Research Project Frank Ruda  Apocalyptic Courage, or: How to Work With Anxiety

The predominant affect determining almost all present-day imaginations of the impending apocalypse is that of fear. Due to its temporal structure, this affect makes us conceive of the apocalypse as an objective event whose future occurrence must be avoided. Any fearful subject is then a passive subject, subjected to a future to be forestalled. The feared apocalypse can thus never be part of any subjective (individual or collective) project. Politically, this translates into a reactive “politics of fear" (Badiou) where collectives are not acting based on affirmative principles but because of what they seek to avoid. The present project will break with this concatenation of apocalypse and fear in order to conceive of a different politics of the apocalypse for the present. Its starting point is the rationalist diagnosis that the apocalypse will be brought about precisely by the ways in which we are trying to prevent it. This shift of perspective leads us to see that the apocalypse is not a future event but has a presence in the present. Thereby it is also not only an objective event, but essentially subjectively produced. Against this conceptual background, the project mobilizes the distinction between fear (which always has an object) and anxiety (which does not have an object) to demonstrate that confronting the apocalypse means to invent ways in which to work with one's anxiety. It is such an invention which will lead the project to propose a novel account of courage: a courage of the "end times" (Žižek).