavenly world on Earth itself. Nowadays, in the context of systemic crisis, nuclear weapons, and ineluctable environmental turmoil, it has ended up turning into an anxiety of an “apocalypse without kingdom” – a destruction without redemption – that “progress, turned against itself, would make almost certain” (Foessel, 2020:60).
On the other hand, some argue that the ideology of progress and never-ending growth is itself a secularized version of apocalyptic thinking. Historian Scheidler (2020) notes the disturbing connections between apocalypticism and social injustice in present-day neoliberal societies. Just like in the Book of Revelation, the market – the new God – divides humankind into the chosen – accepted inside of the New Jerusalem of the gated communities – and the damned – condemned to the lake of fire of the slums. Researcher Zylinska (2018:17) points to the problematic “redemptive apocalyptic tropes […] mobilized today”: the fantasies of space colonialism (“planetary relocation” to an extraterrestrial New Jerusalem) and transhumanism (human upgrade to “homo deus”). Novelist Devers (2022) imagines an IT genius, Sterner, who creates a digital world that he equates with the New Jerusalem from the Book of Revelation. His novel denounces Sterner’s craziness, which lies in his project to relocate the global population to the – supposedly immaterial – online platform and provoke his own Apocalypse as if he were God.
Be it associated with the angst and despair caused by the crisis of the ideology of progress or the blind optimism of its remainders, apocalyptic imaginary tends to be currently regarded with suspicion by many scholars in cultural studies and the humanities. Some problematic aspects of the apocalyptic imaginary they denounce include its linear temporality, excessive focus on the future, oversimplified, dualistic understanding of complex reality, and anthropocentrism (Mussgnug, 2022). Scholars also often highlight the potentially dangerous effects of apocalyptic tropes on their audience, such as banalization (Foster, 2014), a paralyzing fatalism[1] (Prádanos, 2018), a distraction from the actual issue (Morton, 2018), or depoliticization. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction indeed tend to “universalize a set of environmental anxieties that is […] particular to white settler society” (Seraphin, 2016:144). They also often ignore the fact that for the indigenous people of the Americas, the end of the world already occurred (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro, 2016). In addition, most of them fail to acknowledge that the Apocalypse they depict – what some refer to as the collapse of thermo-industrial civilization (Servigne & Stevens, 2015) – is already ongoing.
Nonetheless, the Apocalypse and its imaginaries are and will always remain open to multiple cultural reappropriations and reinterpretations. As reminded by Mussgnug (2022), there is an “irreducible diversity of its numerous expressions, across periods and cultures”: it is not “a single, transhistorical, and transnational canon.” Therefore, Apocalyptic images are not necessarily complicit with the dominant system. In fact, the Apocalypse is also originally deeply connected to dealing with trauma and promoting resistance against oppression (Scheidler, 2020). It can also be interpreted as a moment of revelation of the current situation (Álvarez-Blanco, APOCAELIPSIS). By enabling us to make sense of (the end of) our world, some apocalyptic imaginaries may thus also be counterhegemonic by allowing us to envision a different present.
[1] For books answering this need to get out of paralyzing fatalism, read Oikonomía y acción ciudadana. Transitando sistemas con la Constelación de los Comunes (2020-2023) and En ruta con el común.
Archivo y memoria de una posible constelación (2017-18-19).
Bibliography/bibliografía
AAVV. Oikonomía y acción ciudadana. Transitando sistemas con la Constelación de los Comunes. La Vorágine. 2023.
“APOCAELIPSIS”, La Vorágine, https://lavoragine.net/apocaelipsis/
Álvarez-Blanco, Palmar. “¿De qué apocalipsis estamos hablando?” La Vorágine. 31 March 2020, https://lavoragine.net/de-que-apocalipsis-estamos-hablando/
Álvarez-Blanco Palmar. En ruta con el común. Archivo y memoria de una posible constelación. La Vorágine. 2019.
Danowski, Déborah & Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de The ends of the world. Cambridge: Polity press, 2016.
Devers, Nathan. Les liens artificiels. Paris: Albin Michel, 2022.
Engélibert, Jean.-Paul. Fabuler la fin du monde : la puissance critique des fictions d’Apocalypse. Paris: La Découverte, 2019.
Foessel, Michaël. “L’apocalypse sans la promesse.” Recherches de Science Religieuse, vol.1, no.108, 2020, pp.57-69, https://doi.org/10.3917/rsr.201.0057
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Hoarders, Doomsday preppers, and the culture of Apocalypse. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2014.
Scheidler, Fabian. La fin de la mégamachine. Translated by Aurélien Berlan. Paris: Seuil, 2020.
Morton, Timothy. Being ecological. MIT Press, 2018.
Mussgnug, Florian. « Apocalypse ». In Herbrechter, Stefan et al. (eds.) Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, 2022, pp.1139-1158.
O’Hear, Natasha. “Apocalyptic Imaginaries Contrasting Approaches to Revelation”. Religion in Cultural Imaginary Exploration in Visual and Material Practices. Edited by Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2015, pp.117-148.
Prádanos, Luis. I. Postgrowth imaginaries : new ecological and counterhegemonic culture in post-2008 Spain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018.
Seraphin, Bruno. “Rewilding, The Hoop and Settler Apocalypse.” The Trumpeter, vol.32, no.2, 2016, pp.126-146, https://doi.org/10.7202/1042989ar
Servigne, Pablo, and Stevens, Raphaël. Comment tout peut s’effondrer : Petit manuel de collapsologie à l’usage des générations présentes. Paris: Seuil, 2015.
Zylinska, Joanna. The End of Man. A Feminist Counterapocalypse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
