James Berger

George Mason University
jberger@gmu.edu

 

Lee Quinby. Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism.Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1994.

 

Stephen D. O’Leary. Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.

 

Richard Dellamora. Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994.

 

 

The apocalypse would be the definitive catastrophe. Not only final and complete, but absolutely clarifying. Out of the confusing mass of the world, it would unmistakably separate good from evil and true from false, and expel forever those latter terms. It would literally obliterate them — expel them from memory; inflict on them what the Book of Revelations calls the “second death” or, as Slovoj Zizek calls it, “absolute death.”¹ Evil and falsehood would be purged. It would be as if they had never existed. The revelation, then, the unveiling unhidden by the apocalypse would be the definitive distinguishing of good from evil, or godly from ungodly — all made possible, of course, by a violent cataclysm that shatters every surface.

 

This is the standard apocalyptic scenario, portrayed in texts from Revelations to Steven King’s The Stand. But sometimes, especially in the last century or so, there have been complications. It may be that when the seals are broken and absolute evil identified and isolated, the Blessed will look across the abyss and see themselves. Melville’s Indian Hater story (in The Confidence Man), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment provide revelations of this sort — “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Enlightenment is indistinguishable from barbarism. Moral distinctions themselves compose the surface that is shattered, and under that surface is a universal murderous chaos. This shift in apocalyptic sensibilities exemplifies the cataclysmic transition into modernity — the sense, in Marx’s phrase, that “all that is solid melts into air.”²

 

If the anti-religious apocalypse of the doppelganger is the apocalypse of modernity, the apocalypse of the postmodern is that of Baudrillardian simulation. In Baudrillard, the catastrophe is the end of the whole apocalyptic hermeneutic itself. There can be no unveiling because there is nothing under the surface: there is only surface; the map has replaced the terrain. Commodification is universal, and no longer even under the interpretive control of notions of the “fetish.” What, after all, would there be for the commodity to disguise? Not only “God,” but also “labor relations” or “material conditions” would be without revelatory value.

 

These visions of the end as they appear in fiction, in social movements — and even in social theory — emerge out of a wide range of social and historical contexts. Apocalyptic thought has long been, and continues to be, a political weapon for the dispossessed.³ But it has also been, for a century or so, a form of playful despair among intellectuals. Great power politics for forty years after the Second World War were devoted to making apocalypse possible, then simultaneously threatening and preventing it. And apocalyptic representations in American popular culture have channelled widespread anxieties over nuclear cataclysm and general social breakdown into viscerally compelling — we might even say addictive — forms of entertainment. Fear of apocalypse — of that merging of clarity and oblivion — itself merges with fascination and desire for such a definitive, and perhaps even ecstatic, catastrophe. And this desire for an end to the world must then be considered in relation to the apocalypticist’s attitude toward his own particular society and toward the “world” in general. What degree of hatred for the world — for world as world: the site of procreation and mortality and economics, and the site as well of language and representation — is necessary to generate the wish to end it entirely? Where does this hatred come from? All in all, what historical and psychological alignments can bring about such bizarre, but frighteningly common, imaginings?

 

These are some of the questions a study of apocalyptic movements or representations should try to answer. In this review I will discuss three important recent attempts at describing and theorizing some of the ways the world is imagined to end.

 

Lee Quinby’s Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism is a provocative and far-ranging book impelled by passionate political commitments. Quinby uses methods of Foucauldian genealogy to decipher and, she hopes, deactivate the apocalyptic tendencies she sees as pervasive in contemporary American culture and politics. Quinby’s analyses range from blue jeans advertising to contemporary feminism, Henry Adams’s philosophy of history as a prototype for Baudrillardian irony, Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories, and a chapter of what she calls “pissed criticism” discussing the controversies surrounding Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.”

 

Quinby claims that apocalyptic thinking is a primary technology of “power/knowledge” in America today, and that in its combined religious, technological, and ironic forms it authorizes economic, political, and cultural repressions and perpetuates a repressive status quo. Quinby further claims that genealogical analysis is the best method for opposing apocalyptic regimes and their “claims of prophetic truth” (53). Quinby’s study is ambitious and perceptive. At the same time, I find some of her key terms and arguments not sufficiently developed, and I question her reliance on Foucault as an antidote to apocalyptic thinking.

 

Quinby characterizes apocalyptic thinking as a belief system that “insists on absolute and coherent truth” (47) and relies on “self-justifying categories of fixed hierarchy, absolute truth, and universal morality” (55). She claims that “absolute monarchy and the Vatican, for example, are structured in accordance with principles of apocalypse” (63). And, crucially, apocalyptic micro-structures remain even when power has been significantly decentered. Apocalyptic thinking, then, for Quinby, is above all a technique for perpetuating power through existing institutions — whether they be monarchial or the more diffuse mechanisms of commodity capitalism. In attacking these institutions and their ideologies, Quinby claims to be attacking an apocalyptic tendency that underlies them.

 

Like the Foucault of Discipline and Punish, Quinby is critiquing tendencies toward totalizing thought in which methods of control are inculcated and enforced through discourses and institutions into the smallest forms of behavior. But not every form of totalization is apocalyptic. To cite her own examples, monarchies and the Catholic Church hierarchy are decidedly opposed to apocalypse. Their beliefs in hierarchy and absolute truth serve to sustain and perpetuate an existing order, not to explode and overturn it. Those already in power have no reason for locating a final revelation in the violent collapse of the world as it stands. Dostoevsky’s story of the Grand Inquisitor can still, I think, serve as an example of the probable response of any institutional authority to the Second Coming. It is far more likely — indeed, it is widely documented — that apocalyptic thinking arises in contexts in which individuals and groups feel themselves to be radically without power.

 

Quinby partly recognizes this historical and definitional problem. She acknowledges that apocalyptic thinking has also been characteristic — has, in fact, been inspirational — in certain feminist movements. Quinby’s feminist apocalypticism is pragmatic: “The most crucial point to stress is that feminist apocalypse has often been a powerful force for resistance to masculinist oppression.” And she argues that a contemporary oppositional feminism can be “made possible through the twin legacies of apocalyptic and genealogical thought and activism” (36). I find this position plausible; at the same time, I would argue that it seriously undermines the book’s principal arguments in opposition to apocalyptic thinking per se (especially its identification of apocalyptic thinking with dominant hierarchies) and it reinforces a reader’s sense of the vagueness of Quinby’s definitions.

 

A second problem in Anti-Apocalypse arises, for me, in Quinby’s uncritical use of Foucault. Quinby uses Foucauldian genealogy as a method for demystifying American regimes of apocalyptic power/knowledge. As Foucault writes in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” genealogy seeks to analyze the non-teleological “emergence” of knowledge and power — an emergence that is without any single, epistemologically privileged origin and that does not lead toward a preordained or necessary ending. Foucault explicitly describes genealogy as anti-apocalyptic in its refusal “to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending” (88). What Foucault does not acknowledge, however, and what Quinby also fails to recognize, is the powerful apocalyptic component to Foucault’s own genealogical thinking. If we take genealogy in its more modest forms, as a critique and demystification of institutions and ideologies, and as an insistence and continuing demonstration of historical contingency (in opposition to teleological master narratives), then genealogy differs very little from the actual practice of professional historians. The recent controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution is instructive in this regard. The curators sought to employ, in Nietzschean terms, a critical history to retell the story of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. They were opposed by veterans groups and political conservatives who effectively reinstalled a monumental history in which Truman’s decision was incontestably right on every political and moral level. And yet, the historiography on which the curators relied — the work of scholars like Gar Alperovitz and Michael Sherry — is entirely in the mainstream of the historical profession. The Nietzschean-Foucauldian opposition between critical and monumental history is apt, but in this case it pits not “genealogists” but professional historians against popular perceptions and political demagoguery. The “historian” whom the genealogist is intended to oppose is a straw man drawn from nineteenth-century Hegelian and Whiggish models.

 

Where Foucault goes beyond what is now the normal practice of the historical profession, he tends to veer into apocalyptic tones and imagery. The most striking instance, of course, comes at the end of The Order of Things where Foucault predicts that the post-Enlightenment notion of “man” constructed by the human sciences will “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” And Foucault’s genealogy is less a critique of the institutions and permeations of power than it is an apocalyptic shattering of the discursive unities and continuities that he sees as providing their foundation. Genealogy, then, is a kind of total critique that sees the false continuities of “humanism,” and first among these the idea of continuity itself, extending from the largest institutions and social practices to the most intimate habits of the body and of consciousness. Thus history, as genealogy, for Foucault “becomes ‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being — as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself” (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 88). Genealogy would be the revelatory catastrophe thrust in the midst of every form of power/knowledge. Foucault was an apocalyptic thinker, and it would be helpful if Quinby, as a Foucauldian critic of apocalyptic texts, would consider Foucault as a model to be analyzed and critiqued rather than merely employed.

 

The great strength of Anti-Apocalypse lies in the range and provocativeness of its specific analyses, although, on my reading, important connections remain elusive. For instance, the link Quinby makes — via the pun “eu(jean)ics” — between contemporary fashion advertising and early twentieth-century discourses of eugenics is intriguing, but relies too much on the cleverness of the pun. I never fully understood either the historical or the conceptual connection between these two discourses of human perfection. Likewise, I would like to think that Henry Adams can provide a model for late twentieth-century “ironic” apocalyptic thinking (such as that of Baudrillard), but Quinby’s analysis of The Education, while valuable in itself, does not convince me of this connection. Her idea of the “ironic apocalypse” is intriguing, but should probably be linked more clearly with notions of the post-apocalyptic or post-historical. Quinby’s most powerful chapter, for me, was the one dealing with the controversy surrounding Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Here, Quinby’s close analysis and her political anger combine to describe Serrano’s photograph as a powerful (apocalyptic? anti-apocalyptic?) attack on existing power structures that well deserves their panicked responses.

 

Quinby’s most important thesis in Anti-Apocalypse concerns the prevalence of an apocalyptic sensibility throughout contemporary American culture. Quinby is wrong to attribute this sensibility only to those in power, and to equate apocalyptic thinking with the maintenance of institutional power and hierarchy. And yet, an apocalyptic sensibility is a presence in American institutions, especially, but not exclusively, since the rise of Reaganism and the New Right. There needs to be an historical and theoretical perspective that can analyze an extraordinarily broad array of apocalyptic phenomena, ranging from Star Wars the movie to “Star Wars” the missile defense system, and from the apocalypticists of Waco and Oklahoma City to the academic theorists of postmodernity.

 

Stephen O’Leary in Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric takes on part of this project. O’Leary proposes that we stop regarding belief in apocalyptic prophecies as purely irrational, if not psychotic, and that we, rather, examine apocalyptic pronouncements as forms of rhetoric: that we seriously consider the possibility “that people are actually persuaded by apocalyptic arguments” (11). O’Leary’s book is in part a contribution to rhetorical theory, along the lines drawn by Kenneth Burke’s writings on “dramatism.” It is in part a contribution to a rhetoric of theology, again following the contributions of Burke. O’Leary’s knowledge of these fields is thorough, and he describes apocalyptic rhetoric as an attempt at theodicy that justifies the existence of evil in the world by redefining temporality: by promising an end to time, and therefore to evil. He also distinguishes apocalypse in a tragic “frame” (using Burke’s term), in which the end is simply the end, from apocalypse in a comic “frame” in which no end need be final, and regeneration is always possible.

 

Although O’Leary’s erudition is impressive, it seems to me that some of these discussions will be of interest chiefly to students of rhetoric and theology. His analyses intervene in highly specialized debates that detract from his larger arguments. Of more value and interest, I believe, are his accounts of specific American apocalyptic movements and texts. His descriptions of the Millerite movement of the 1830s and 40s, of the writings of Hal Lindsey, and of the apocalyptic tenor of the New Right in the 1980’s and 90’s are compelling and contribute greatly to our understanding of these important apocalyptic phenomena. O’Leary’s narrative of the growth of the Millerites makes clear the importance of the “total critique” in apocalyptic thinking. O’Leary shows how Miller’s prophecies gained their greatest popularity among those who had previously been involved in the early nineteenth-century reform movements — abolition and temperance — and that “the shift from social reform to Millerism resulted from a growing perception that the evils of American society were systemic, rooted not only in ignorance and apathy but also . . . in the nature of the cosmos” (128). Likewise, O’Leary argues effectively that the popularity of Lindsey’s writings grew not only out of general nuclear anxieties and the Cold War, but also in reaction to the social dislocations of the 1960’s. Christian right wing apocalypticists of the 1970’s of course regarded the Soviet Union as the great apocalyptic adversary; but they also came to see the United States itself, in its depraved condition, as a kind of Babylon that likewise merited destruction.

 

Given these perceptive historical accounts, it is strange that O’Leary ultimately downplays the role of social context in favor of his rhetorical model. Describing apocalyptic writings and movements as responses to social turmoil and destabilization (or, as he terms it, “anomie”) ultimately explains nothing, O’Leary argues. “If anomie is caused by experiences of disaster,” he writes, “which in turn are defined as events that cannot be explained by received systems of meaning, then we have not really added anything new to our conceptual vocabulary; having defined disaster in terms of symbolic communication, anomie becomes endemic to the human condition and so loses its explanatory power. For all symbolic systems, all hierarchies of terms, find their limit in the inevitable confrontation with the anomalous event” (11).

 

This last statement is true, and yet not all systems and hierarchies feel the need to invent some ultimate anomalous event that shatters all systems and hierarchies. In negative theology, for instance, the anomalous event is God who supports the hierarchy that cannot explain or represent Him. And responses to genuine historical disasters need not take apocalyptic forms, as Alan Mintz and David Roskies have shown with regard to Jewish history. Disasters of all kinds can be assimilated into existing historical narratives if institutional or symbolic structures remain intact.

 

O’Leary is right, then, to reject a mechanistic model of “anomie” as a trigger for apocalyptic thinking. But he does not add to our understanding when, describing the crisis that produced Millerism as “not simply economic or political,” he concludes that “in the terminology of this study, it can be described as a breakdown of the comic frame, the revelation of the apparent inadequacy of the optimistic view of history that inspired reform efforts” (98). This breakdown would seem to be expressly economic and political, and the new terminology needed is not that of comic vs. tragic frames or of generalized theodicy but is rather a terminology that can describe the Millerite’s, and other apocalypticists’, overpowering desire for a cataclysmic end of the world.

 

While O’Leary cites instances of this desire in Miller’s writings, he does not recognize or analyze it as such, even as he characterizes one passage as having an “intensity that verges on the orgasmic” (114). Such an insight regarding the “orgasmic” nature of apocalyptic outbursts seems exactly right, but O’Leary does not pursue its implications. Instead he consolidates these apocalyptic erotics into a Weberian vocabulary as a display of “charismatic excitement” that is, in turn, a product of “a rhetorical construction of temporality” (115). But when Miller writes, “O, look and see! What means that ray of light? The clouds have burst asunder; the heavens appear; the great white throne is in sight! Amazement fills the universe with awe! He comes! — he comes! Behold, the Saviour comes! Lift up your heads, ye saints, — he comes! he comes! — he comes!” (in O’Leary, 114), a theorist of apocalypse must investigate this extraordinary wish for salvation, culmination, the End to the known world, and for personal survival after that End — or for the ecstasy of oblivion.

 

In his widely read The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode described apocalyptic desire in terms of a theory of narrative, positing a universal urge on the part of finite human beings to imagine the end of the story in which they find themselves always in the middle. Kermode, however, is never fully able to account for the violence of apocalypse, or for the fact that the catastrophic revelation is always of something wholly Other. Kermode’s narrative theory can account neither for the passionate joy felt in imagining universal catastrophe, nor for the overwhelming hatred of the world that accompanies apocalyptic imaginings. In a sense, O’Leary’s theory of apocalyptic rhetoric extends Kermode’s thinking. O’Leary conceives of apocalyptic discourse as a means of resolving unanswerable questions concerning evil and time, of creating a narrative structure that brings those stories to a conclusion. But both Kermode and O’Leary are silent on what we might term the “sensation of an ending”: the end as emotional-sensual release, and as spectacle.

 

O’Leary’s discussion of the apocalyptics of Reaganism and the New, and Christian, Right is insightful and raises important questions concerning the role of apocalyptic thought in American history as a whole. O’Leary argues that as the Right gained power in the 1980’s, its perspective shifted from a tragic to a comic frame without, however, losing its sense that an apocalyptic ending was coming soon. O’Leary is concerned with trying to explain the movements for conservative “reform” of American culture and politics, movements that a Millerite or Hal Lindsey position would reject as useless given the inevitability and imminence of the end. This shift is partly, as O’Leary points out, a result of achieving power and realizing that such reform may actually be possible. The outsiders became insiders, and the hardcore apocalypticists moved further to the margins — among the Branch Davidians and in the militias. But O’Leary maintains that the apocalyptic impulse is retained ambiguously on the political Right, combined with what he calls, quoting Nathan Hatch, “civil millennialism,” that is, “the establishment of a civil society that would realize millennial hope” (189).

 

This last point, I believe, is of even greater importance than O’Leary grants it. Susan Sontag’s comment in 1967 that America is a country equally apocalyptic and valetudinarian is especially apt when applied to Reaganism. For Reagan’s Cold War fervor, his apparent eagerness to go to the edge of the abyss with the Evil Empire — “Make my day” — coexisted with no perceptible contradiction with his unreflective nostalgia for a largely imaginary “America” that existed before a) the communist menace; or, b) the 60’s; or, c) the industrial revolution. Furthermore, in a remarkable transposition, this site of nostalgia, for Reagan, came to be seen not only in the past, but as actually achieved in the present — under his presidency. The apocalypse, in a Reaganist view (and this is true also for his successors on the Right, the Newtists) will take place in some final struggle, against somebody, yet to come; but, in a more important sense, the apocalypse has already happened. Reaganist America, I would argue, regards itself as already post-apocalyptic.

 

Reaganism should be seen not only in relation to right wing Christian apocalyptic discourses of the 1970’s, as O’Leary effectively portrays it. It also needs to be considered in a larger history of American millennial thinking, a history in which the founding and existence of America is itself regarded as a fundamental apocalyptic rupture, a salvific divide between old and new political, economic, and spiritual dispensations. America in this view — as a New Jerusalem, a City on the Hill — is perfect, and post-apocalyptic, from its inception.⁴ And yet, also from its inception, America has been faced with the political, economic, and class antagonisms that beset any country — and with the racial catastrophes (involving both African-Americans and Native Americans) that have been its unique encumbrance. Thus, throughout American history, we see a confrontation between a vision of American post-apocalyptic perfection and the facts of social tensions, crimes, and disasters.

 

The characteristic response of Reaganism to this encounter has been denial. Racism, for example, from a Reaganist perspective, used to be a problem; fortunately, however, the problem has been solved; and, since there are no lasting effects, it was never really a problem in the first place. America was perfect in its orgins, and has developed perfectly to its perfect telos. The problem, according to Reaganism, lies with those malcontents who seek to “revise” America’s perfect history.

 

And yet, the crimes and catastrophes of the past — whether in the context of psychoanalytic theory or in history — cannot be denied without consequence. They continue to return and, in various forms, inhabit the present. I would suggest that O’Leary is right to reject social “anomie” as a determining factor in apocalyptic discourse. A better heuristic concept would be the sychoanalytic notion of trauma, for trauma encompasses not simply a momentary disorientation, however severe, but also a theory of temporal transmission and of the mechanisms of repression and denial of that transmission. Thus, the tension O’Leary describes in Reaganism between comic and tragic apocalyptic frames can be thought of more fruitfully as the continuing, conflicted responses to historical traumas in the context of an ideology, or mythology, that denies the possibility of trauma.

 

One of the principal virtues of Richard Dellamora’s Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending is its recognition of the central importance of historical trauma and its aftermaths in the shaping of apocalyptic sensibilities. Dellamora’s study is more specialized than either Quinby’s or O’Leary’s — it concerns the formations and disintegrations of certain constructions of male homosexual identity around particular historical crises, namely the Oscar Wilde trial and the onset of AIDS — but its theoretical and methodological implications are more far reaching than those of the other two books. Historical catastrophe, for Dellamora, shatters existing narratives of identity. It renders them impossible but, as it forces their repression, it also enables their return in a variety of symptomatic forms. Catastrophe functions as apocalypse in creating a historical rupture that obliterates forms of identity and cultural narrative. But apocalypse in this sense must be understood in terms of trauma, for these identities and narratives are not fully obliterated. What is forgotten eventually returns, changed and misrecognized. Dellamora shows how such misrecognitions can result in further repressions; and he shows also instances in which repressed stories are purposefully remembered — instead of being acted out and repeated.

 

Dellamora contends that “the most notable feature of the history of the formation of male sexual minorities [is] the repeated catastrophes that have conditioned their emergence and continued existence” (1). Specifically, Dellamora writes, the Wilde trials of the 1890’s,

 

brought to an abrupt, catastrophic close an
unprecedented efflorescence of middle-class male
homosexual culture in England.  The advent of AIDS
occurred at the end of a decade of dramatic gay
subcultural development.  The evident contrast between
these crises and the aspirations, efforts, and
accomplishments of the immediately preceding years
makes it inevitable that both periods will be cast
within apocalyptic narratives of Before and After. (31-32)

 

Dellamora describes the development of late nineteenth-century “Dorianism,” the construction of English middle-class male homosexual identity based on the imaginative retrieval of ancient Greek models. He describes the elaboration and problematizations of this construction in Pater’s Marius the Epicurian and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. And, in a particularly brilliant chapter analyzing E.M. Forster’s story “Albergo Empedocle,” Dellamora shows Forster’s literary response to the shattering of “Greek” identity brought on by the Wilde trials and the Labouchere amendment of 1885 banning homosexual activity. In this after-the-end narrative, the Greek spirit, along with open homosexual identity, has been forgotten. The story’s protagonist, through some mysterious metempsychosis, becomes Greek, that is, receives the infusion of an obliterated identity — and is subsequently judged insane by his baffled and concerned family and friends. In Dellamora’s interpretation, the social repressions and amnesias of the post-Greek world of “Albergo Empedocle” have become so complete that a return of the repressed can appear only as a traumatic wound in the heterosexual social fabric — an illness that deprives its subject of any role in that world.

 

Dellamora’s concern then is with the vicissitudes of cultural transmission through traumatic-apocalyptic moments of rupture, discontinuity, and outright suppression. In a compelling final chapter on Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library, Dellamora shows the blockages and reopenings of several narratives of homosexual freedom and repression. In the wake of the AIDS epidemic having wiped out the 1970’s “paradise” of sexual openness, Hollinghurst’s protagonist gradually discovers, through oral testimony and rediscovered documents, a forgotten history of repression that preceded that brief era of openness. And the apocalypse of AIDS also reveals a white middle-class orientation of that lost paradise — its ambiguous status as a colonialist “cruising” of the third world. In Dellamora’s reading, The Swimming Pool Library portrays cultural apocalypse in both its destructive and revelatory aspects, as it approaches those “motivated absences that mark the history of gay existence” (191).

 

In the middle of his book, Dellamora examines another set of blocked transmissions of homosexual narratives. These are instances in which liberal or left wing literary intellectuals have appropriated important features of gay culture while suppressing their specifically sexual contexts and implications. Dellamora discusses J. Hillis Miller’s use of Walter Pater as a precursor of literary deconstruction, Frank Kermode’s dismissal of William Burroughs as representative of an avant-garde apocalyptics that lacks the proper skeptical attitude, David Cronenberg’s cinematic transformation of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and Fredric Jameson’s criticisms of Andy Warhol. Dellamora’s central point is that these liberal or leftist heterosexual discourses emphasize the “difference” or “dissidence” of these texts in the abstract, but cannot or will not articulate their specifically gay differences and oppositions. Miller, for instance, having placed Pater in the company of Wilde, Proust, Michelangelo, and Leonardo, ultimately “proceeds to defend deconstruction by dissociating it from being-homosexual” (70). Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, Dellamora argues, “identifies with Burroughs as artistic iconoclast” while separating itself “from the ‘womanly’ Burroughs who is a sexual pervert” (121). In a particularly interesting and provocative discussion, Dellamora takes issue with Jameson’s criticism of Warhol’s art as postmodern ahistorical pastiche. Citing Warhol’s series of reproduced photographs of Robert Rauschenberg’s family in the rural south in the 1920’s, entitled ironically (after Agee and Evans) “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Dellamora counters Jameson’s claim that Warhol consistently elides history, claiming instead that it is Jameson who, in his readings of Warhol, elides the gay and working class histories that Warhol has, in fact, inscribed. While Dellamora does not make the point explicitly, it would seem from these instances that homosexual desires and gay cultural sensibilities are, for liberal heterosexuals as well as for reactionaries, traumatic intrusions that must be re-routed through an apocalyptic forgetfulness in an attempt to constitute a post-apocalyptic world in which such things could never have existed.

 

One question I have for Dellamora concerns his interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s 1980 essay “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” Dellamora sees two distinct moments in Derrida’s account of apocalyptics: first, an analytic moment seeks to extend the Enlightenment impulse toward demystifying the power claims implicit in apocalyptic discourse; second, an affirmative moment, recognizing the fictional, thus potentially heuristic, nature of apocalyptic discourse, seeks, in Dellamora’s words, “to mobilize the discourse on behalf of subordinated individuals and groups” (26). This distinction strikes me as overly neat, and it misses a necessary middle step that problematizes the two that Dellamora mentions. What is missing is Derrida’s unsettling conclusion that all utterance is apocalyptic. If, as Derrida writes in a passage quoted by Dellamora, the apocalyptic tone is “the possibility for the other tone, or the tone of another, to come at no matter what moment to interrupt a familiar music,” the political consequences of such an intrusion remain ambiguous. The sudden derailment that constitutes the apocalypse, Derrida continues, is “also the possibility of all emission or utterance” (in Dellamora, 26). Elsewhere in the essay, Derrida asks,

 

and if the dispatches always refer to other dispatches
without decidable destination, the destination
remaining to come, then isn't this completely angelic
structure, that of the Johannine Apocalypse, isn't it
also the structure of every scene of writing in
general? (87)

 

Apocalypse as the continual destabilization of every meaning, origin, and end is, finally, for Derrida, inherent in language. It joins Derrida’s earlier terms of linguistic destabilization such as “trace” and “differance,” but with the difference that in the case of “apocalypse,” the social and political effects are likely to be more immediate. As Derrida writes, “Nothing is less conservative than the apocalyptic genre” (89), but “conservative” must be taken here to mean any impulse to perpetuate an existing order. Apocalypse, for Derrida, is the desire, embodied in language, for a continual revelatory catastrophe, a continual unveiling of whatever lies hidden beneath any social veil. As I read Derrida’s essay, apocalypse remains recalcitrant to any particular politics.

 

This Derridean quibble aside, however, I regard Dellamora’s Apocalyptic Overtures as the best work on apocalyptic literature to appear since Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. It does, I believe, exactly what a book on apocalyptic sensibility should do. It emphasizes the role of catastrophe both as destruction and as revelation; it places actual and imagined catastrophes in specific historical contexts; it analyzes the role of desire in apocalyptic imagining; and it pays close attention to the mechanisms of cultural transmission and repression of historically traumatic events. And together with its theoretical and methodological merits, Apocalyptic Overtures tells stories of the suppressing, forgetting, and remembering of gay culture and catastrophe that need to be told and heard.

 

 Notes

 

1. We read in Revelation (20:14), “[t]hen Death and Hades were flung into the lake of fire. This lake of fire is the second death; and into it were flung any whose names were not to be found in the roll of the living.” Zizek then cites de Sade, distinguishing between natural, biological death and absolute, or symbolic, death: “the destruction, the eradication, of the [natural] cycle itself, which then liberates nature from its own laws and opens the way for the creation of new forms of life ex nihilo” (134).

 

2. Marshall Berman, of course, took this phrase as the title of his excellent book on the experience of modernity. Michael Phillipson sums up very well the apocalyptic perception of the modern when he writes, “The modern experience . . . cannot be comprehended in the languages of the past, of Tradition, and yet we do not find ourselves except in this present — hence the need for . . . a language without history, without memory . . . a language against representation” (28 ).

 

3. Norman Cohn’s study of the relations between medieval apocalyptic movements and economic and political struggles remains compelling after almost forty years. See also Adela Yarbro Collins’ work on the historical context of the Book of Revelation, and anthologies edited by Sylvia L. Thrupp and Paul D. Hanson.

 

4. For accounts of the importance of apocalyptic strains in American ideologies, see Tuveson, Bercovitch, Slotkin, and Boyer.

 

Works Cited

 

• Alperovitz, Gar. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and the Architecture of an American Myth. New York: Knopf, 1995.
• Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978.
• Boyer, Paul. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1992.
• Collins, Adela Yarbro. Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” Semeia 23 (1982): 63-97.
• Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 76-100.
• —. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973.
• Hanson, Paul D., ed. Visionaries and Their Apocalypses. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction London: Oxford UP, 1966.
• Mintz, Alan. Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
• Roskies, David G. Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1984.
• Sherry, Michael S. The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1987.
• Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992.
• Thrupp, Sylvia L., ed. Millennial Dreams in Action: Studies in Revolutionary Religious Movements. New York: Schocken, 1970.
• Tuveson, Ernest Lee. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1968.
• Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso, 1989.