Postapocalyptic Self-Reflection

“Always focused on the threat of a dark future, stories of a postapocalyptic world inevitably wrestle with the present and past, weaving alternative threads into a familiar narrative, which has at its heart the modern subject, who has lost its footing and has been left dislocated in a world long out of joint. In taking up this nonlinear thread, the “post” of the post¬apocalyptic is linked to an understanding of (our) time which implies that the catastrophe, the apocalyptic scene, has always already happened, while it is also happening and about to happen, yet without any finality or revelation; the envisioned future full of doom is nothing but projections of this unbearable past-¬present. [...] The notion of self-reflection—a fairly loaded and seemingly outworn term in philosophy, and cultural and psychoanalytic theory—is up for discussion as we ask: How do we maintain ethical, critical, and political agency as deconstructed yet active post¬apocalyptic subjects in a postapocalyptic world?” From de the editors “Postapocalyptic Self-Reflection” is published in dialogue with “Post-apocalyptic Realism” (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2018).