Sense of an Ending: On Apocalyptic Maneuvers and Ethics of Collapse
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Sense of an Ending: On Apocalyptic
Maneuvers and Ethics of Collapse
Christine Hentschel
On November 5, as U.S. votes were still being counted and Trump
was losing key states while declaring his victory, Judith Butler noted:
“The tyrant spiraling down calls for an end to testing, to counting, to
science and even to electoral law, to all those inconvenient methods of
verifying what is and is not true in order to spin his truth one more
time. If he has to lose, he will try to take democracy down with him.”
A week later, on November 13, when the tyrant spoke out publicly for
the first time after the election was called for Joe Biden, he uttered a
sentence that journalists came to interpret as the first sign toward ad-
mitting that he might not reign after January 2021: “Whatever happens
in the future—who knows which administration it will be, I guess time
will tell” (Trump). When the American people had spoken, he wanted
the future “to tell”; when the end of his presidency had been declared
officially, he created an air of uncertainty and chaos. I want to read the
nervous public statements from the last weeks of the Trump presidency
as dimensions of an apocalyptic maneuver—both by Trump himself and
his supporters—of denying, divining, awakening to, or longing for “the
end.” I contrast this maneuver with an apocalyptic sentiment of a very
different ethical and affective investment—namely, the concern with
societal collapse or even the extinction of humanity through climate
catastrophe.
Apocalyptic Maneuvers:
Cruel, Spectacular, and Messy Endings
After Trump’s “sign,” the cruel final acts of claiming sovereignty
were accelerating: the execution of people incarcerated at federal pris-
ons, including a female survivor of sexual violence who suffered from
Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 265-69 265 Julie Sze
mental illness; the diversification of methods of killing people on death
row, including firing squads and poison gas; as well as the presiden-
tial pardon of some of his most prominent allies and family members
involved in the business of his presidency. Trump’s cruel last acts not
only incorporate the actions of a narcissist and irresponsible tyrant, but
are themselves expression of an “apocalyptic populism,” which Wendy
Brown identified as one of three strains of white support of Trump in
the 2016 elections. Apocalyptic populism is a resentful attitude out of
a sense of an ending of white male rule. It “yearns for disruption and
revenge” (5). The apocalyptic populists, Brown argues, “are animated
more by humiliation and rage than by fear. They responded to the boor-
ishness, the bravado, the swagger, the willingness to blow things up
without caring where the pieces would land” (5-6). Their impulse is to
“take the world with them as their domination comes to an end,” Brown
writes (24). The announcement of indoor holiday parties at the White
House in the midst of record-breaking numbers of COVID-19 deaths is
just one of the many cynical convergences of this spectacular version of
apocalyptic populism in the last days of Trump’s reign.
These maneuvers to kill, avenge, punish, or celebrate in the midst
of death emphasize an underlying characteristic of authoritarian popu-
lism that Eva von Redecker conceptualizes as the aggressive defense
of “phantom possession,” a logic of property in which others “figure as
‘thieves’” trying to steal allegedly rightful power from actual oppres-
sors. “[Phantom-owners] feel dispossessed and want to conquer—not to
have and keep, but to wreck and break. Only in turning against the ob-
ject in full destructiveness, only in the moment of violence, is their full
sovereignty fleetingly realized: episodic absolute dominion” (57). From
the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rallies after the election to the storm-
ing of the Capitol on January 6th, this logic of aggressively defending a
phantom possession is laid bare: No matter who you have voted for, we
own the power and the right to reign! (And in the meantime, we can
already come and create chaos.) Apocalyptic populists, Wendy Brown
writes, “seek restored white male entitlement, or at least its political af-
firmation, even if it can’t be materially restored, even if it’s all they’ve got
as the world goes to hell and they help take it there” (8-9). While look-
ing on with jealousy at progressive identity politics (von Redecker 55),
Stop the Steal protesters made a point of inundating Black Lives Matter
Plaza with bodies to eclipse the massive words “Black Lives Matter”
painted on the ground, as well as tearing down the plaza’s anti-racist and
anti-police-brutality artwork. At the insurrection on January 6th by an
almost entirely white mob, a makeshift gallow with a ready-made noose
was part of the messages installed outside the Capitol building (Borger).
A final dimension of such apocalyptic maneuvering transpires via
the QAnon conspiracy cosmology, which has grown rapidly during the
pandemic in the United States, but also in Brazil, the United Kingdom,
and Germany, and is closely interwoven with anti-lockdown protests
266 Amst 66.1 (2021): 265-69Monsters in a Moment of Danger: Global Climate Justice and U.S. Obligations
and anti-vaccination movements. Adherents of the secret figure Q claim
that a “deep state” has kidnapped and tortured thousands of children,
so that Hollywood actors and Democrats can ingest the rejuvenating
substance Adrenochrome that is harvested from the abducted children.
Trump, in this story, is secretly fighting this cabal. According to Q’s
prophecies, the “destruction of the global cabal is imminent” and a
“Great Awakening,” and, ultimately, salvation lies ahead, as Adrienne
LaFrance notes. Ritual phrases exhorted to the Q community such as
“trust the plan,” “the calm before the storm,” “nothing can stop what is
coming,” and “enjoy the show,” all suggest a force bigger than any human
agency and a spectacular final show at the end of our world. A QAnon
supporter in Germany explained to me in an interview that a race war of
cosmic proportions is around the corner, that we have already “entered
a new dimension” and that vaccination is a key strategy in the attempt
to kill and enslave “us” (Silke). Apocalyptic projections, feminist theo-
logian Catherine Keller writes, are about “some cataclysmic showdown
in which, despite tremendous collateral damage, good must triumph in
the near future with the help of some transcendental power” (11). The
apocalyptic maneuver here is that of divining a final war of good versus
evil, of freedom versus slavery, deciphering the signs and codes by both
Q and Trump, and imagining the apocalypse as an epic show.
In this air of apocalyptic maneuvering, the end is many things: that
which the tyrant and his supporters refuse to accept, but when facing
it, that which offers a pathway of cruelty; or that which is embraced
and longed for, a great awakening and a spectacular final show. In the
current climate of apocalyptic nervousness, a cruel excitement for the
end and the allowance to destroy everything and finally take revenge
manifests itself on the streets, in chatrooms, in the White House, and it
culminated in the Capitol rampage.
Apocalyptic Sentiments against the Tyranny of Denial
“Apocalypse” means “to unveil, to reveal, to disclose”; in the brutal
imaginary of the last moments, “truth blinks with cosmic excitement”
(Keller 1). But as a deadly disease, widespread wildfires, racist violence,
and violent polarizations prevail in the United States and elsewhere,
apocalyptic sentiments seem to seep in from different sides. Doctors have
talked about an “‘apocalyptic’ Coronavirus surge” (Rothfeld et al.); the
Californian fires have been described as “orange hellscapes” (Nijhuis);
and public intellectuals, such as Jonathan Franzen, have called to stop
“pretending the climate apocalypse can be stopped” (Franzen). This is
a different apocalyptic sentiment, without much of an expectation of
triumph, revenge, or salvation. One that is more about the saddened re-
alization that we are facing humanity’s end by way of the devastating ef-
fects of the climate catastrophe. Both apocalyptic engagements actively
work through the end, but with a dramatically different affective and
Amst 66.1 (2021): 265-69 267 Julie Sze
ethical investment with regard to the urgency of the major existential
and political crises we face. One is cynical, vengeful, and destructive on
its way down; the other struggles to find orientation in the realization of
collapse and extinction.
Against the manifestation of strength, the thinkers and activists
concerned with societal collapse in the face of climate change emphasize
vulnerability: that of the human species, the particular vulnerabilities of
long-marginalized groups, and that of all life on the planet. Against the
promise to take back or reclaim a stolen future, they mourn what is lost
forever: species, rainforests, polar icecaps, living environments. Instead
of giving in to a “cruel optimism” (Berlant), their attitude is pessimistic,
full of despair, anger, and fear, yet seeking attunement and care (Grove
233). Against the display of ultimate sovereignty, their existential state-
ment is that “we are not in control anymore”: tipping points and cascad-
ing effects have created such unforeseeable dynamics that all we can do
is find orientation for “navigating the climate tragedy,” e. g., to organize
resilience in a more collective way (Bendell 22). In total contrast to apoc-
alyptic populism’s cruel celebrations of the end, this engagement with
the end is driven by an ethics of collapse—ethics as a struggle for the
common values on a damaged planet, or in Jairus Grove’s words, as “the
means to intervene in the vitality of becoming, not to steer its course as
captains of our destiny but as attempts to drag our feet in the water in
hopes of going productively off course” (232).
Our time is a time when everything is ending, Catalonian philoso-
pher Marina Garcés writes (13). Humanity has entered a “posthumous
condition” in which threats and death are constantly looming and our
question is no longer “where to go,” but “for how long” (Garcés 14).
Needed in such dark times is not a “great awakening” but, as Garcés
argues, a “new radical enlightenment”: a rethinking of the vital link be-
tween knowledge and action, and a reimagining of the consequences of
our actions. “With all the knowledge of humanity at our disposition we
can only brake or accelerate our fall into the abyss” (9; translation mine).
Those sick of the tyranny of denial may perhaps not so much hope for a
new beginning, but rather for a different—ethical—kind of apocalyptic
engagement that takes the detour by way of the end, aiming toward
finding orientation on a common ground of emancipatory action in the
midst of myriad existential crises.1
1 Thanks to Susanne
Krasmann, Chris Hammer-
mann, Eva von Redecker,
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