The Venice Review on the apocalypse

Four perspectives on the end of the world at the end of the year

1.

Imagine a world slowly but surely taken over by ice. A sheer layer spreading over the land, just as evil does in an animated film. It might shatter, but all that lies underneath is a frozen and now-infertile earth. The sun does not warm, the ice does not thaw.

In Anna Kavan’s novel Ice, that is precisely the world’s fate. ‘Never known such cold in this month’, one of the fleeting and unnamed (as they all are) characters forebodes right at the beginning (we might say similar things of the unseasonably blazing sun in Rome’s December, heading towards our own abyss). The nameless protagonist, a small girl with thin wrists (as if her life force were always implicitly in doubt) traverses an unknown land, having come from the tropics, and becomes absorbed in its pending and increasingly-present glacial apocalypse. It is somehow always apparent that it is too late to depart from this common fate and that, temporary respite notwithstanding, it will come to pass.

The girl seems like a shard of ice herself in her pale fragility. As if, unhappy of her destiny though she may be, she were nonetheless already a piece of it. Kavan wrote during the Cold War with its own looming, though sudden, apocalyptic threat. The interest in Our End, not as a question, but as a fact, with the only doubt being its precise aesthetic rendition, is comprehensible.

I feel akin to Ice’s protagonist in her desperation towards and yet assimilation to her fate: when I detect true inescapability, I run out to meet it. I soak it up and claim it as my own, denying it the force of impact. I smoke and sit outside in the Roman summer heat as though I could always live like this. Amor fati and stoicism are similar in this unflinching acceptance of that which is or will be. They do not necessarily seek to fold events into a sense (this was meant to be), but rather overlay sense and events and take them up wholesale as sense itself.

Yet the anthropologist Ernesto de Martino would argue that it is precisely our reaction to and against the certainty of the apocalypse, not our acceptance of it, that makes us most human.¹ He does not mean the political or similar actions we engage in to stop an apocalypse from happening. He is referring to the palingenesis, the radical transformation and renewal, that only the end, through our reactions, can unleash. The apocalypse is certain in an ontological sense, in the sense that any beginning has an end, not in a chronological and literal sense, in the sense that we know night will, any moment now, follow day. If we took the imminence of our end so literally, fully stepping into the individual crises it could unleash (‘I am going to die!’), the apocalypse would become a psycho-pathology, a malady. If, instead, we were able to (collectively) ‘don the risk of the end of the world with cultural significance and through this framing make new worlds, then the end [would become] merely a moment of passage’.²

This is not an easy task. It means accepting the apocalypse not because we have accepted our (individual) death, rushing out to embrace it as it scorches or freezes or disintegrates us, but because we have realised that, together, we can overcome it.

Alyssa Erspamer

2.

Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.

—Revelations 1.3 (KJV)

Around the end of the 1st century AD, a man now known as John sat down on the Greek island of Patmos and transcribed the visions he witnessed concerning the Last Days. The book, which contains fiery, catastrophic depictions of the end times, eventually (and appropriately) took its place as the final book of the New Testament—the Book of Revelations. In the book, John of Patmos predicts the intensification of the struggle between Good and Evil, with the violence and chaos of the world culminating in the intervention of God on the side of Good, the eventual destruction of Evil, and the ushering in of the Messiah to implement a benign and just rule for the righteous for all eternity. 

John was not the first person to write about the end times, but it’s from his book of visions that we take the word ‘apocalypse’ (deriving from the Greek ἀποκάλυψις, the term more or less translates as ‘revelation’). Ever since John (and perhaps thanks to him), we have had a slew of predictions and tales concerning the end of the world: from Nostradamus to evangelical pastors and even Hollywood executives, there has always been a fixation on the eschatological, the theology of the end, that seems to bore into our very psyche. 

Why is this? Why have people, throughout the two millennia since John of Patmos’ time (and before then as well), foretold the end of the world, fantasised about its arrival, and penned reams and reams of books on this cataclysmic, profoundly horrifying end of our existence? What does the apocalypse as an idea say about humanity? 

The psychology behind apocalyptic thinking, put quite simply, is that the world is a harsh, seemingly irrational place where justice rarely prevails; what is desired in thinking (or even yearning) for the apocalypse is the triumph of truth, of justice. The contradictions and cruelties of everyday human life are ‘revealed’ to us, only to be violently destroyed in light of a shining paragon of virtue and goodness. One is reminded of Marx, who wrote, ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’.³ This is precisely because the eschatological mode of thinking is inherently dialectical in nature. 

Even the crudest blockbuster movies often present us with this format—the world ends (through zombies, environmental disaster, or nuclear war), the ‘wicked’ are swept away (along with a great deal of the good), and the protagonists are left to begin a new, just society. The apocalypse is Noah’s Ark, the flood myths of countless civilisations of old, wrapped into a temporally and culturally appropriate costume. 

The crucial point, however, whether conscious or unconscious, is often missed when thinking about the apocalypse. The apocalyptic fantasy is not a libidinal desire for destruction and death, but rather a deeper melancholia for the absence of a just state of existence. In many ways, it is a self-soothing mechanism against the anxiety of extinction or death. The apocalypse is a desire for answers, for truth, not for demise. And for that reason, it will always be just beyond the horizon, yet to be revealed. 

Finlay Darlington-Bell

3.

What is this allure of apocalypse? For Christians, for instance, apocalypse is of course not merely a showy end-of-times, but also salvation for the just and the righteous. It is—at last!—an event like the birth of Christ, and as it buries the inadequacies of this world, it elevates the worthy.

Nowadays we seem to live on the brink of an apocalypse without any prospect of salvation. At least, not a salvation based on righteousness. In several possible versions of the apocalypse facing us some do survive—the rich and well-resourced stockpile and flee to the mountains of New Zealand or Norway while the chaos of extreme weather, flooding, and displacement unleashes itself onto the vast majority. Unless of course the chaos pushes a world leader to open their nuclear arsenal—then perhaps the apocalypse will be blind and equal, swallowing the entire world. Could there be an allure to even this pure destruction? Perhaps the old Christian one: finally an event will come and bring with it some sense. 

Since I joined student activist groups roughly ten years ago, I have witnessed the apocalyptic fears that seem to undergird many of those pushing for political change in our time—the sense of helplessness inspired by new technologies and climate change and the relentlessness of capitalism (per that famous quote attributed to Mark Fisher or Jameson or Žižek that I’ve been banned from saying).⁴ I personally never liked thinking about those fears. Do we inevitably find ourselves focusing on them? Should we? There are two practical questions, regarding apocalyptic thinking in politics, that I keep returning to. Since we continue to invoke such fearful prospects as we do our political battles, they seem necessary to contend with. 

Firstly, could we ever know the apocalypse is coming? Supposedly science can give us awareness of this biblical pronouncement: we can calculate its arrival with data collection and models; and we can assume its arrival thanks to the immensely powerful technologies we believe to be technically capable of mass destruction. Does this amount to knowledge? I have my doubts about the accuracy of streamlining vast arrays of data to predict world-scale events. But perhaps the latter point, about our technological capability, is the real concern: without any need for data-driven predictions, our technological ‘progress’ itself is digging a grave for us that at one point we will fall into. Apocalypse then seems to be a question of whether we have any control over technology (or, who does have control over it). 

Secondly, is apocalypse talk motivating? Is the vision of a nuclear holocaust the only way to get us to oppose nuclear weapons, or the urgency of climate protestors promising an irreversibly uninhabitable world in a few years the only way we can start pushing unapologetically for better climate change politics? Asking these questions is uncomfortable because, despite the immense awareness and talk of climate change and sustainability in the past years and the decades of lived fear of nuclear war, there are no significant policy breakthroughs in either camp. The U.S. for instance is producing more crude oil than ever right now.⁵

Occasionally the prospect of a great terror does make me spring to my feet and share articles widely, but soon this drive tapers out. Because the very nature of an apocalyptic force is something so beyond my puny impact that soon any will to confront it devolves into the only seemingly proper response before an apocalypse: trying to be among those that survive.  

Perhaps the right question around the apocalypse is a different one, one that has come up again and again in these times of late modernity, without much resolution: that of how to acquire (political) agency towards our futures. We live in a time where so many of the technologies we make—nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, fossil-fuel-driven transportation, new medical research—could have unimaginable tail-ends of risk, whose likelihood and magnitude are difficult to calculate no matter what the prophets of data believe. The question of global apocalypse might begin not by understanding those risks fully, but by trying to understand how we can take agency at all, even on smaller scales. 

Melanie Erspamer

4.

About a year after the global financial crisis, the popular sense of dread which followed in its wake congealed into a film about the end of the world. The film was called 2012, and if you were unfortunate enough to be at all clued into American popular culture at the time, you probably have at least some vague recollection of it, even if you never saw it. The viral marketing campaign ahead of its release made this inevitable; it was incredibly aggressive, and ultimately successful, with the film grossing $791 million against a budget of $200 million. At the very least, it worked on my middle school class, amongst whom the vivid images of the end of the world dominated lunch table conversations for a good month leading up to the film’s release—practically an aeon in middle school time—whereupon it was pretty much immediately forgotten.

This initial fascination inevitably spurred classroom discussion by teachers eager to translate the cultural moment into a learning opportunity via a kind of pedantic literalism that only actually appeals to the most annoying minority of 13-year-olds. Ordinarily, I would have been foremost amongst this cohort, but this time I found myself oddly sceptical of the teachers and their assorted pets’ repeated insistence upon the implausibility of the film’s premise. Their repudiations seemed at once both incredibly obvious, and yet somehow also an equally obvious product of wishful thinking. Surely it did not need to be said that a new type of neutrino from a solar flare was unlikely to cause the overheating of the Earth’s core, in fulfilment of an ancient Mayan prophecy—yet it kept being said anyway. It was hard to avoid the impression that these lectures, however smug their delivery, derived less from their admittedly self-evident truth, than from the lecturers' desire to believe in the self-evidence of that truth, and in retrospect, perhaps even in the concept of self-evident truths more generally.

Apart from Mr. Durante’s extensive treatment of neutrinos—which sailed blissfully over my head in much the same manner solar flares apparently do most of the time—these homilies tended to focus on the film’s misrepresentation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. The party line was that this calendar was cyclical in nature, its 5126-year-long cycle simply set to end with the start of a new cycle, just as spring inevitably follows winter. It was never clear to me what we were actually meant to take from all this. Was this notion of a cyclical history meant to be so obviously absurd that we would dismiss the whole thing out of hand? Or were we supposed to embrace it, safe in the knowledge that a world-historical spring would soon be upon us?

As it turned out neither would be the case. History may not follow the neat cycles laid out in the calendars we use to track it, but that did not mean it wasn’t still in motion, roiling and churning beneath the surface in a way the American public up until very recently hadn’t had to confront, heated by forces not so easily disproved as whatever nonsense about neutrinos. The anxiety this shitty movie somehow managed to tap into was not that the world would end, but that it hadn’t ended already; that there might yet be more history to come, and we were powerless to make sense of it.  

Indeed, in the intervening years, the would-be authorities of American public life have actually embraced the coming of the apocalypse, metastasising into our familiar class of “experts'' and their attendant fetishists. However, the anxiety which was once latent within their confidence has likewise blossomed into an all-encompassing neuroticism that continues, now more than ever, to undermine the self-evident truths to which they cling for salvation. The experts are no doubt mostly right about the parts-per-million of various greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the viral load of an un-masked cough. Just like they were right that the world wasn’t ending when I was in middle school. But now, it goes without saying, the world is actually ending. So why does it keep being said?

Tom Schueneman

1.  Especially in his posthumous masterpiece La fine del mondo (1977).

2. Lisa Di Pietro, Patologia e presenza. Il pensiero di Ernesto de Martino dagli albori alla fine del mondo (Roma: Fondazione Mario Luzi, 2019), p.12. Translation my own.

3. Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. by Samuel Moore (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), p. 16.

4. ‘It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism’.

5. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?f=W&n=PET&s=WCRFPUS2