Abstract
Being good at being God: even the capacity to contemplate such an imperative is irreducibly modern, and so—living as we do, in “modern times”—bears on our self-understanding. Unlike many gods, however, we moderns remain decidedly mortal, and so are subject to our own deaths, even if those deaths can only appear to us as such through our witnessing of the deaths of others and by the morbid contortions of our own imagination. (The already-dead, we might say, are not here to represent it for us.) Recalling in some ways Epicurus’ letter to Menoeceus, in which the philosopher famously announced Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo [“I was not; I was; I am not; I don’t care”], Jacques Derrida once made the infamous claim in his essay “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” that nuclear war is “fabulously textual”—“something that one can only talk about.”2 Where some predictably read this statement as further proof of the French philosopher’s idealism and textual relativism, Derrida’s point was anything but: that nuclear annihilation can only be represented because its actualization would leave no one—and perhaps nothing—to represent. Be that as it may, we are obliged to ask a question Derrida himself does not. Is this absolute horizon of ad nihilum, utter nothingness, the only way in which apocalypse can “appear?” Might it be possible, for instance, to claim that some have witnessed apocalypse and lived to say something about it? And if they have, can the actuality of that experience really be articulated, or articulated in a way that is adequate to the signified? We will begin at least with these questions.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Mimesis, Movies, and Media: Violence, Desire, and the Sacred. Volume 3 |
Editors | Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Joel Hodge |
Place of Publication | U.S. |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Academic |
Pages | 33-48 |
Number of pages | 16 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781628924664 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781628924640 |
Publication status | Published - 2015 |
Keywords
- criticism and interpretation
- history
- philosophy