Apocalyptic Discourse

H.G. Wells wanted his epitaph to be 'God damn you all, I told you so'. But how accurate were his predictions of industrial warfare and global conflict, especially as his descriptions of an aerial bombing of New York in War in the Air has been compared to the terrorist attacks of 9/11? Did the late Victorians really 'discover the future' or did the 1990s simply recycle the 1890s? At the aftermath of 2012, this book is 'looking backward' and identifies startling connections between the apocalyptic fantasies of the last two centuries' ends and traces intriguing links between Nietzsche and chaos theory, Dracula and The X-Files, the Borg Queen and H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha, among others.

The publication of Josef Schmid's landmark work on the textual history of the Apocalypse seemingly established the Andreas Text Type as a fourth-century product. The primary evidence for Schmid's claim came from the fourth-century corrections of the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus, corrections which bore a close resemblance to the Andreas text of the Apocalypse. Schmid's reconstruction, however, is flawed. The fourth-century corrections he identified are actually from the seventh-century. The data supporting a fourth-century Andreas text type does not exist. Schmid's widely influential error appears to have been based on a misreading of Milne and Skeat's "Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus."

Mémoire présenté par :
Erwan MOREAU
en vue de l'obtention du diplôme de :
MASTER 2 RECHERCHE
Domaine : Sciences humaines et sociales
Mention : Ethnologie-Sociologie
Spécialité : SOCIOLOGIE
Préparé sous la direction de M. Jean Bruno RENARD, professeur de Sociologie
Juin 2014
Mention obtenue : très bien


Abstract (French) :

Le synonyme le plus proche du terme "monstre" est l'expression « contre-nature » (Aristote, Saint Augustin, Canguilhem, Lascault, Cuny Le Callet, Valton, etc.). Sentence paradoxale s'il en est quand on sait qu'au niveau biologique, il est entendu que rien de ce que produit la Nature ne peut voir le jour indépendamment du respect de ses lois et qu'il est le propre de l'imagination de pouvoir y créer des exceptions.

Mais parallèlement à la Nature, objet de la biologie et de la physique, se trouve une autre « nature » : la « connaissance ordinaire » (Aristote employait pour sa part le terme de « cours ordinaire », « ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ » en parlant du statut contre-nature du monstre), cette « chose que l'organisme construit dans le but de créer un ordre dans le flux de l'expérience »

Ainsi, tout monstre peut être traduit comme étant ce qui apparaît contraire à une  « connaissance ordinaire », à une réalité sensible, dans son acception la plus large, c'est-à-dire orientée vers l'esthétique (le plus couramment rattaché à une vision anthropocentrée) et/ou vers l'éthique (intolérance idéologique).

Aussi par le partage des affects que met en œuvre une communauté d'esprits (religieuse, laïque, révolutionnaire, impérialiste, etc.), des éléments « contre-nature » peuvent apparaître à un niveau macrosociologique. Éléments émergeant de l'esprit gnostique et de son succédané l'esprit dogmatique, chacun ayant pour spécificité de mettre en exergue le dualisme entre bien et mal, connaissance et ignorance les entraînant ainsi vers l'ère de la déliquescence, de la décadence, en somme vers les temps eschatologiques et leurs abominations monstrueuses.


Abstract (English) :

The best synonym for the word ‘monster’ is the expression ‘unnatural’’ (Aristote, Saint Augustin, Canguilhem, Lascault, Cuny Le Callet, Valton, etc.). That is a paradoxical sentence - if any - when we know that biologically speaking nothing produced by Nature can exist regardless of the respect of its laws. It is among the characteristics of imagination to create exceptions.

But parallel to the Nature as objet of biology and physic is another kind of ‘nature’: the ‘ordinary knowledge’. (Artistote named it the ‘ordinary course’ (ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ) to mention the unnatural aspect of monster), this ‘thing that is produced by the organism to create an order within the experience’s flow’.

Then any monster can be understood as what appears in contrary to an ‘ordinary knowledge’, a ‘sensitive reality’ in every sense, that is to say aesthetics- (mostly associated to an anthropocentred vision) and/or ethicspositioned (ideological intolerance).

And the sharing of affections made by a minds’ community (religious, lay, revolutionary or imperialist, etc.) can reveal some ‘unnatural’ elements at the level of macrosociology. Elements that are emerging from the Gnostic spirit and its substitute: the dogmatic spirit. Each specifically brings out the dualism between good and evil, knowledge and ignorance that leads towards the decay, decline age - in other words towards eschatological times and their monstrous abominations.

The paper takes several texts (Berkoff’s Greek, Bond’s trilogy, The War Plays, Rosenthal’s L.O.W. in Gaia, Kushner’s Angels in America, Butterworth’s The Night Heron, Ridley’s Mercury Fur and Eclipse, Washburn’s Mr. Burns, and Churchill’s Escaped Alone), written for Anglo-American theatre between 1980 and 2020 to analyse how the rhetoric of decadence and renovation changes with the turn of the millennium.

The Left Behind novels, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, illustrate how rapture fiction has become established as a highly successful sub-genre of Christian literature. However, their public reception – within popular and scholarly contexts – reflects an instrumentalisation of the novel that obscures their significance as cultural expressions of evangelical identity.  This article challenges this tendency, drawing from social scientific research into reader negotiation of texts within the evangelical world, and argues that both processes of engaging with the novels, and the novels themselves, mirror an evangelicalism that is not simple, univocal or homogeneous, but is complex and conflicted.

Although overshadowed by its filmic adaptations (Hideo Nakata, 1998 and Gore Verbinski, 2002), Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring (1991) is at the heart of the international explosion of interest in Japanese horror. This article seeks to explore Suzuki’s overlooked text. Unlike the film versions, the novel is more explicitly focused on the line between self-preservation and self-sacrifice, critiquing the ease with which the former is privileged over the latter. In the novel then, the horror of Sadako’s curse raises questions about the terrors of moral obligation: the lead protagonist (Asakawa) projects the guilt he feels over his self-interested actions, envisaging them as an all-consuming apocalypse
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Résumé

La peur de la surpopulation et de la sous-population n’est pas une problématique nouvelle. Régulièrement, elle resurgit dans les discours démographiques, écologistes, etc. Cet article présente une brève rétrospective d’études surtout anglo-saxonnes mettant en évidence la dimension apocalyptique dans la pensée démographique. Il met en relief les arguments utilisés à travers la présentation d’un certain nombre de discours qui se fondent sur des concepts et paramètres démographiques et leurs répercussions sur l’avenir de l’humanité, des régions ou des États. Il souligne notamment, la force narrative des représentations apocalyptiques, bien que laïcisées, à travers l’habillement des discours par des arguments de type scientifique et des données quantitatives qui fondent les scénarios catastrophiques dont l’occurrence est toujours repoussée.

//

Abstract

Fear of overpopulation and underpopulation is not a new issue. Regularly, itreappears in the discussion of scientists in particular of demographists and ecologists. This article presents a brief review of mainly Anglo-Saxon studies highlighting the apocalyptic dimension of demographic thought. It emphasizes the arguments used trough the presentation of a number of discourses that are based on demographic concepts and parameters and on their impacts on the future of humanity, regions or states. It underlines in particular the narrative force of apocalyptic representations, although secularized, through the usage of scientific arguments and quantitative studies which built catastrophic scenarios whose occurrence is always postponed.

L’articolo è un’analisi dell’ultimo capitolo della Didaché, la sezione cosiddetta “apocalittico- escatologica” (cfr. Didaché 16,1 ss.) che chiude questo documento così importante per lo studio delle dinamiche cultuali e sociali presenti in particolari ambito del proto-cristianesimo siriaco tra I e II secolo. Lo studio rileva le reti che collegano la sezione conclusiva della Didaché ad altri flussi di trasmissione proto-cristiani di poco precedenti e/o coevi (l’Ascensione di Isaia, il Vangelo di Matteo, le Lettere di Ignazio di Antiochia, testimonia e commenti a testi profetici della Bibbia ebraica), sottolineando come il concetto di “Scrittura”, in questo specifico ambito storico e culturale, non possa essere letto alla luce di un canone già stabilito e valido per tutti i gruppi proto-cristiani. Il canone, come è noto, è una formazione piuttosto tarda, e la Didaché testimonia di una fluidità di riprese e modalità di rilettura che coinvolge documenti e tradizioni orali e scritte in molti casi perduti o ricostruibili solo in parte sulla base di testi successivi.

... Page 5. LONGING FOR THE END A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization Frederic J. Baumgartner palgrave Page 6. ... p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-23834-7 (paperback) 1. Millennialism—History. 2. Civilization, Western. I. Title. ...