Meaningful Apocalypse
Mexico as an Apocalyptic Hotspot
On April 29, 2024, CAPAS Director Robert Folger was invited by University College London to deliver the prestigious annual Tagore Lecture Series in Comparative Literature. His lecture, entitled "Mexican Apocalypses: 2023 | 1521 | 14,000 BC", addressed the particular temporalities of apocalypse and post-apocalypse, focusing on Mexico as an apocalyptic hotspot.
In his introduction, Folger used the examples of the Netflix adopations of Chinese author Cixin Liu’s 2008 Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy and of the popular role-playing video game franchise Fallout, to illustrate, on one hand, the particular temporalities of apocalypse and postapocalypse, and, on the other the existence of a topology of the apocalypse that does not only imply particular spatial configurations but also the marking of specific spaces as apocalyptic, meaning that they are “gravitational centers” for apocalyptic narratives and images. The lecture focused on Mexico as an apocalyptic hotspot in historical perspective.
Reviewing different instances of apocalyptic events and narrations of Mexican history, that is, the so-called Dinosaur Apocalypse, the apocalypse of colonialism from a European and Indigenous stand-point, and the reflections of these apocalyptic framings in Mexican artifacts and art work of past and present that were at display in an exhibition at the Mexican Museum of Anthropology in 2023-2024, co-organized by CAPAS, Folger suggested in his lecture to understand the apocalypse in Mexico as an apocalyptic history. At the same time, he elaborated and deepened through the case of Mexico some crucial concepts regarding apocalypse and post-apocalypse, in particular in relation and opposition to the Anthropocene and the booming notion of extinction.
He argued that modern temporality and spatiality allows us to conceive of apocalypse only in terms of a “naked apocalypse” (Günther Anders), total annihilation and extinction, which implies that post-apocalypse is an unfinished end of a world that is not the end of existence but the end of life understood as an acuerdo, habitual agreement, in the sense given to the term by Mexican philosopher Zenia Yébenes Escardó. Hence, the apocalypse is not “naked,” but rather implies the lifting of a veil and a confrontation with a “mystery” that hegemonic instrumental rationality cannot comprehend. This form of meaningful apocalypse challenges the epistemological regime related to linear temporality, the dictatorship that the present exercises over both the past, which becomes material subject to hermeneutic violence, and the future, which is merely a linear extension of the present because the possible, as Slovenian philosopher Elena Zupanič says, is based on what exists.
Annual Tagore Lecture Series
Annual Tagore Lecture Series in Comparative Literature at the University College London, named in honor of the poet, playwright, painter and musician Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), has the goal to “establish
long-term perspectives that foster creativity in research, education and enterprise, and to encourage new generations of thinkers in their pursuit of a collaborative, cosmopolitan, critical and creative understanding of our present, its past and the futures it may inspire.” Previous “scholars of international distinction,” include Karen Pinkus (Cornell, 2023), N. Katherine Hayles (UCLA, 2021), Ursula K. Heise (UCLA, 2020),and Rita Felski (University of Virginia, 2019). The 7th Annual Annual Tagore Lecture Series in Comparative Literature at the University College London was delivered by CAPAS director Robert Folger on April 29 2024.