Theory & Event

In The Sense of an Ending, his groundbreaking study of apocalyptic narrative, Frank Kermode warned against the category mistake of taking apocalypse literally. For Kermode, human beings exist "in the middest," in the thick of worldly affairs, where the two great mysteries of the human condition, birth and death, obstruct knowledge on either side. The power of fiction is its capacity to unite beginning, middle, and end into an intelligible whole, affording us a perspective otherwise inaccessible from our place in the middest. Apocalypse, one of the oldest versions of the End, is for Kermode a narrative pattern that humans project onto history in order to make it coherent and comprehensible. To believe in apocalyptic narratives, to subscribe to the view that the End is nigh, is thus to mistake paradigm for reality—an error that Kermode, writing in the 60s, considered the root of Nazi and Soviet "totalitarianism."

Half a century after The Sense of an Ending, myriad apocalyptic scenarios, from climate change to pandemics to the Christian Rapture, continue to lurk just beyond the horizon. If Kermode is right, apocalypticism will persist as long as it continues to meet the existential and epistemological needs of beings in the middest. But things have also changed since Kermode's time. The ecological crisis, for example, is rapidly adjusting to our sense of an ending: the alarming forecasts of climate scientists have made belief in the impending end of human life as we know it an empirically legitimate position. Today even the most sober-eyed sociologists recognize that "serious perils to the existence of humanity have become a fact of contemporary life. […] What was once dismissed as apocalyptic fanaticism is now the prediction of leading scientists."¹ (Insofar as this is true, Kermode's warnings about apocalyptic belief should be reversed: the view that climate change is just another run-of-the-mill doomsday fantasy, one that "green capitalism" will soon dispel, marks the truly dangerous and naïve fantasy.) While the critique of universal or grand narratives defined much of theory and criticism from the mid-twentieth-century onward, the species-level crises of the age of globalization demand a thorough reconsideration of these categories. It is to such a project that Slavoj Žižek's Living in the End Times appears to be a timely contribution.

Žižek's latest book begins with the premise that "the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point" (x). Žižek identifies four breaking points, or Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, threatening contemporary capitalism: climate change, biogenetics, "imbalances within the system itself," and social divisions (x). In an ingenious analytical move, he then proposes that a psychoanalytic theory of grief can map the dominant responses to the coming catastrophe; the book's five chapters promise critically to analyze contemporary "social consciousness" as symptomatic of five stages of grief, starting with liberal denial and proceeding to anger, bargaining, depression, and finally revolutionary acceptance. The last stage is summed up in Mao's remark "There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent."

As outlined in the introduction, at least, Living in the End Times promises to be an important rejoinder to liberal critics of apocalyptic thinking, from Kermode's and Norman Cohn's classic studies to the more recent work of John Gray and Peter Y. Paik. Whereas Kermode emphasized the dangers of linking apocalyptic categories to praxis, Žižek brazenly affirms apocalyptic analysis as a means for generating "engaged" truth. "The truth we are dealing with here is not 'objective' truth" (xiii), Žižek notes, and neither is it the sort of supernatural-transcendent truth claimed by Christian fundamentalists' literal reading of the Book of Revelation. Living in the End Times indeed participates in the various "returns to religion" in some contemporary Marxist critical theory, but it is no Left Behind. Žižek claims to capture truth in Badiou's sense: that which demands the subject's fidelity to it. Living...