Draft: Post-Apocalyptic Culture Teresa Heffernan Saint Marys University Hope is often about the future and in that

sense also related to the desire for endings, apocalypse, and revelation. Frank Kermodes influential The Sense of an Ending was published in 1967 and reprinted in 2000. In this work, he makes an impassioned argument about the importance of investing in endings. In abandoning a sense of an ending, which, he suggests, finds one of its most impressive expressions in Apocalyptic texts like Revelation, we may find ourselves succumbing to the intolerable idea that we live within an order of events between which there is no relation, pattern, mutability, or intelligible progression. Drawing on the biblical model, apocalypse in Kermodes work is positive in its connotationsit is about resolution and revelation. Endings in fictional narratives, he argues, are mini expressions of a faith in a higher order or ultimate pattern that though itself will remain perhaps forever obscure, nevertheless, lends a sense of purpose to our existence in the world. The desire for apocalyptic narratives as Kermode sees it is caught up with the need to understand ourselves and find meaning in relationship to a community that is larger than the individual self. He writes that in connecting to a community through the establishment of things like a shared calendar and genealogy: each life might require a meaning beyond itself in the interval between its beginning and its end. It was not just a simple progress towards ones own death, not just one damned thing after another. Instead of remaining at the mercy of the passage of ordinary time a life could be felt as making sense in terms of a far more universal system of counting; and a lifespan is thus

given significance by solidarity not only with those who shared membership of ones particular epoch but also with ancestors and descendants. The investment in the end then is an antidote to the sense of the individual imprisoned, disconnected, and isolated in the shell of the selfhorribly alonethat runs through modernist literature and is exasperated by late capitalism and the increasing commodification of life. Particularly vocal on this issue of the end is Michel Houellebecq, the controversial French author. His1998 novel Les particules elmentaires (translated as The Elementary Particles in North America and Atomized in England) welcomes the literal end of man and the emergence of a posthuman society whose inhabitants live in harmony and are immortal. In an interview in 1999, he said: deep down, I am with the Utopians, people who think that the movement of History must conclude in the absence of movement. An end to History seems desirable to me. In his novel, the late twentieth century has succumbed to the individualistic consumerist culture that has rendered its inhabitants numb, isolated, and atomized. Conservative in its analysis, the novel suggests the break down of the family and the embrace of difference and individualism have destroyed any buffer between the self and the market, leaving the characters at the mercy of its fluctuating trends and obsession with the new and the young. The story of the two brothers, the main characters, is framed by a prologue that sums up the contemporary condition of humanity: often haunted by misery, the men of [this] generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared. The half brothers in the novel, abandoned by their fathers and mother, from broken homes, products of the post 1960s sexual liberation movement, are incapable of

love. Bruno is enslaved by transient sexual desire and the cult of the young beautiful body, passively giving himself up to hedonistic pleasures that had shaped an entire generation reared on market forces. Michel removes himself from the current of life, insulated in a protective armor. The womenChristiane and Annabelle--are still capable of love, but are martyrs to it, and they die painful deaths as the whole of Western culture moves slowly towards suicide. Brunos addiction to sex originates in a pre-sexual desire to be touched and loved: Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope, the narrator comments. Driven and dominated by this longing and his loneliness, and, not particularly attractive or well-endowed, he engages in sexual adventures that are for the most part cold, brutal and that get less frequent with age. But when he meets Christiane, who facilitates his sexual life and organizes multiple partners, he finally thinks he feels happy and in love. For the first time his profound sense of alienation is relieved. The democratic nudist resorts like Cap dAgde promise, Bruno thinks, an aesthetics of goodwill where individual desires converge, allowing for a sense of community. They continue their adventures in various clubs even as the exhaustion of sexual pleasure is always there--the barely repressed possibility in all the orgies (174). When Christiane is crippled, however, Bruno cant bring himself to care for her broken body, saturated as he is by a culture that places such tyrannical value on physical youth, market beauty, and instant pleasure. She commits suicide alone in her low-income apartment, and he comes to realize he was no more capable of love than his hedonistic parents (205). He finishes his days in an asylum.

His good looking half-brother, Michel, was traumatized as a child by his grandmothers death, which provoked abject animal fear. Detached and rational, he watches the futility of life around him and he remains on its periphery. Michel lives a completely intellectual life in contrast to Brunos physical one, but he is no more able to love or care for another than his brother, not even for his beautiful childhood sweetheart, Annabelle. After a long separation, Michel and Annabelle reunite at forty. When she requests that he impregnate her, he imagines the fusing gametes, followed immediately by the first cell divisions. It felt like a headlong rush, a little suicide. Understanding that all species that depend on sexual reproduction are mortal, Michel finds life from the very moment of conception already in decline, already doomed and futile. Annabelle must abort in any case as she has uterine cancer and when it metastasizes, she overdoses. The Elementary Particles, in positing a post human future made possible through technological intervention, understands man as itself the problem and looks forward to his end. Difference, in the novel, produces anaesthetized, autonomous individuals who are completely subject to the trends of the market. Separation and isolation, ultimately the products of mortality and sexual difference, are characterized as evil Thoroughly egocentric and self-absorbed, humans require, Michel concludes, a fundamental shift if society [is] to survivea shift that would credibly restore a sense of community, of permanence and of the sacred. Thus, he moves to Ireland to work on his project on immortality, inspired by the Book of Kells, new biotechnologies, and the memory of Annabelles love that he could never return or understand, and then kills himself. Michel, who is responsible for the new posthuman species, concludes: nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaustand mans mission on earth was probably to do

just that. In the novel, the project of modernity stalls in the twentieth century. Rudderless and without direction, man turns to violence and instant ego gratification and the only cure is to get back on course, to move toward an end goal as the narrator suggests that: Without regular and continuous progress, human evolution took random, irregular, and violent turns for which menwith their predilection for risk and danger, their repulsive egotism, their violent tendencieswere directly to blame (137). Technology is proposed as the solution to the problem of humanity as it promises to eradicate economic and sexual difference. Hence the work of the scientist, Michel, leads to the posthuman race as he thinks: mankind must disappear and give way to a new species which [is] asexual and immortal, a species which had outgrown individuality, separation, and evolution (258), and the few remaining humans look on with envy at this paradise, where everyone shares the same genetic code. The excess DNA is excised, death is eliminated, and along with it difference. Thus the end of history and the end of man, in the logic of the novel, restore a common and sacred community as they overcome difference and address one of the central problems of modernity as loneliness and isolation are eliminated. A year before Kermode published his work on endings, Jacques Derrida suggested an alternative to the idea of the end. Derridas Ends of Man, responding to Kants man as an end in itself, suggests multiple origins and endings of man, so that man is not limited to a singular abstract category making it impossible to speak of a we. In Derridas work, the beginning and end of humanity are displaced by the post, a post that is already there in the very origins of apocalyptic narratives and that opens them to all possible directions none of which can claim the right to the end. The inability

to claim this right that results from this mixture of codes and languages produces the very condition for love in the world: In the beginning, in principle, was the post, he writes and I will never get over it. But in the end I know it, I become aware of it as of our death sentence: it was composed, according to all possible codes and genres and languages, as a declaration of love. In the beginning the post, John will say, or Shaun or Tristan, and it begins with a destination without address, the direction cannot be situated in the end (Postcard 29). The abandoning of an ultimate ending, or at least a recognition that the focus on a particular end limits other imagined worlds, in Derridas work, is an ethical move and allows for a world that remains open in its direction, available to other headings. This new understanding allows for thinking that, as he writes, is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology--in other words, through the history of all of his history-has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. Both Derrida and Houellebecq discuss the future in terms of ruptures and tears and catastrophic shifts. In the Ends of Man, for instance, Derrida asks what the passing beyond man and the origin and the end of the game will bring forth, concluding his article with the question about: the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. So to in the prologue of The Elementary Particles, the narrator speaks of history in terms of metaphysical mutations and global transformations that emerge eventually conquering the values of the majorityhe cites the rise of Christianity that brought down

the powerful Roman Empire, the rise of modern science that in turn lead to the downfall of medieval Christianity, and predicts that we are on the verge of a new metaphysical mutation brought about by biotechnologies that no human agency can halt; this mutation gives way to the posthuman immortals in the novel. However, according to the novel, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault are, by the early part of the second millennium, all subject to global ridicule as there is a return to a neo-Kantian model. The human sciences have failed and science emerges as the irrefutable truth. But, what gets shut out in apocalyptic narratives that posit a singular collective end? Identity conceived in difference, in Derridas sense, is not the same as Houllebecqs notion of difference as extreme individualization. Derrida, in a paper on the human genome project published in 1996, argues that the risk that is run at this unique moment in the history of humanity is the risk of new crimes being committed against humanity...against man, against the very humanity of man, no longer against millions of representatives of real humanity but against the essence-itself of humanity, against an idea, an essence, a figure of the human race, represented this time by a countless number of beings and generations to come (The Aforementioned 207-8). But rather than appealing to the elementary make up of the human he argues in the same paper: If there is responsibility, if there is an ethical and free decision, responsibility and decision must, at a given moment, be discontinuous with the normative or the normal, not in their misrecognition of norms, not in their ignorance of knowledge about normsrather they must take a leap and welcome a sort of discontinuity, a heterogeneity in relation to the normative as such. On the one hand The Elementary Particles appears to be open to a future, to an absolute other of man, the non-normative, the posthuman,

suggesting what Derrida refers to as an ethical response. Yet, the narcissistic desire to recreate the other in the image of the self, to institute an absolute norm, to share the same genetic code, to eliminate difference (particularly sexual difference), to create a species as its own end (beyond evolution), also forcefully shuts down ethics. This version of the posthuman merely replicates the Enlightenments universal immortal man in more extreme and literal terms as it refuses to understand the self/other as a liminal, interconnected place where responsibility involves a singular response that needs to be negotiated, that needs to make space for the other that is discontinuous with the self, that is capable of the love of an other. It never occurs to Michel, who is inspired by Annabelles love but incapable of understanding or feeling it, that it might be the gift of death, the very thing he is determined to eradicate, that makes her capable of love. The ending of the novel is ambiguous: Is a new version of the world inspired by Michel, a man who had grown pitiless and mechanical, anymore hopeful than the bankrupt human world it replaces? The novel dramatizes the tensions between the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic worlds: If the twentieth-century entertained the complicated ethical possibilities of living in a world that valued difference and death, was open, in flux, and without a definitive direction or end, this moment is abandoned in this end-of-the century work that yearns for the simplicity, purity, eternity, and universality inherent in apocalyptic narratives. Jos Saramago writes in Seeing: Hope is like salt. Theres no nourishment in it, but it gives the bread its savor (38). Hope in this analogy is insubstantial and unfulfilling, but it adds flavor and enjoyment to life just as it is possible to make bread without salt but it is pretty bland and tasteless. Yet whereas bread sustains life a diet of

salt would be deadly. Michels dream in The Elementary Particles, which relies on the hope of new technologies to solve the problems of the twentieth century, is like salt without bread as it destroys the very condition of love even as it tries to restore it.