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Ms.Calculating the Apocalypse

Catherine Keller
Affiliation:
Drew University
Brenda E. Brasher
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen
Lee Quinby
Affiliation:
Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York City
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Summary

These prophets feel that, if something divine can still come to us, it will do so when we abandon all calculation… These predecessors have no future—they come from it. Within them, it is already present. But who hears it? Obscurely their song waters the world. Of today, of yesterday, of tomorrow.

Luce Irigaray.

The cascading calculations of end times—if not of the hour and the day, at least of the month and the year—had by the end of the second Christian millennium generated an academic industry of meta-calculators. We assessed the symptoms and effects of all these naive apocalypses, took the measure of their historical and social extremities, calculated the miscalculations of past predictions, argued with each other's estimations of past miscalculations. Which prior dates for the end of the world were meant literally, by whom, to what end? How shall we estimate the dangers and disappointments of various apocalypses still pending? Which real threats to life currently attract apocalyptic imagery? When does apocalyptic narrative describe, and when does it enhance, the danger? If this meta-apocalypse betrayed—at least around millennium's end—a bit of scholarly opportunism, it was also driven by an urgent (surely not apocalyptic?) sense of social responsibility. It still is.

In the case of this anthology [essay], the shared urgency takes the form of feminist hermeneutics. What does sex have to do with apocalypse—with a mythic war between a sword-tongued Messiah and the great urban Whore? More or less everything, is the simple answer.

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Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2006

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