The end of the world is a seemingly interminable topic; at least, of course, until it happens. Environmental catastrophe and planetary apocalypse are subjects of enduring fascination and, as ethnographic studies show, human cultures have approached them in very different ways. Indeed, in the face of the growing perception of the dire effects of global warming, some of these visions have been given a new lease on life. Information and analyses concerning the human causes and the catastrophic consequences of (...) the planetary crisis have been accumulating at an ever-increasing rate, mobilising popular opinion as well as academic reflection. In this book, philosopher Deborah Danowski and anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro offer a bold overview and interpretation of these current discourses on the end of the world, reading them as thought experiments on the decline of the West's anthropological adventure; that is, as attempts, though not necessarily intentional ones, at inventing a mythology that is adequate to the present. This work has important implications for the future development of ecological practices and it will appeal to a broad audience interested in contemporary anthropology, philosophy, and environmentalism. (shrink)

Omnipresent in popular culture, especially in film and literature, the theme of the 'end of the world' is often rejected from contemporary philosophy as hysterical apocalyptism. This volume attempts to show that it is vital that we address the motif of the 'end' in contemporary world – but that this cannot be done without thinking it anew.

Are we in imminent danger of extinction? Yes, we probably are, argues John Leslie in his chilling account of the dangers facing the human race as we approach the second millenium. The End of the World is a sobering assessment of the many disasters that scientists have predicted and speculated on as leading to apocalypse. In the first comprehensive survey, potential catastrophes - ranging from deadly diseases to high-energy physics experiments - are explored to help us understand the risks. (...) One of the greatest threats facing humankind, however, is the insurmountable fact that we are a relatively young species, a risk which is at the heart of the 'Doomsday Argument'. This argument, if correct, makes the dangers we face more serious than we could have ever imagined. This more than anything makes the arrogance and ignorance of politicians, and indeed philosophers, so disturbing as they continue to ignore the manifest dangers facing future generations. (shrink)

The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida’s final seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign”, as the explicit themes of the seminar—namely, sovereignty and the question of the animal—come to be supplemented and interrupted by questions of death, mourning, survival, the archive, and, especially, the end of the world. The book begins with Derrida’s analyses, in the first year of the seminar, of the question of the animal in the context (...) of his other published works on the same subject. It then follows Derrida through the second year of the seminar, presented in Paris from December 2002 to March 2003, as a very different tone begins to make itself heard, one that wavers between melancholy and an extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end. Focusing the entire year on just two works, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger’s seminar of 1929–30, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” the seminar comes to be dominated by questions of the end of the world and of an originary violence that at once gives rise to and effaces all things. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows Derrida as he responds from week to week to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world events—the aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq—and more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away. All this, the book concludes, makes this final seminar an absolutely unique work in Derrida’s corpus, one that both speaks of death as the end of the world and itself now testifies to that end—just one, though hardly the least, of its many teachable moments. (shrink)

Ernesto de Martino left The End of the World unfinished at his death in 1965. His student Clara Gallini published the first Italian edition in 1977, which was followed by an updated version in 2002...

Here I wish to report on developments on three fronts concerning ‘religion’ in expanding global debates about the ‘the end of the world’ and ‘the ways we know it’, concerning: the word ‘religion’ itself, as half of the religion-science binary, and its marginalization–or complete absence–in the construction of the modern scholarly disciplines and university departments, and influencing of ‘modern’ culture and politics; proliferating doubts about the positivist epistemology of modern ‘science’; and the growing sense that we are caught up (...) in epochal transitions, in which we are significant actors, and that, far beyond what we can know ‘scientifically’, our responses involve leaps of hope and faith which contribute to tipping the balance among divergent possible futures. (shrink)

The chapter studies the speculative realist critique of the notion of finitude and its implications for the theme of the "end of the world" as a teleological and eschatological idea. It is first explained how Quentin Meillassoux proposes to overcome both Kantian and Heideggerian "correlationist" approaches with his speculative thesis of absolute contingency. It is then shown that Meillassoux's speculative materialism also dismantles the close link forged by Kant between the teleological ends of human existence and a teleological notion (...) of the "end of the world." Speculative materialism no longer sees the end of thought, or the end of the thinking human being, as an insurmountable limit of conceivability, but rather as one contingent and possible event among others. This allows us to conceive an "end of all things" in a positive sense with regard to which the old eschatological hope for the end of the present world of injustice and for the emergence of a new world of perfect, "divine" justice becomes meaningful and legitimate in an entirely new sense. (shrink)

In this paper we offer some ideas on the relationship between metaphysics of causation and common explanatory practices of behaviour. We first suggest a sort of “negotiating model” for theorizing about mental causation, and then examine the so-called causal closure argument focusing on some morals one can draw from it that further illustrate the model we recommend.

In this book, Kas Saghafi argues that the notion of "the end the world" in Derrida's late work is not a theological or cosmological matter, but a meditation on mourning and the death of the other. He examines this and several other tightly knit motifs in Derrida's work: mourning, survival, the phantasm, the event, and most significantly, the term salut, which in French means at once greeting and salvation. An underlying concern of The World after the End of (...) the World is whether a discourse on salut (saving, being saved, and salvation) can be dissociated from discourse on religion. Saghafi compares Derrida's thought along these lines with similar concerns of Jean-Luc Nancy's. Combining analysis of these themes with reflections on personal loss, this book maintains that, for Derrida, salutation, greeting, and welcoming is resistant to the economy of salvation. This resistance calls for what Derrida refers to as a "spectro-poetics" devoted to and assigned to the other's singularity. (shrink)

This paper highlights certain features of the metamorphosis that the concept “the end of the world” has undergone from its origin in early Christian thought to the present day. This concept has, in recent decades, become increasingly prominent within Western European Lutheran and Roman Catholic theology. This paperdemonstrates that the notion of the end of the world popularized by Jürgen Moltmann and Karl Rahner, despite the traditional, biblical language in which it is couched, has more affinity with the (...) philosophical concept “the end of history” developed by Hegel than it has with the ideas common in early Christianity. (shrink)

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake… are the famous opening tenets to REM’s anthemic stream of political consciousness, ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it’ and within this treatise, th...

First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history." Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the "end of the world." The idea (...) of a "unified world," they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required in a society without traditional subjects and institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and any nostalgia for "starting" from the familiar in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively, the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of "ends." And other things besides. (shrink)

The global pandemic has pushed many of us to online streaming services. A particular genre in these services is the ‘end of the world’ science fiction film, in and through which the speculated results of processes such as climate change are depicted. CGI technology is frequently deployed to create images of the end of the world, which is a backdrop to the narrative of, ‘saving ourselves amidst the ruins’. This philosophy of education essay will critically examine ten films (...) in order to:Explain how ‘the end of the world’ images connected to processes such as climate change, obscures and displaces attention from the real, scientifically proven processes that are not so entertaining, but are still deadly. The images are created by capital and its machines for audience attention and have little to do with real social change. Science sits in an ambiguous position in this paper in that the real processes of climate change proven by science may be funded by capitalist mechanisms that can also be their cause.Introduce a reformulated notion of ecosophy from the work of Félix Guattari, Murray Bookchin, Arne Næss and Andre Gorz. This essay will suggest that ecosophy has the potential to teach the underlying split between depictions of the end of the world through the capitalist machine and the real social change necessary under climate change. Ecosophy is in the context of this essay a specific conceptual construction designed for teaching about climate change through cinema. (shrink)

One of the greatest values of human being and her/his unique role in the world is giving life to forms created in their minds into shared world. Once this ability has been obstructed, humans rebel against the destiny they themselves or fate has brought and confronted them with. In this text we will analyze the proper human attitude in front of the threats of self-affirmation in existence, morals and their true, unique being. The best approach to the meaning (...) of those threats is in understanding their most extensive scales, like the threats of different visions of the end of these worlds are. Each vision demands a proper human attitude. Consequently, each ‘the end of the world’ gives a new perspective of what the courage is, in itself. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author argues that Avatar: the Last Airbender ( ATLA ) actually provides us with what the he will call an abolitionist philosophical account. Abolitionism is a theory of justice – derived primarily from the work of Black radicals – built on claims that global and local injustices can be explained by evil institutions or ways of life that cannot be reformed or changed, but that must be abolished. The world of ATLA is built on a (...) very specific metaphysical picture, the idea that the world is made up of the four elements. The natural causes the social, and so the latter ends up taking the shape of the former. The connection between the nations and the elements is deeper than production design. The swamp is not just an entire ecosystem, consisting of varied and distinct elements, but is in fact “one big, living organism”, a unity. (shrink)

The authors of this collection of essays propose that climate change means serious peril. The approaches begin from archaeology, literature, religion, psychology, sociology, philosophy of science, engineering and sustainable development, as well as 'straight' history. Our argument, however, is not about the science per se. It is about us, our deep and more recent history, and how we arrived at this calamitous impasse. With contributions from academic activists and independent researchers, History at the End of the World challenges advocates (...) of 'business as usual' to think again. But in its wide-ranging assessment of how we transcend the current crisis, it also proposes that the human past could be our most powerful resource in the struggle for survival. (shrink)

An examination of how the Accelerationist imagination has failed in its deviation from Nick Land's radical metaphorics of an Artaudian and Bataille-esque signifying “economy without reserve” to a neo-Sovietised bureaucratic plan for the post-Anthropocene, per Benjamin Noys et al. Given a positivistic guise, futurology of the latter kind almost always masks a return of apocalyptic humanism. The fantasy of a species unified in solidarity, in full view of its techno-evolutionary obsolescence, seeks to magically transform the history of alienation into some (...) transcendental “means” of global post-production: but what this amounts to in fact is the phantasmatic extension of the Situationist spectacle into a “collective” dream of living on beyond a “global” extinction event which, in reality, will have been nothing but that of an ideology. (shrink)

In several late texts, Derrida meditated on Paul Celan's poem ‘Grosse, Glühende Wölbung’, in which the departure of the world is announced. Delving into the ‘origin’ and ‘history’ of the ‘conception’ of the world, this paper suggests that, for Derrida, the end of the world is determined by and from death—the death of the other. The death of the other marks, each and every time, the absolute end of the world.

Prologue: autumn aroma -- What's left? -- Arts of noticing -- Contamination as collaboration -- Some problems with scale -- Interlude: smelling -- After progress : salvage accumulation -- Working the edge "freedom" -- Open ticket, Oregon -- War stories -- What happened to the state? : two kinds of Asian Americans in translation -- Between the dollar and the yen -- From gifts to commodities and back -- Salvage rhythms : business in disturbance -- Interlude: tracking -- Disturbed beginnings (...) : unintentional design -- The life of the forest : coming up among pines -- History -- Resurgence -- Serendipity -- Ruin in gaps and patches -- In science as translation -- Flying spores -- Interlude: dancing -- In the middle of things -- Matsutake crusaders -- Ordinary assets -- Anti-ending : some people I met along the way -- Spore trail: the further adventures of a mushroom -- Notes -- Index. (shrink)

SummaryTheoderic’s diplomacy with distant peoples has often been considered as a kind of ‘Realpolitik’ chiefly aimed at military or strategical purposes, but the symbolic importance of two embassies from the Warni and Hesti should be taken into consideration more carefully. The king aimed to convince his subjects and neighbours that he was the rightful heir of the Roman emperors by following a subtle policy of imitatio Imperii. He also used diplomacy to achieve this goal and took advantage of two embassies (...) from remote peoples of Northern Europe in order to imitate both Augustus and contemporary emperors, who prided themselves upon receiving envoys from far-away lands. (shrink)

At the End of the World there is blackness doing the (im)possible. This essay considers the (im)possibility of debate in our contemporary crisis through an examination of the domestication of potentiality in rhetorical dialectic. Debate, in its presupposition of stasis, parallels sovereignty's ontologizing operations of antiblack racial terror that suspend contingency. Meanwhile, blackness was already getting it done. The U.S. Civil War serves as a privileged example for thinking through blackness as the groundless constitutive outside to the possible that (...) yet gestures toward other generative moments found in refusal of the disappointing options that pass for politics offered to us today. (shrink)

The philosophy of Deleuze is as relevant to contemporary thought as it is obscure and complex. Deleuze at the End of the World guides readers through this maze by exploring the raw material that Deleuze took from thinkers in various fields of knowledge to construct his own concepts, some of them well known (such as Hegel, Kant, Husserl, Balibar and Blanchot) and some widely unexplored (Selme, Guillaume, Bakhtine and Dalcq). At the same time, readers will gain access to Latin (...) American perspectives on contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This article considers a series of ideas disturbing the conventional wisdom that decrees education an essential force in saving the world. Taking Morton's descriptions of hyperobjects seriously, we consider his radical idea that the world has ended amidst the eco-political depredations of the Anthropocene. Accordingly, we claim that education in modernity most properly belongs - materially and ideologically - with technological enframing and the rise of biopower. In other words, what is taken almost universally as the sacred realm (...) of education is, in fact, a contributory factor in the global eco-ontological crisis. Morton describes global warming, plastics and nuclear arsenals as hyperobjects: viscous, nonlocal entities that exist in temporal and spatial planes vastly different from our own immediate worlds. They are the threatening, difficult to access entities that express the Anthropocene. While most will propose that education will be vital in combating looming ecological apocalypse, we consider that education is a hyperobject itself. Education, we opine, is aligned with the forces and conditions that have generated the present crisis. This is because education embodies the same qualities as the hyperobjects of modernity; according to any rigorous historical ontology, education as we know it must be seen as the most extensive expression of a dangerous biopower that is beyond control. If this position is to be taken seriously, education is not merely impotent in combatting ecological catastrophe, but is a key apparatus supporting the Anthropocene. Education is thus another element of the end of the world. (shrink)

Plants are edging closer to the center of critical inquiry in the Anthropocene because they are intimately tied to legacies of settler colonialism, forced migration, related practices of extractive capitalism, and their environmental and human harm. Ostensibly sessile, plants travel constantly through their adaptations to ensure their survival and reproduction. In the modern period, this movement was taken to unprecedented scale by humans, triggering massive displacement of people and disruption to ecosystems. Among the many instances of plant movement, the scandalous (...) mobility of invasives unsettles us because it exposes the worst excesses of the Anthropocene. This essay focuses on the practice of multimedia artist Precious Okoyomon, whose installations feature prominently kudzu, the most notorious weed in the US. The highest concentrations of kudzu are found in the former Cotton Belt—Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—making it cotton’s unlikely successor. The essay analyzes how Okoyomon’s kudzu installations explore the dark side of the landscape, peeling off layers of human and environmental harm while acknowledging the resilience of more-than-human life. But a focus on invasive species also challenges plant theory’s celebration of entanglement, showing how the theoretical effort to produce the plant as a generalized concept bumps against the contingencies of its natural history in time and place, its ontological slipperiness, its ethical ambiguity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: * Physical Eschatology * Theological Eschatology * Thermodynamic Evidence of Creation * Escaping Creation * Christian Theological Eschatology * Notes.

My mother died within the first few months of the pandemic. Her sudden and rapid decline from Alzheimer's disease is difficult to separate from the COVID-19 restrictions put in place by her nursing home just two months prior. We went from visiting her daily to not at all, then to a strictly enforced twenty-minute hospice visit to say goodbye. After her passing, and still amidst the pandemic, I could not write. The conventional methods and outputs of bioethics inquiry felt impossible.Making (...) art is the only thing that felt possible then. Perhaps that's the function of art, to make things feel more possible. I began by collecting materials from work—package inserts, empty prescription bottles and gelatin capsules—to... (shrink)

Resumen Este artículo busca demostrar que los argumentos generales acerca de la exploración científica valen también para las ciencias espaciales. El trabajo se basa en el ejemplo de la exploración de Venus y lo que esta nos dice acerca de nuestro propio planeta. Argumenta que el concepto de la probabilidad de Leslie es incorrecto, como también lo son las dudas sobre la evidencia Venusiana. Así mismo, concluye que no se puede rechazar la importancia que tienen los descubrimientos inesperados que han (...) resultado de la exploración de Venus para ayudarnos a comprender nuestro propio planeta. Y que si van a ser rechazados estos descubrimientos debe ser por razones científicas, no por intuiciones acerca de la probabilidad.This article seeks to demonstrate that the general arguments about scientific exploration are also suitable for space sciences. The work is based on the example of the exploration of Venus and what it tells us about our own planet. It argues that Leslie’s concept of probability is incorrect, as are also the doubts on Venusian evidence. Likewise, it concludes that we cannot deny that the unexpected discoveries that have resulted from the exploration of Venus are important to help us understand our own planet. And if these discoveries are going to be rejected, it must be for scientific reasons and not for intuitions about probability. Este artículo busca demostrar que los argumentos generales acerca de la exploración científica valen también para las ciencias espaciales. El trabajo se basa en el ejemplo de la exploración de Venus y lo que esta nos dice acerca de nuestro propio planeta. Argumenta que el concepto de la probabilidad de Leslie es incorrecto, como también lo son las dudas sobre la evidencia Venusiana. Así mismo, concluye que no se puede rechazar la importancia que tienen los descubrimientos inesperados que han resultado de la exploración de Venus para ayudarnos a comprender nuestro propio planeta. Y que si van a ser rechazados estos descubrimientos debe ser por razones científicas, no por intuiciones acerca de la probabilidad. (shrink)

This article examines the concept of ‘event’ and the manner in which it has been neglected in both ecocriticism and Hitchcock studies. Using The Birds (1963) to rethink the premises of ecocritics’ discussion of nature, animals, and disasters in cinema and Hitchcock scholars’ emphasis on representation and symbolism, the article argues that it has become imperative to philosophically foreground ‘events’ in light of the numerous contemporary films that revolve around them. Hitchcock’s film is shown to propose a renewed concept of (...) event, a concept that significantly departs from the two most influential conceptualisations of the event in post-1960 continental philosophy: those of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. Eschewing philosophical theories that equate the event with pure becoming or conceptualisations that characterise events as rupture and break, the film reveals a particular form of bird-event that posits relationality to address becoming and rupture simultaneously. Indeed, what distinguishes Hitchcock’s concept of event, contra Deleuze’s and Badiou’s, is that it emphasises relationality instead of pure continuity or radical rupture in the characterisation of corporeal or embodied individuation. Emphasising relationality helps understand the film’s deployment of a concept of event that departs from the aforementioned theorisations that exclude the human body (and therefore affect) from the event’s experiential import. Closely aligning bodies prior to and after the bird-events, The Birds ultimately discloses the paradox of body and event at the heart of contemporary event theory by way of linking or relating bodies and events, thus tapping into debates over embodiment and affect in cultural and media theory. Centering around modalities of evental experience rather than the controversial and endlessly debatable signification of the bird attacks, the analysis purports that the bird-event configures materiality only to reveal its relational and interstitial volatility. (shrink)

This article elucidates the significance of eschatology—particularly what may be called negative eschatology—for the task of political life. Through tracing some of the appeals to eschatological notions in recent political thinking and movements, we demonstrate some of the dangers of eschatology as a resource for political theology. The article then engages with the version of negative eschatology rendered by Vincent Lloyd, which holds out the possibility of experiencing a foretaste of the eschaton in moments of struggle against domination. The form (...) of political activity in focus here is a struggle to dismantle that which does not belong to the eschatological order of justice—that is, struggling against what the eschaton is not. We bring this account of the relationship between the eschaton and the political into conversation with Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of infinity, and offer an account of negative eschatology as an invitation into living in relation to a fullness that is ever unfolding. Political activity undertaken in this light is oriented towards opening the conditions of possibility for the contingent transformation of injustice and led by those at the margins. We suggest, therefore, that in the dismantling of what eschatology is not, it is possible to glimpse what the eschaton might be. (shrink)

We are currently experiencing a planetary crisis that will lead, if worst comes to worst, to the end of the entire world as we know it. Several feminist scholars have suggested that if the Earth is to stay livable for humans and nonhumans alike, the ways in which many human beings – particularly in the wealthy parts of the world, infested with Eurocentrism, colonialism, neoliberalism, and capitalism – inhabit this planet requires radical, ethical, and political transformation. In this (...) article, we propose that feminist theory, particularly feminist posthumanities, and Black feminist and decolonial thought, together with creative practices such as writing, have much to contribute to transformative planetary activism that imagines different and other kinds of worlds and futures based on an ethical consideration of nonhuman others and collective caring for the planet. (shrink)

Narratives of human-induced environmental effects such as climate change and biodiversity decline have long been dominated by narratives of loss in which humankind is concep­tualized as a destructive force. But in addition to narratives of loss, there is a narrative of gain and resilience in nonfiction books intended for a general audience. Books employing this narrative emphasize that nature is dynamic and that some species are adapting to and flourishing thanks to human-induced changes. This review essay discusses two new books (...) in this vein: Chris D. Thomas’s Inheritors of the Earth and Menno Schilthuizen’s Darwin Comes to Town. I argue that these two books, besides being interesting in their own right, are important contributions to the popular literature on climate change and the Anthropocene because they denaturalize dominant apocalyptic narratives of nature. However, they underestimate the severity of human effect on the biosphere and advocate a form of anthropocentrism that may be misguided if our goal is to maintain a functioning biosphere for the future. (shrink)

More than forty years of commitment to nuclear weapons may have prepared Britain to take part in Armageddon, but not to defend itself against attack. What made British governments choose this path and how have they justified it? How have they responded to the moral questions it raises? Using material from recently-released official documents, Roger Ruston presents a moral history of British defence policy, from the 'lesson' of Appeasement to the nuclear modernizations of the eighties, and answers many of the (...) questions that governments have avoided. The book will be of great interest to defence historians, moralists, politicians, and general readers who need a clear account of their country's defence predicament as a basis from which to devise workable and morally acceptable alternatives. (shrink)