ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of the most curious aspects of the apocalyptic tradition, which is especially evident when it is mixed with centurial or millennial fantasies. Based on the assumption that the world is a moral order providentially designed, it read historical and/or natural disasters as portentous signs of God's wrath for mankind's sins. Ironically, as religious prophets turned more and more to political signs of the coming end and disregarded natural portents, their secular counterparts began to read the natural world for indications of impending disaster. From the point of view of deconstruction, such an outcome is a source of apparent comfort, because it forestalls final totalization. Melancholy is the quality inherent in the mode of disappearance of meaning, in the mode of volatilization of meaning in operational systems. Mourning need not mean complete dialectical sublation, but rather a willingness to tolerate its impossibility.
