Apocalyptic Thinking after Günther Anders

Babette Babich
(Fordham University / University of Winchester)

19 June 2023
4–6pm BST
RHUL Room 1 Stewart House
Senate House, London

This talk explores Günther Anders’ reflections on time and eschatology along with his phenomenology of the post-apocalyptic body. It may be argued that Anders’ 1956 Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen never appeared in English owing to his emphasis on the American use of the atomic bomb in 1945. Anders argued that thereby, with bombs but also with nuclear power plants, we ran the risk of annihilating time itself, both the future and the past.  This apocalypse is the world we know, absent, as if by magic, all the people, all of us, as if we never were. The vision is strangely reminiscent of the lockdown landscapes we remember from the past few years and it is a vision in accord with a world of reduced carbon and drastically minimized global populations.

Co-sponsored by the Centre for Continental Philosophy, Royal Holloway University of London.

Free and open to the public.

Contact: j.ng [at] gold.ac.uk

About the Speaker:
Babette Babich is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, NYC and Visiting Professor of Theology, Religion and Philosophy at the University of Winchester, England. Her research emphasizes philosophy of science and technology (from a continental perspective) in addition to ancient philosophy and philosophical aesthetics, esp. sculpture and music. Recent books include Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology (2022); Nietzsches Plastik (2021); Nietzsches Antike (2020); The Hallelujah Effect (2016 [2013]); and Words in Blood, Like Flowers (2006). In addition to editing the journal, New Nietzsche Studies, her edited collections include Reading David Hume’s ›Of the Standard of Taste‹ (2019) and Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science (2017) as well as editing the physicist-philosopher, Patrick Aidan Heelan’s, The Observable: Heisenberg’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics (2016).

Twitter: @babette_babich.

Research articles: https://fordham.academia.edu/BabetteBabich