ABSTRACT
Examining the place of the next pandemic in visions of the “end of the world”, Chapter 1 explores how human extinction under the bane of the next pandemic raises questions about apocalyptic reasoning and about the very dichotomy of the apocalyptic/non-apocalyptic. The chapter takes up Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s invitation for an anthropological engagement with the much-neglected work of the German philosopher Günther Anders, so as to reflect on how the pandemic imaginary is entangled in the dialectic of two eschatological temporalities: “the time of the end” and the “end of times”. Arguing that unlike apocalyptic visions of the end, the pandemic imaginary lacks a structural place for a force or an agency that delays the end of the world, the chapter shows how the latter entails a mythic reversal that sets anomy as the endless result of the next pandemic. Comparing this vision with nuclear ends of the world, the chapter explores how anomy, as a state of collapsed human mastery, is imagined not as a return to “nature” but as a realization of humanity’s deepest truth.
