Overcoming the apocalypse in the pluralistic space of poetics and politics

Abstract

In the shift toward the Early Modern era, the end-centric temporality of the Middle Ages underwent a critical reevaluation, which spawned four distinct historical paradigms in the interplay between eschatology and politics. This article delineates these paradigms as follows: the revolutionary, where political constructs undergo a metamorphosis toward the eschatological, culminating in their complete dissolution within it; the progressive, in which political elements evolve in the direction of eschatological thought while retaining their distinct existence; the conservative, where political structures act to curtail the influence of eschatological expectations; and the post-apocalyptic, wherein both political and eschatological spheres merge into the economic, exemplifying the cultural logic of late capitalism. Utilizing process tracing as a methodological tool within the framework of critical realism, the study investigates the dynamic processes through which societies confront and potentially overcome apocalyptic scenarios. It reveals that poetic and political pluralism serves as a transformative mechanism, facilitating the potential overcoming of apocalyptic threats. However, this overcoming is only achieved in the progressive model, which is marked by the adoption of a polytheistic political myth and a clear separation between the domains of politics and ethics. In contrast, the post-apocalyptic model is characterized by a radical proliferation of apocalyptic narratives, which leads to the normalization and institutionalization of a metaphorical ‘worldly hell.' In this context, the political and eschatological are reconstituted within the economic domain, signaling a shift to a new cultural and ideological paradigm dominated by capitalist ideology.