Omnipresent in popular culture, especially in film and literature, the theme of the 'end of the world' is often rejected from contemporary philosophy as hysterical apocalyptism. This volume attempts to show that, on the contrary, it is vital that we address the motif of the 'end' in contemporary world - but that this cannot be done without thinking it anew. The 'end of the world' opens up philosophical questions concerning the very notion of the world, which is a fundamental element of all existential, phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy. Is the 'end of the world' for us rather 'somebody's' death (the end of 'being-in-the-world') or the extinction of many or of all (the end of the world itself)? Is the erosion of the 'world' a phenomenon that does not in fact affect the notion of the world as a fundamental feature of all existential-ontological inquiry? Or is there on the contrary an inherent negativity in the very notion of the world which is only now really becoming a question ? Can the world really 'end'? What would it mean? Or should one rather speak about an 'unworlding' of the world in order to bring about an interrogation or maybe even a deconstruction of the notion of the world? This volume demonstrates the origins and the present state of these concerns, in philosophy, film and literature. The book opens with a philosophical hermeneutics of the present state of the world by showing how the end of the world takes place in the world itself. It goes on to show how different arts have ventured to express the end of the world while asking if a consequent expression of the end of the world is also an end of its expression. Finally the book explores how philosophy copes with the problematic of the end of the world today.
1. Introduction, Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback and Susanna Lindberg / Part I: The Ends in the World / 2. Technologies of the End of the World, Susanna Lindberg / 3. Dialogue on the Postcolonial World, Achille Mbembe and Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback / 4. After the End of the World, Danielle Cohen-Levinas / Part II: The Ends of Art / 5. The Ends of the World in Lars von Trier's Melancholia, Martta Heikkila / 6. The End of Film. Bela Tarr's Les Harmonies Werckmeister and the Intempestive Escathology of Editing, Serge Margel / 7. Viktor Pelevin's Apocalyptic Postmodernism, Artery Magun / 8. The Space of the End of the World, Dan Karlholm / 9. Expansions. Remarks on Friedrich Hoelderlin's Geo-politics, Esa Kirkkopelto / 10. The Language of the End and the Language of the World in the Poem of the End by Marina Tsvetaeva, Tora Lane / 11. After the End of History, Asyndeton (Ce qui reste, the Otherwise of History), Irina Sandomirskaja / 12. It's Not the End of the World! Reflections After Gunther Anders and Maurice Blanchot, Gisele Berkman / 13. Immersion: Harmony, Variety and Fragmentation, Sean Gaston / Part III: Philosophy at the End of the World / 14. Kant and the End of All Things, Sven-Olov Wallenstein / 15. End and/or Beginning: The World as One-Time Event in Heidegger and Dogen, Krzystof Ziarek / 16. Mettre fin. Derrida et la peine de mort, Laura Odello / 17. The End of the World after the End of Finitude: Of the Speculative Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy, Jussi Backman / 18. The Energy of the End, Michael Marder / History as the Hermeneutics of the Without, Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback / 19. The End of Ends. Scene in Two Acts, Federico Ferrari and Jean-Luc Nancy / Index
