On Thursday, November 3rd at 6 PM, the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Poetics & Theory will host Slavoj Žižek for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!
This in-person event is open to the public - advanced registration required: RSVP HERE
The multiple crises and apocalyptic prospects we are facing today seem to evoke more and more ominously the four horsemen of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelations. Plague: at the end of 2019, Covid exploded and changed our lives forever – it is still here and we can expect new waves as well as other viral pandemics. War: with the Russian attack on Ukraine, we got a true hot war in Europe – a sobering reminder that nobody can afford to observe war from a safe distance. Even if some kind of truce will be enforced, war forcefully asserted itself as a general condition of our lives and peace as a temporary exception. Hunger: it is also on the horizon due to global warming. Death: not just the excessive deaths caused by the other three riders but our “second death” through the latest modes of the digital control of our daily lives, especially the prospect of the “wired brain” (the direct link of our thinking with digital machines) – will we still be human, and in what sense, if this happens? So, to repeat the title of Lenin’s famous book: what should we do, what can we do in this predicament?
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of German, the Office of the Dean of the Humanities, and the International Center for Critical Theory.
