Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history."

First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history." Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the "end of the world." The idea of a "unified world," they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required in a society without traditional subjects and institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and any nostalgia for "starting" from the familiar in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively, the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of "ends." And other things besides.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• I. Phantasms of the End of the World
• The Beginning of the End: On the History of Radiation from Plato to Chernobyl (p. 7)
• The Place of Beginning and End: Caves and Their Systems of Symbols (p. 19)
• The Anorexic Ruins (p. 29)
• II. Concepts of the End of the World
• The Temporality of World-Views and Self-Images (p. 49)
• Disappearing Adulthood: Childhood as Redemption (p. 64)
• III. Beyond Apocalypse
• Approaches to Nothingness (p. 81)
• Between Simulation and Negentropy: The Fate of the Individual in Looking Back on the End of the World (p. 96)
• The Last Vehicle (p. 106)