A specter keeps haunting the present – the specter of the apocalypse. Looking at the multiple crises that have overlapped and combined with each other to create today’s strange cacophony of doomsday scenarios, everything seems to point toward the end. And yet, things go on. This talk asks why a world that produces ever more crises and catastrophes continues to reproduce itself. Why do we remain attached to this world, even despite our knowledge about its destructive consequences? To answer these questions, the talk draws on a psychoanalytic approach, particularly by mobilizing its notions of fantasy, repetition, enjoyment, and contradiction. Psychoanalysis foregrounds human subjects’ attachment to, and repetition of, excessive and potentially harmful relations – relations that we continue to ‘enjoy’ beyond our own good. From this perspective, the talk examines the persistence of systemic structures of exploitation and oppression. It emphasizes that fantasies of the world’s end do not necessarily interrupt the present but may even help to secure its continuation. It explores how anxiety feeds into this dynamic and shows how the causes of crises and catastrophes are externalized onto ‘others’ who are met with hate, fear, and enjoyment. Following from this, the talk shifts the perspective from ‘the end’ of the world caused by an external threat to ‘an end of this world’ caused by internal rupture. Rather than asking how to prevent the end of the world, the talk aims to understand what exactly must end so that something new can begin. It takes the proposition seriously that another end of the world is possible.
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