HSEM2253H: Thinking The Apocalypse: From Revelation to Extinction

We live, perhaps for the first time in the history of civilizations, in the anticipation of the end, in the sense of eschaton. The end of times haunts us. And this eschatology is no longer Messianic; it is no longer the Pauline ?time of the now? and of the imminence of the end. Our anxiety comes instead from scientific calculations of the potential inhabitability of many regions of the world. To be sure, those calculations may be proven wrong, but it is hard to remain indifferent to such risks when formulated by way of science. The world has seen the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, a parenthesis in global history, in which we have experienced for the first time a synchronous and global natural disaster. Never in recorded history has the world been so interconnected by dread of death. Never before have we witnessed the impact of a disease in real time and across the planet, from New York to New Delhi. Sensationalism aside, we have been exposed to human precariousness on a global scale. This course engages with our age of great derangement through philosophical, religious, literary, and cultural history, from the Biblical prophetic/messianic tradition, to our present time of scientific doomsday predictions regarding the future of the human species. We will read texts from the Book of Revelation and Paul?s Letters to thinkers such as Hans Jonas and Gunther Anders, who have been the most important contributors to the anti-nuclear campaign (Anders) and to environmental awareness (Jonas). We will read novels and watch films that engage with apocalyptic themes such as WWI, the Holocaust, and nuclear war. We will also reflect on millenarian discourse, from the Middle Ages to Hegel?s philosophy of history and modern dystopias that claim that it is desirable to reach the end of history via violence and revolution, and today via transhumanism and human augmentation.

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