We should mobilize the distinction between apocalypse and catastrophe, reserving the term ‘catastrophe’ for what Günther Anders called “naked apocalypse.” Apocalypse, “an uncovering” in Ancient Greek, is a disclosure or revelation of knowledge; in religious speech, what apocalypse discloses is something hidden, the ultimate truth we are blind for in our ordinary lives.
Today we commonly refer to any larger-scale catastrophic event or chain of detrimental events to humanity or nature as ‘apocalyptic’. Although it is easy to imagine the apocalypse-disclosure without the apocalypse-catastrophe (say, a religious revelation) and the apocalypse-catastrophe without the apocalypse-disclosure (say, an earthquake destroying an entire continent), there is an inner link between the two dimensions: when we (think that we) confront some higher and hitherto hidden truth, this truth is so different from our common opinions that it has to shatter our world, and vice versa; every catastrophic event, even if purely natural, reveals something ignored in our normal existence, puts us face to face with an oppressed truth.
We live today in an era that is best characterized as the end of the end — the circle is closed, we passed from catastrophe to apocalypse to apocalypse and then back to catastrophe. We hear again and again that we are at the end of history, but this end just drags on and even brings its own sense of enjoyment.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and Psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include ‘Hegel in a Wired Brain’, ‘Sex and the Failed Absolute’, ‘Like A Thief In Broad Daylight’, ‘Reading Marx’, ‘Incontinence of the Void’, ‘The Day After the Revolution’, ‘Heaven in Disorder’, ‘Reading Hegel’, ‘Surplus-Enjoyment’ and ‘Žižek Responds!’.
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