Historically Determined Apocalypse: The Struggle of Accents in a Time Born of Crisis

Unlike Biblical prophesies or the Protestant belief in predestination, the more secularised apocalyptic prophesies today offer no redemption, spur no industry: provoke no revolution. Rather, they encourage a fatalism and misanthropy. Apocalypse, David Noel Freedman notes, ‘was born of crisis’. Drawing on the materialist linguistic theories of the Bakhtin Circle, the paper aims to identify how apocalyptic thinking in this age of crises differs from that of the past, how it is being refracted through the prism of a dominant ideology and the potential consequences this has for how we think about ourselves and our relationship to the world. The paper considers the contribution of critical social theory in ‘lifting the veil’ on the material processes and relations that underpin apocalyptic thinking in this particular crisis formation. By challenging the fatalism and misanthropy that aligns with such thinking, the future itself becomes a space of ideological and political contestation.