Alenka Zupančič: Brief History of the End

 
28.10.2019
 
Department of Sociology
 
Alenka Zupančič

The event is organized in conjunction with the Freud's Dream Museum.

Do we live in the end times, just before the end, or maybe already after the end?

Taking as its starting point Francis' Fukuyama infamous theses that history has ended with the fall of Berlin wall, the lecture will follow the history of this alleged end in its different shapes and figures. There exists something that one could call the »atmosphere of the end«. The latter can be apocalyptically dark or more cheerful, but the key emphasis in it is not on the end as interruption of something, but on the end as specific modality of life and of time. That is to say that the atmosphere of the end has its own texture, its substance, which seems to determine the way in which we live here and now, how we are, how we »last«. As if in the end we remained stuck with – the end itself, which wouldn’t go away. Could we thus say that a true end is not simply the end of this or that, but always also a kind of »end of the end«?

Alenka Zupančič professor, The Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Photo: universitytimes.ie