Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World

by Catherine Keller (editor)

"In her brilliant, wide ranging, nuanced study of apocalypse, Keller has written a definitive cultural and theological essay. In this book she is doing the work of the true providing learned, passionate guidance for living the good life, all of us together, here and now, on our planet."
--Sallie McFague, Distinguished Theologian in Residence
Vancouver School of Theology "A richly evocative exploration of apocalyptic's ambiguous possibilities.... Inspiring in the fullest personal, political, and religious senses of the term."
--Kathryn Tanner
University of Chicago Divinity School "Catherine Keller is a poet among theologians. Her writing attains imaginative heights and depths that expose the flatly prosaic character of most theological work. One finds oneself lingering over sentences, images and tropes, hearing them resonate with connections and insights."
--Peter Hodgson
Journal of the American Academy of Religion "Densely packed and brilliantly articulated, this book challenges the reader's critical engagement with the cultural habits of postmodernity. Apocalypse Now and Then demonstrates that scholarship can be simultaneously poetic and rigorous, firmly grounded in the concrete while exploring the rarefied air of the esoteric. In the face of apocalypse we need not succumb to despair but can let Keller guide us to an affirmation of hope."
--Elizabeth A. Say, CrossCurrents "Filled with passion and tension and vividness.... Insightful and provocative, Keller's Apocalypse Now and Then is a most enjoyable reading experience.... A book not to be missed."
--Ted Peters, Theology Today "In assessing our postmodern situation and in searching for sustainable environments and persistence in the struggle against human suffering, Keller offers us all a profoundly grounded, lifesustaining alternative to despair."
--Rita Nakashima Brock, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley "This is a brilliant brilliant in its content, brilliant in its prose, brilliant in its style.... This book is valuable not simply for what Keller says, but for how she says it.... Part of the pleasure of this book is that even as Keller builds her argument from chapter to chapter, she weaves a story around the edges of her chapters. And this story is itself the counter-apocalypse she argues...."
--Marjorie Suchocki, Claremont School of Theology

Genres: Theology, Religion

384 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1996

About the author

Catherine Keller practices theology as a relation between ancient hints of ultimacy and current matters of urgency. As the George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University, she teaches courses in process, political, and ecological theology. She has all along mobilized, within and beyond Christian conversation, the transdisciplinary potential of feminist, philosophical and pluralist intersections with religion.

Her most recent books invite at once contemplative and social embodiments of our entangled difference: Cloud of the Impossible: *Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement* (2014), *Intercarnations: On the Possibility of Theology* (2017), and *Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public* (2018).

Since the start of the millennium she has served as executive director of the annual Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium. These events have yielded 12 anthologies, mostly published by Fordham University Press; they include *Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and the New Materialisms* (coedited with Mary Jane Rubenstein); *Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation* (coedited with Laurel Schneider); *Common Goods: Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology* (coedited with Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre and Elías Ortega-Aponte); and *Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discourse.*

Twitter: @Prof_Keller

Reviews

[Zach · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok I... I just can't do it. In the hands of a historian, this narrative (the effect of the book of revelation/the fixation on apocalypse on western culture) would be absolutely riveting to me, but theology in general does not interest me, and Keller is a practitioner of the absolute worst kind of painfully overwritten, neologism-ridden, ridiculous-slash-using (de/colon/izing), abstract and abstruse philosophizing.

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

chapter 1.
• Preface
o A guide to the end of the world? Who would want to go there? It is the contention of this book that you don’t have to. We are already there, in apocalypse-in its narrative, its aftermath, its compulsion, its hope.
o I will not analyze the construct of apocalypse primarily as an outside force—there is no distance from our sense of self. Apocalypse as I wish to “reveal” it constitutes a multidimensional, culture-pervading spectrum of ideological assumptions, group identities, subjective responses, and—perhaps most interesting of all—historical habits. I don’t even believe we can step outside of it if we want to.
o The thrall of the ancient texts
o Questions
 To what extent, for instance, does “the apocalypse script” function as a self-fulfilling prophecy? When and where does our history as a whole—do our own individual and cultural stories in particular—re-enact apocalyptic strategies of transformative dissociation: a desire for justice braced with righteous moral dualism; an investiture with sacred meaning of the simple opposition of good and evil, of we and they, of now and then, of male and female?
 Is feminism its own apocalypse? Has its end started at its birth? Does it need a de-dramatization
o Such a de-dramatization, if it does not imply a failure of nerve for needed confrontation, characterizes the spirit of the present work. Even my proclivity in this book to defer sex/gender analysis belongs to the operative strategy: I have wanted to let the feminist construction of gender refract through the lens of apocalypse as one “configural zone” among others—like time and place, community and spirit—rhetorically intersecting and transfiguring them, gaining at once support and relativity from their proximity.
o Apocalypse as a kaleidoscope for cultural consideration.
o This work remains theology.
 Yet the distinctions of believer and unbeliever, of sacred and secular, of religious and rational, while they serve important polemical purposes, symptomatize the binary habit.
 Deferred too is discourse of the Spirit and God!
o Deferral, boundaries. Eschatos as edge.
 This work, for all its refractions of an already composite gaze, does take place within such a spiritual boundary, an edgy and porous one, to be sure, political and self-questioning—a horizon that always recedes again into a “not yet” that “already is
 There is hope here and there isn’t. Hope is like a path in the countryside: originally there was no path—yet, as people are walking all the time in the same spot, a way appears.”
• 1. Opening. Dis/closing “The End”
o Apo-kalypso: to unveil, reveal, disclose.
o Prebiblically connotes marital stripping of the veiled virgin
o In Rev, the moment of truth blinks with cosmic excitement. The revealing gaze is male
o Why re-open such a text?
 We stand in an unfinished history of apocalyptic finalities.
 This text of disclosure is the Western text of closure—and so we live among its effects.
o Canonical version of Rev
 Author (calls himself John) composed narrative in form of letter to seven churches in Asia Minor
 Lifted in vision to divine throne room, whence he is taken on a tour of end things—ta eschata.
 Right reader, LAMB, appears. Opening of scroll of seven seals.
 First four seals=four horses of apocalypse, global calamity
 Tribulations unfold and worsen according to pattern of sevens.
 Text then shifts to allegories, seven signs (women birthed clothed in sun, crowned with stars, chased into wilderness by red dragon; imperial whore of Babylon stripped burned and devoured by beastly cohorts; final battle ending in victory of messianic warrior (SECOND COMING) and his 1000 year reign.
 Last shakedown and final resurrection and judgement of dead
 Descent of gem-adorned New Jerusalem, the healing of nations, and end of suffering and death (though majority were condemned to burn in hell)
o Performance of apocalypse script in culture, history (headlines, Elvis second coming, horror, political script. Reagan the premillennialist). The Christian end-script.
o Coupled with utopian apocalypses cultivated. Decolonializing discourse, eg.
o The apocalyptic imaginary presents the unrepresentable and promises to resolve it. Can be optimistic of pessimistic, sacred or secular. Not that I want to overdraw the distinction between faith and culture, theism and atheism, or religion and indifference.
o Retroapocalypse: attempts to return to the letter of Rev (literalists!). Bible is speaking immediately to our own present! The biblicists can’t be homogenized yet all hold onto endism, “the displacement of the self into a future scenario”
o Cryptoapocalypse: subliminal margins, inaccessible yet accountable. Not conscious or ideology identified with but charges from indistinct zone of ABJECT fascination and repulsion. The explosive, revolting, enthralling force of abjection—whose bond to biblical apocalypticism Kristeva herself came to recognize. It is a foreboding. It is unacknowledged apocalypticism. No conscious tether to the old text but an inclination to read across it. Pervasive in modernity.
o Here these are not archetypal typology of an eternal pattern, or a metanarrative of apocalypse, or essential subtext of history. Only a repeated situating of a group in some cultural Babylon of domination and an anticipation of its end.
o A hidden transcript is signaled here. DEF: discousse that takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation of powerholders.
 The book of Rev counts in Bible-based cultures as the master script of the hidden transcript. The book itself, with its darkly cryptogrammatic symbolism, already functioned in its own historical sitz-im-leben and rhetorical setting as a countercultural code for dissent.
 Operative ambiguity capable both of revolution and reaction and often of combustions of the two.
o I am more interested in how these explicit yet secretive apocalypticisms symptomize a wider matrix of unconscious tendencies, an apocalypse habit. This habit manifests itself as the performance of an apocalypse script (text, disseminated via interpretations, acted out in secular and subliminal practices)
o Yet calling it “text” makes it more firm than it is. Before such text is a broader, vaguer apocalypse pattern.
 The pattern, adjacent always to suffering, rests upon an either/or morality. Extremes. Good/evil male/female innocence/vice
 Resistance to either/or logic in assessing the habit of apocalypse belongs to the present strategy for healing from the habit.
o
o Apocalypse DEF
 Used with systematic ambiguity
 Indulges in a certain looseness of self-reference
 it means to connote always both an interpretive and a material set of collective habits, always some tense coupling of hope and despair—always an end of some world and a corollary vision.
 But context, proportion, rhetoric, and effects will vary bewilderingly. And, I hope, revealingly.
o It is not enough to merely observe how the moral dualism “revealed” in Rev has underwritten culture, how to pulses in motions of thought and feeling in an apocalyptic tone: Such deconstruction of a pattern that habituates itself readily into metanarrative—into any form of grand, telic history—will itself serve apocalyptic ends if all it does is yield more academic distance
o I want therefore to poke openings into the apocalypse pattern, to enter attentively into the gravitational pull of apocalypse.
o NOT an antiapocalypse: as a stance its terms mirror those of apocalypse. It aggressively over-simplifies its “other” in order to judge and supersede it: precisely the apocalypse habit, if in a lower and more sympathetic key.
o Academically, theologically, it is dismissed. Augustine’s anti-apocalyptic eschatology.
 Augustine counsels a deliteralization of millennialism. the comedy of an ultimately providential outcome supersedes the laughter of scorn at false predictions and delayed parousias.
o Some theological voices read Apocalypse as prophetic resource for social and ecological accountability, differing from fatalism, supernaturalism, and esoteric secrecy usually associated with apocalyptic seers. Neo-apocalypticists mobilize text to preach warning and renewal rather than transcendent doom and closure
 Lib Theology (like Boesak) offer genre of revolutionary commentary on Apocalypse.
 Moltmann’s Theology of Hope centers not end things but hope in eschatology.
 Ecotheology, e.g. Primavesi
 She cannot rest with the ambiguously progressive reading of the neo-apocalyptists. To elude the double bind of an anti-apocalypse which must continuously confess its indebtedness to its opposite and at the same time disavow any righteous inevitability of the End, I have come to claim the counter-apocalypse
o Counter-apocalypse
 Counter opposes the encounters, it performs an analog to that which it challenges.
 Counter-apocalypse recognizes itself as a kind if apocalypse, but then it will try to interrupt the habit.
 Suggests an apo/calypso: a broken, distorted text, turned to abusive purposes, only revelatory as it enters a mode of repentance for Christendom and its colonial aftermath.
 If it reveals anything, it does so in ironic mimesis of the portentous tones of the original with which it dances as it wrestles.
 It dis/closes: it would avoid the closure of the world signified by a straightforward apocalypse, and it would avoid the closure of the text signified by an anti-apocalypse.
 Mediated through the emancipatory discourses of neoapocalypse, which reopen the book
 To criticize without merely opposing, to appreciate in irony, not deprecate in purity, our relation to tradition, to situate ourselves in a fluid relation to the text, itself alarmingly mobile between multiple contexts.
 Counter-apocalypse echoes and parodies apocalypse in order to disarm its polarities, it also savors its intensity, its drive for justice, its courage in the face of impossible odds and losses.
 Dis/closure signifies a broken consciousness-—that to unlock the time and space of apocalypse is to look another way, to reveal the truth told by suffering and to delight in the healing opening not unlike the clearing in the woods of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved where broken bodies get spirited and dance.
o Eschatology
 Study of end things, ta eschata, the edge or horizon spatially or temporally. Prophetic critique of status quo. No cyclical but a break.
 Precedes biblical tradition; earliest mythologies. Zoroaster prophesies Frashokereti, the “making wonderful.”
 Hebrew, too, but a late development
• Buber’s two forms of eschatology:
o 1. prophetic: sees every person endowed w power to participate in decision and deeds in preparing for Redemption
o 2. apocalyptic: redemptive process has been fixed and our human accomplishments are only tools
o Overdrawn distinction here—Hanson puts them on a single continuum
o Abject is edged with the sublime—Kristeva
 The counter- edges us onto the text. Sets us on edge.
 Abject DEF: that site of simultaneous fascination and repulsion based on proximity to something that neither maintains the distance of an object nor attains identity with oneself as a subject.
 WE are not outside of the apocalypse pattern
 Itself often elliptic, rhythmic, and cryptogrammic, Kristeva’s writing suggests a stylistic link with what she elsewhere names the semiotic, the maternal marking upon discourse, the psychological vestige of a pre-discursive relationship culturally suppressed, yet formative of the subject and his/her linguistic capacity.
 She is connecting abjection to a methodically feminist ambivalence, indeed, a CONSTRUCTIVE AMBIVALENCE. This will let me pick up my dis/ease with the text and walk
o Narrative theology
 We must risk interdisciplinary infractions which might be incurred by a more sustained encounter
 So her task is a scripturally grounded narrative engagement, a form of narrative theology.
 DEF: takes into account the rich and troubling complexity of the biblical narratives themselves.
 Riceour laments the eclipse of biblical narrative. We must critique the Yale Schools’ uncritical and stylistically storyless evocation of master narrative
 I understand the present project to nest in a complex, twisted history of biblical narrative effects. I consider myself part of the story. With Ricoeur, and unlike the Yale School, I consider that story to be intertwined with endless other ones, and therefore intertextually absorbing but also absorbed and absorbable in them, internally contested and externally relativized.
 Rather than constructing some nice counter-apocalyptic feminist version of the Christian pattern, I would hope to open a more troubled space, one at once disturbing and attractive, a discursive zone in which to attend to the multiple and contradictory effects of a particular biblical text.
 And always I must return to this point: that whatever liberal pluralism has shaped my vocabulary of meaning, whatever mix of communities religious, intellectual, and political give me voice, I recognize the apocalypse at their edges.
 A feminist counter-apocalypse cultivates its own liberating capacity within the interstices of apocalyptic anxiety and the margins of the text, where we might break into a rereading of our own unacknowledged dependencies upon these interlocking master scripts.
o To stand in some particular fragility of place and time, with one’s fragments of community and materialities of gender, and to love life: that is perhaps the only real basis of action against the end of the world.
o This book will offer 6 dimensions, or aspects, of reflection. It is structured in the conic spiral of Apocalypse. Seven is always six as the seventh contains the entire septet
 First three chapters are midrash on Revelation. Midrash articulates a text in-between. Derrida’s intertextuality.
• Midrash here lacks communal coherence of a single religious perspective.
 Subsequent chapters unearth stream of historical effects of Revelation to swing into the responsive cosmological play of counter-apocalypse.
• Themes time, place, community, gender, and spirit. These move to the threshold of the present.
• These chapters are burdened by Wirkungsgschichte, effective history/history of effects. The hermeneutical forcefield of the text.
• Fucko and N’s wirkliche Historie—real history—lends methodological support. History becomes ‘effective’ to the de-
• gree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being?
Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then, chapter 2. Text. Seeing Voices
• The Book of Revelation inscribes multiple meditations—from God, to Christ, to an angel, to “John,” to his writing. Already leavened with past prophetic citations, the new text is to be read aloud, mediated from vision to scroll to oral performance. Does the text, tense with its layered Last Word, resist its own closure? Is the time of its own deconstruction—as the origin of endless Western oversimplifications—near?
• Its mythopoeic medium, maddeningly nonlinear even as it marches from Alpha to Omega, mocks academic analysis.
• So to hear this text, pneuma must be used. So I mimic the style of a midrash, that unique, rabbinic model of a layered multiplicity of interpretations. I cannot send readers up to the throne room with John. But I do invite them back into this text, this subtext of our history and pretext of our fantasies.
• She will allow for two commenters to limit the reading of Apocalypse at its political edges.
• 1. Allan Boesak, reading as black S African clerical leader during apartheid.
o we shall have to learn to read it differently. We shall have to do away with those sterile escape mechanisms and dead-end arguments about numbers and symbols and signs by which the real message of Revelation is so often paralyzed. We shall have to stop reading the Apocalypse as if it were meant to be a practical guide to heaven and hell. it is not esoteric depth but political necessity that dictates Revelation’s rhetorical opacity
o For him, key to reading Apocalypse as protest literature for resistance movement. Revelation belongs to an entire genre of resistance to colonization His reading performs its politics.
o “apocalypticism was the distinctive cultural form taken by imagination in late Second Temple Jewish society.”
o Was John actually persecuted though? Contested theory of the liberation ethic of ancient apocalyptic authors
 Were they organic intellectuals? guerilla exegesis?
 Regardless, liberation can be from a text even if it is not by it.
• 2. Mary Daly
o Notes how apocalyptic impulse aggravates systemic male-violence, idolizing a transcendence which controls, resents, and ultimately destroys life.
o But does it do us good to dismiss Rev as mere patriarchal mystification?
o Does rad fem not suffer from an equally questionable purism?
• Back to rev: John is told “now write!” And he sees this voice. Text-vision.
o Seen voice scripts new sense (Hebrews emph hearing over vision)
o Prophets (including Jesus) had left the rest to scribes, but this voice ask to be written
o Apocalypticism straddles the distinction between scribe and prophet
o Revelation 1:16 embodies the ancient Hebrew Word which goes forth from the mouth of God. Its paradigmatic form—the prototype of oral authority—is the speech by which the world was created
o The Book of Revelation bristles with allusions to writing—from the opening imperative to “write,” to the scroll of seven seals, John’s swallowing of a small scroll, and the final warning not to add to or subtract from itself.
• Rev 2:26f
o Far from any gospel of love, this text promises power
o There is catharsis under crisis from these words but they cannot be purged of imperial Christian traces.
• John mentions Jezebel
o Who calls herself a prophetess and practices immorality and eats foods sacrificed to idols. Her syncretism is a problem. Is the fact that she is a woman incidental?
o To provoke such ferocity, she must have represented some widespread tendency (in Thyatira)
o The poetics of power, of conquest, of swords and iron rods pitted against female flesh, penetrates the significatory field of the Apocalypse.
o A feminist ethic cannot “veil” the misogyny of its metaphors, even if, as Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza stresses, this is the one book of the New Testament dedicated to justice.
• Rev 4 Heavenly door opens into throne in heaven. A heavenly come hither initiates the unveiling of a virgin time, soon to be consummated.
o Reader becomes voyeur
o As Schissler Fiorenza argues, the “eschatological promise to the victor”—that “the one who prevails... may sit with me on my throne”—prepared for the vision.
o

[Lee · Rating 1 out of 5]

I would not recommend this book to anyone, not even a theologian. What a ghastly exercise of saying absolutely nothing. For example:
“For the dissociated, there awaits the crypto apocalypse-the economic continuum of uninterrupted, liberally veiled sexism-colonialism-racism-speciesism, absorbing disillusioned bourgeois dissidents back into the business-as-usual bosom of Babylon. One by one.” (219).

Care to comment?

[Dragan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is hard to read, the author has such a large and complex vocabulary. I’m really interested in reading about feminism but when I have to check every sentence a word I feel that I’m not taking in the text. I don’t think this book is for me end of the day. I tried so hard but it’s complexity is so hard to deal with.

[Ted Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author with whom this work is paired is not the author of his work. Author is confused with a poet.