The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

Apocalypse Now? Eschatalogical Tendencies in Contemporary Literature

Fatima Naqvi (Rutgers University)
The Abandonment of the Victim: Christoph Ransmayr's Apocalyptic Narrative, Resplendent Decline [Strahlender Untergang]

Christoph Ransmayr's Resplendent Decline (1982) conjures up apocalyptic visions of the future in order to suggest a cosmic victim narrative. The brief text centers on an experiment with gruesome consequences: a terrarium is built on a 70 km2 area of desert sand and a human being left to die there. Through this "organization of disappearance," the New Science -which develops and institutes the project - hopes to counter the entropic, destructive tendencies that man advances. Launching a full-scale attack on past scientific endeavors, the New Science would like to set limits to human reason and scientific procedure. Man, by destroying himself, is to re-discover a lost essence, one that has become obstructed and obscured by capitalist expansion, environmental devastation, and increasing homogeneity.

The view of world as a site of continual decay has gained renewed currency. In my contribution, I will discuss the implications of an entropic model of human development: it allows the presentation of man as a victim of superhuman forces. I also wish to highlight certain parallels to Peter Sloterdijk's recent social model in The Contempt of the Masses [Die Verachtung der Massen] (2000). Both Sloterdijk and Ransmayr conceive of contemporary humanity as lacking meaningful differences. The result of such an entropic conception of humankind and human development becomes clear in the case of Resplendent Decline: concrete historical occurrences such as the National Socialist past are subsumed into a larger process of natural destruction. I will also examine the dialectic between victim and sacrifice that Adorno and Horkheimer develop in their Dialectic of the Enlightenment, which serves as an important reference for Ransmayr's narrative. Finally, I will develop the metaphysics of absence upon which the New Science builds, and its relationship to the emergence of a paradoxical mysticism.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES