Apocalypse

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates the pervasive cultural influence of apocalyptic thinking in the twenty-first century. It explains how the rhetoric of apocalypse, with its characteristic sense of existential urgency, has been variously endorsed by environmental activists, campaigners for intergenerational, planetary climate justice, and protesters against sexism and racism. On a more critical note, the chapter suggests that cultural attention to linear time and world-shattering rupture, in apocalyptic discourse, stands in the way of more complex and probing critical engagements with nonhuman temporalities. It gives voice to leading posthumanists, who have argued that apocalyptic thinking is structurally anthropocentric and therefore particularly problematic in the context of the unfolding climate and environmental catastrophe. The chapter endorses this critique and, in response, seeks to shed light on the possibility of new forms of apocalyptic thinking, which are explicitly attentive to their own material entanglement and therefore resistant to the combined power mechanisms of anthropocentrism and advanced capitalism. Such new forms of progressive, disruptive, and self-reflective apocalyptic thinking, it is suggested, may draw their force from non-anthropocentric knowledge practices and imaginative frameworks. In this way, the chapter resists the idea of apocalypse literature as a single, transhistorical, and transnational canon and instead emphasizes the irreducible diversity of its numerous expressions, across periods and cultures.