Fall 2013 |
Edited by Christine Davis and Scott MacKenzie
This issue brings together an international array of scholars and artists to examine the current political and cultural fascination with material and symbolic representations of “The End.” From the end of Communism to the end of higher education, the end of the environment to the end of life, our writers and artists examine what is currently ending, and what popular, philosophical and political discourse claims to be at an end. This issue foregrounds not only the contemporary political and environmental disasters that are taking place around us, but also offers entry points to engage with these postulated ends, allowing one to imagine a future that is not an endpoint. To do so, one must firmly place oneself in the present, without naïve nostalgia for the past, or abject resignation about the future. For there to be a future, our contributors, in different ways and from different philosophical, critical and artistic points of view, argue for a citizenship fully engaged in the present. The issue also includes Slavoj Žižek’s keynote address from the Until the End of The World Symposium, held at Toronto’s City Hall Council Chambers in September 2012.
Table of Contents
Introduction, Christine Davis and Scott MacKenzie
The End of the World (As We Know It), Slavoj Žižek
Betrayal: The Thanatocracy (1974), Michel Serres
Silence Wager Stories (1993), Susan Howe
The End of the Humanities, Toby Miller
All That’s Frozen Melts Into Air: Arctic Cinemas at the End of the World, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport
A Beautiful Movie About The End of the World: Director’s Statement, Lars von Trier
Offshore: Extreme Oil and the Disappearing Future, Brenda Longfellow
Communism and the End of the World, Matthew Flisfeder
Algorithms for the Extinction Event, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
Separation, Death, The Thing, Freud, Lacan, and the Missed Encounter, Catherine Malabou
Selected Songs for the End of the World, Alan Zweig
PORTFOLIOS
Colour, Christine Davis and Scott Lyall
The End, Vlad Lunin
COLUMN
Ian Balfour, This is the End–Not: Or, Enough with the Messiah AlreadyREVIEWS
Jill Glessing, Ori Gersht: History Repeating, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Friederike Schäfer, Venezia To Be or Not: The 2013 Venice Biennale
Christine Korte, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship by Claire Bishop
Anne K. Yoder, What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation by Tom Finkelpearl
Michael DiRisio, Living As Form edited by Nato Thompson