Humanities, Volume 11, Issue 2 (April 2022) – 28 articles

The future is not what it used to be. A new strain of futurism has taken over the stage of global science-fiction: one whose understanding of the future cannot be distinguished from its understanding of the present. Gone are the days when extraterrestrials in shiny, extravagant outfits mastered fascinating technologies that flirted with magic. Characters in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2015–2020) dress like us, and the dystopian technology they put up with is, for the most part, a technology that has existed for years. Armando Iannucci’s imagining of a space cruise for rich people in Avenue 5 (2020) overlaps with Elon Musk’s actual plans of sending wealthy tourists to the moon, while Albert Robida’s visionary téléphonoscope (1879) amounts to a sad reminder of our everyday Zoom call. Is not the current COVID-19 crisis the blueprint to the ultimate post-apocalyptic script? Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona noted in a recent interview that Steve Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), originally labeled as a sci-fi movie by IMDB, is now a drama according to the same internet portal. Science is not fiction anymore, which means at least two different things: that science has lost the power to convey the kind of awe that may be later turned into fiction, and that fiction seems to be unable to inspire a narrative of scientific or—broadly speaking—human progress. How can we retrieve the emancipatory value of progress in good old futuristic sci-fi when the future coincides with the present? What should cultural production look like to help us imagine an alternative to financial capitalism in the face of the impossibility of utopia? The answer, I will claim, resides in Franco Berardi’s concept of “futurability”. This paper explores the limits of this concept by reading side by side Javier Olivares’ and Pablo Olivares’ The Ministry of Time (2015) and Oriol Paulo’s Mirage (2018). Full article

Critics agree that Sarah Waters’ fourth novel, The Night Watch (2006), marks a turn in her fiction, away from the farcical tone of her first three neo-Victorian novels and towards an ever-more serious concern with the changes in class structures and gender roles brought about by the fact of war. The novel tells the parallel stories of three women and one man living in various areas of London in the 1940s. Though they have different social status, ideology, and sexual orientation, they share similarly traumatic experiences as, together with war trauma, they harbour individual feelings of loss and/or shame related to their deviance from patriarchal norms. The article seeks to demonstrate that the palimpsestic and backward structure of the novel performs formally the ‘belatedness of trauma’ (Caruth 1995, pp. 4–5), in an attempt to respond aesthetically and ethically to the ‘mnemonic void’ (Freud [1014] 1950) or ‘black hole’ (Pitman and Orr 1990; Bloom 2010; Van der Kolk and McFarlane [1998] 2004) left both in the characters’ traumatised psyches and in our cultural memory of the 1940s by the erased memories of the decade’s non-normative or dissident others. Full article

Although Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of Cézanne in the context of his philosophy of painting does not explicitly address the painter’s relation to literature, this relation is important and somewhat problematic. Cézanne was an avid reader of both classical Latin and contemporary French literature, but he sought, in his maturity, to dissociate painting from the inspiration of literature. The danger of a mode of figurative painting informed by literature is explored in Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece, of which there are echoes in Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of painting, and which is alluded to in Emile Zola’s novel The Masterpiece, which led Cézanne to break off his lifelong friendship with the author. Zola’s novel contradicts Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the artist’s creative freedom by portraying his protagonist, modeled on Cézanne, as destroyed by a fatality of destiny. Cézanne, in his maturity, sought to conjoin in painting a “logic of the eyes” with a “logic of the brain” resulting in an art genuinely “parallel with nature”, which it sought to express rather than to represent. The article explores this dissociation of painting from literature and autonomy with respect to what Merleau-Ponty calls “the dimension of color” and to Cézanne’s lifelong theme of bathers in a landscape. Full article

Since the Green Revolution, the development of agriculture has been measured by the relation between the chemical input (fertilizers and pesticides) and yield. Other factors, such as deforestation, water pollution, biodiversity loss and the loss of human health, were not part of these calculations. With the advent of genetically modified monocrops in the 1990s, GM soy in particular, plantations took over larger surfaces of land, accelerating these negative processes on a previously unknown scale. It has become clear that if this type of agriculture persists, toxic plantations will soon consume the planet. One of the phenomena prompting this awareness in different places of the world was the death of bees. ¿Qué les pasó a las abejas?, directed by Adriana Otero and Robín Canul, relates the environmental conflict between GM soy growers in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, and Mayan beekeepers. Not long after the arrival of GM soy to Yucatan, the bees began to die. When their honey was rejected by the EU authorities due to contamination with transgenic pollen, Mayan beekeepers realized that not only their bees, but also their water and their bodies were poisoned by GM soy agriculture, while their forests were cut for new plantations. The Maya demanded that the state prohibit the planting of GM soy on their land. ¿Qué les pasó a las abejas? is a character-driven documentary featuring leaders of the Maya beekeepers’ movement, including the recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize 2020, Leydy Pech. Maya Land; Listening to the Bees, my own documentary, reflects on the same environmental conflict and asks what the future would look like if bee health was considered a criterion of sustainable development. A vision of an alternative future emerges in both films through a series of interviews with Mayan beekeepers, scientists, and policy makers; bees are healthy, water is clean, and agriculture incorporates a mixture of ancient techniques and cutting-edge technologies that assist humans in rethinking their relationships with land and plants. Full article

This contribution surveys the range of images of weeping in Old English literature, concentrating particularly on weeping due to suffering, grief and unhappiness, and on tears of compunction, but examining other types of weeping as well, including supplicatory and sympathetic weeping (these latter are found in prose but not in poetry). Taking account of contemporary theory, the study understands weeping to be a physical manifestation of distress, but also to function as a social gesture, as reflected in the circumstance that most weeping in Old English is public rather than private. It is noted that saints do not normally weep in the literature despite the suffering they typically endure, and also that in traditional Old English poetry weeping is seen as not appropriate for men, or at least for men in the prime of life. Some of the most interesting instances of weeping in Old English, however, are to be found in episodes that appear to contradict or problematize such expectations, as is illustrated by the examination of a number of relevant examples. The references to weeping cited in this study are in the majority of cases based on Latin models, and reflect the wider Christian literary tradition in the early Middle Ages, rather than being specific to Anglo-Saxon England; but, in both religious and secular works, Old English writers are shown to be thoughtful and imaginative in their treatment of weeping and to deploy images of it to forceful emotive effect. Full article

In Brazil, since the early 2000s, different documentaries have raised awareness about the problematic issues that tree plantations, especially eucalyptus, provoke, as they are propagated across the country. By means of interviews and a mix of investigative and expository styles, these films address and denounce the controversial role and power of the timber industry. However, in the last few years, other works have approached the relationships between planted forests and local ecosystems, offering an alternative perspective. This essay analyzes two recent films on the issue, the short film Gerais, and the 78 min long Do pó da terra, released in 2015 and 2016, respectively, while looking at another short documentary, Desertos verdes: plantações de eucaliptos, agrotóxicos e água, released in 2017, a straightforward documentary that advocates against eucalyptus plantations, interviews specialists and activists, and shows data that work as a report about the situation. In Gerais and Do pó da terra, forest plantations are not central narratives, rather, the focus is on specific communities and their customs. Through testimonial, observational, and poetic modes, they discuss the challenges faced by local inhabitants as their unique lifestyles and sociocultural expressions are threatened. Thus, this essay explains how, instead of images of destruction and the specificities of eucalyptus environmental effects, these documentaries choose to show the connection of local people and their art with the land, their daily life, and the changes they face. By crucially emphasizing the different timelines in play, that of western modernity, and that of alternative understandings of life–nature, they differ from other approaches towards filming environmental conflict that stress the immediacy of the situation. These two films offer a more intimate perspective of human beings, in interplay with their ecosystem, which allows for reflection on how they cohabitate and look forward. Full article

Reflecting John D. Niles’ recent codicological reading of the Exeter Book, this essay advances a comparative reading of the three manuscripts containing Old English Solomon and Saturn dialogues. These manuscripts attest that the Solomon and Saturn dialogues were “serious” texts, twice attending the liturgy and later (12th century) joining high pre-scholastic philosophy. They further reveal a shift in the use of poetry over time. The earlier dialogues evince an “Incarnational poetics” that is distinct from but nevertheless comparable to the “monastic poetics” of the Exeter Book, while the later, prose dialogue has taken a less performative and more encyclopedic form. Full article

This essay examines three films that express a particular affinity with fire: Ircaema: Uma Transa Amazônica (1974), O que arde (2019) and Huachicolero (2019). While focusing on disparate socio-political settings, all three share an improvised, amateur style, utilizing raw and vulnerable filmmaking, involving risks for the cast and crew. Each film’s arc of fire has its own tempo unique to a time and a place, constructing an idiosyncratic representation of a novel fire regime, characterizing flames in terms of pattern, frequency and intensity. The protagonists in all three films possess forms of pyrophilia as they negotiate life on the screen burning in front of our eyes. The fires these films show us are the feral spawn of extractive economic practices at the core of modernity: logging, monoculture farming and oil extraction. In this regard, the wildfires analyzed here do not carry out a vital metabolic function for biomes but rather harm or possibly erase ecosystems and the biodiversity they sustain. In turn, such pyrotechnics have enabled different forms of fugitivity, insofar as the protagonists in these films are in flight from their own entanglement within these combustible landscapes. Full article

In northeastern Brazil, a region with extreme droughts and the smallest rainfall index in the whole country, water sources are crucial to ensure the survival of humans and nonhumans in this semi-arid region, known as sertão nordestino. Since the mid-twentieth century, classical cultural expressions focusing on this area have emphasized poverty in a desert of dry vegetation. Unlike romanticized portrayals of the backland in the 1990s, contemporary visual culture resorts to speculative and science fictional elements to reflect on possible futures amidst pressing socio-environmental challenges in the Capitalocene. This article examines how speculative and science-fictional elements in the film Bacurau (2019) by Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho and the sertãopunk comic Cangaço Overdrive (2018) by Zé Wellington and Walter Geovani configure human–nonhuman and life–death entanglements to rearticulate both the representation of these communities as backward or picturesque and their historical de-futuring due to neo-colonialism and extractivism. These Brazilian visual productions problematize the notion of sustainability as a linear progression of human-centric futurity. In a dialogue between feminist posthumanist (Donna Haraway) and decolonial (T. J. Demos) works and the visual productions, I offer the notion of ‘vernacular sustainabilities’ that decenters the human while fashioning new conceptualizations of entangled and diverging futures in the sertão. Full article

The relationship between women and classical antiquity, its texts, artefacts, and study, has been fraught to say the least; the discipline of Classics has often been defined by the exclusion of women, in terms of their education and their ability to contribute to debates more generally. However, we are currently in the middle of an astonishing period when women are laying more of a claim to the discipline than ever before. This article examines three recent novels by women which take on the cultural weight of the Homeric epics, Iliad and Odyssey, to explore the possibilities of a ‘new song’ that foregrounds female characters. The novels experiment with different narrative voices and are self-conscious about the practices of story-telling and of bardic song. Their awareness of their challenge to and contest with Homeric tradition renders their ‘new songs’ fragile as well as precious. Full article

In this essay I analyze the critically acclaimed movie, Birdboy: The Forgotten Children, a dystopic animated film based on the graphic novel Psiconautas. It takes place on an island populated by anthropomorphic animals, most of them young, who live in a time after an industrial accident destroyed the livelihood of its inhabitants. Birdboy and some of his friends try to escape their reality either by taking drugs or by attempting to abandon the island, but they are hunted by police, by the gang of rats that inhabits the dump, and by their hallucinations. In the end, although they do not achieve their goals, Birdboy and his friend Dinky reunite in an inner paradise. Drawing on various theoretical approaches, such as Hannah Arendt’s notion of new beginnings and Timothy Morton’s sustained project of ecological critique, I study the ways Birdboy represents time and engages with the ethics of the future. Birdboy’s universe is marked by emotional, physical, and temporal accumulation. The interconnection of sentient and non-sentient beings on the island shows the impact of legacies and the difficulty of creating radical new beginnings. Birdboy’s story is ultimately a call for responsibility for the future rooted in the awareness that everything leaves a trace. Full article

Aside from being part of a vibrant corpus of Indigenous futurism, Claire G. Coleman’s novel Terra Nullius (2017) can also be analysed as an eco-crime novel. Indigenous Australian authors of this genre (e.g., Philip McLaren, Steven McCarthy, Nicole Watson) often anchor the source of criminal acts in the theft, loss and devastation of traditional lands, which provides their crime novels with a heightened awareness of environmental issues. The same applies to Terra Nullius. This is, however, a novel that successfully conceals its futuristic framework until halfway through. Equally, this successfully disrupts the usual postulates of crime fiction by shifting the reader’s attention from the usual “whodunnit” to the more elusive “whoizzit” mode of crime fiction. This, as the discussion reveals, means that the criminal acts in Terra Nullius are rendered unpunishable. This paradox, as it is argued, is strengthened by introducing the so-called “noir detective” (Timothy Morton) in the character of Father Grark, who cannot investigate that which constitutes the crime and the alibi shaping the world of Coleman’s futuristic novel. Full article

Using statistical data, scholarly research, institutional models from higher education, and highlighting key personages from the academy and the business world, we argue that including Buddhism-related content into the general education of students can offer a powerful avenue of reform for the humanities in American universities. The article shows how humanities-based skills are becoming more desirable in today’s business environment, and demonstrates how the skills that Buddhist Studies—and religion more broadly—provide are consistent with those needed in today’s global and integrated technological world. Utilizing the Universities of Harvard and Arizona to help frame the discussion, the paper outlines the history of the American general education system, the ongoing crisis in the humanities, how Buddhism fits within the humanities viz. religion, and specific ways to implement Buddhism-related content into the academy domestically and internationally. Full article

The past is certain, the future an illusion. Contemporary films such as Ivy Maraey: land without evil (Juan Carlos Valdivia 2013), Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra 2015), The Fever (Maya Da Rin 2020), and Bacurau are border films, from the genre of contact films. They announce how coloniality maintains a grip on frontier territories in the Americas. These films also present particular indigenous visions that challenge western epistemes and confront audiences with particular ways of being in the world, where the modern subject finds its limit. The article introduces a critical perspective on cinema as a colonial tool, producing forms of capture that are part of the modern archive and the notion of linear time. These films also build on cinematic traditions such as tercer cine and afro-futurism, and are strong on concepts such as cosmopolitanism, resistance, and subalternity. They present forms of adaptation, reaction, return, and redemption while maintaining the status of cinema as a capturing device, entertainment, and capital investment (the triad of destruction in modernity/coloniality). Full article

Why were Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid (1608) and The Seven Works of Mercy (1607) requested for display at a number of humanitarian public events? And why did Caravaggio’s work inspire a series of photographic and journalistic reportages on contemporary migratory phenomena? This article surveys the main circumstances linking Caravaggio’s pictorial corpus to the so-called European migrant crisis. After critical reflection on the social construction of the “humanitarian Caravaggio,” the focus shifts onto a book that is at the same time a journalistic investigation of migratory phenomena, a literary work, and a theoretical reflection on the ways of looking: La frontiera (2015) by Alessandro Leogrande, which concludes with a reflection on the representation of suffering in Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1600). By following a path that connects Caravaggio’s painting, Susan Sontag’s thought, and Leogrande’s writing, what emerges is the critical and self-critical potentiality of a comparative approach to the arts and images. Full article

The impulse for development and modernization creates rifts between humans and nonhumans, dragging us deeper into the rhythms of capitalism and urban life. In the Peruvian Andes, this impulse has manifested in an intergenerational trend of rural out-migration that exacerbates the life-making struggles faced by those left behind. Óscar Catacora’s film, Wiñaypacha, reflects on these struggles and their impact on the lives of an elderly Aymara couple living isolated in the Peruvian highlands as they await, to no avail, the return of their son. The first section of this article examines how the aesthetics of Wiñaypacha emphasize the social–ecological unravelings that occur between the human and nonhuman beings that together construct the filmed Andean world. Catacora’s film represents migration as a gradual process of abandonment experienced by the Aymara elders that degrades their ability to sustain their lives and the lives of their animals. In the second section, I analyze the way Wiñaypacha makes visible the existence of the Andean pluriverse and worlds that have not disappeared in the wake of development. The film’s representation of time and suma qamaña (harmonious living) represents a departure from the universalizing tendencies of extractive capitalism and exemplifies the existence of alternative life-worlds. Full article

The subject of this essay is the relation between Milton’s classical patriotism and his English nationalism. It has two principal aims. First, it sets out to examine the degree to which the affective or emotional quality of Milton’s patriotism was shaped by the classics, especially Cicero and Virgil. For all the energy that has gone into studying Milton’s classical republicanism, there has been relatively little interest in that political movement’s central concern with patriotism: few, for instance, have shown much interest in David Norbrook’s acknowledgment that “English republicanism emerged in part as a vehicle for English nationalism.” And second, through this focus on the classical aspect of Milton’s patriotism, it argues that far from being neutralized or undercut, Milton’s nascent nationalism was actually enabled and intensified by his internationalism, an internationalism that is most graphically illustrated by his engagement with Italy and its role in recovering the classics. Full article

Black children have never been exempt from the violence and abuse that have beset Black adults. Any comprehensive attention to and understanding of systemic racism, anti-Blackness, and intergenerational Black trauma must consider the historical violence literally, representationally, and fictionally against Black children and youth. For each news story headline about violence against Black children, there is a comparable Black adult story, underscoring the interchangeability of Black adult and Black children subjected to racial violence. This essay is not a history of violence against Black children in literature but, rather, an effort to understand and demonstrate that Black children’s lives have not always mattered and that to address true racial justice in this country, systemic assaults on Black children and, by extension, on Black children’s families and communities, must be included in any justice conversation and work. This essay looks at representative children’s literature that normalizes violence against Black children. Full article

The writer and director Lucía Puenzo expresses herself in two different languages: literary prose and cinematographic narrative. Her work is characterised by a single ethical and aesthetic commitment. She highlights sensitive contemporary issues such as identity, gender, sexuality, marginality and the family, but also ethical concerns around eugenics, migration, exclusion and dangerous social elements. The paper looks at the differences between the novels XXY, El niño pez (The Fish Child) and Wakolda (The German Doctor) and their corresponding films, highlighting Puenzo’s stylistic and aesthetic constants. The notion of identity, the notion of family and different historical perspectives and their representations are analysed in her literary works and their subsequent adaptations in films. A comparative analysis of the literary and film texts help us to see how plotlines have been transposed, observing the differences and the reasons for these differences. She keeps her two creative sides separate and makes significant changes as she adapts the literary original to the film script. Her audiovisual approach is to reduce the plotlines and issues shown in the originals. The value of Puenzo’s artistic production is making visible characters who are on the edges or are socially marginalised, favouring their acceptance and integration in the society. Full article

This essay examines Virginia Woolf’s experimental representations of bisexuality in her bildungsroman, Jacob’s Room (JR) (1922). This article suggests that we cannot appreciate Woolf’s complex modernist strategies of resistance to restrictive and reductive attitudes to sexual identities if we think only in binary terms of hetero- and homosexuality in Woolf’s work. I argue here that a contemporary gaze of queer theory, one informed by current ideologies on the spectrum of gendered and bi+ sexual identities, is required to unearth in full Woolf’s critique of sexology in her first substantive investment into experimental sexual realism. I aim to show how sexological bisexuality influenced Woolf’s developing aesthetic that was, at the time of writing Jacob’s Room, beginning to adopt a much more innovative and experimental form. Full article

In this paper, we will analyse how Xesús Fraga’s novel Virtudes (e misterios) (2020) and María Ruido’s audiovisual project The inner memory (2002), by creating memory and post-memory of Galician emigration in the 1960s and 1970s, reconfigure the symbolic image of the Galician nation, which has always been defined on the basis of the discourse of mobility and emigration. Both authors, from the fragmentation of intimate memories and through an ambiguous pact with the reader, between the documentary and the fictional, bring us the stories of emigrant women—narratives in which identities are inevitably hybrid, fragmentary and far removed from homesickness as a defining factor of the Galician identity. Emigrant women do not fit into the hieratical traditional identity, which marginalises them because they do not fit the archetype of ‘widows of the living’. Full article

Since 2008, thousands of young Galician graduates have left their country looking for the job opportunities they cannot find at home, with the UK (particularly London) as their main destination. A noticeable feature of this movement is the increase of women migrants, who have sometimes occupied unskilled, low-paid jobs despite their university qualifications. Starting in the second decade of the 21st century, a corpus of narrative texts written by Galician women authors (Alba Lago, Anna R. Figueiredo, María Alonso, and Eva Moreda) has given visibility to these experiences. Lago’s, Figueiredo’s, and Alonso’s characters express anger and frustration as a way of denouncing the precariousness of their situation and the material conditions that led to their departure from Galicia. Combining different theoretical approaches from migration studies (Morokvasic; Nail; Kędra), criticism of global neoliberalism (Bourdieu; Bauman; Sassen), and affect theory (Ahmed), I propose an analytical framework for reading these texts as expression of a “poetics of expulsion” with four thematic axes: expulsion, exploitation, (dis)connection, and repossession. I finish by considering Moreda’s novel as illustrative of a different view of migration, focusing on the migrant’s agency and on migration as a personal choice (Silvey and Lawson). Full article

The presence of hunting imagery in Beowulf has often been noted, but the significance of the figures of the stag and the wolf to the thematic design of the poem has yet to be fully explored. In this article, I first analyse the sustained presentation of the Danish royal hall as a stag, before exploring how the Beowulf poet exploited the various traditional associations of the wolf in the development of the figures of Grendel and Grendel’s mother. Finally, I consider the elaboration of the hunting imagery in the final section of the poem, which focuses on the Geatish Messenger’s account of the pursuit and killing of King Ongentheow by Eofor and Wulf, and the beasts-of-battle motif. The article concludes that the Beowulf poet made extensive use of animal and hunting imagery in order to ground his work in the lived experiences and fears of his audience. Full article

John Niles suggests that Old English poems often “demand […] attention not only to the possible nuances of meaning of every word, but also to the spaces where no words are written and no story told”. Such spaces, he argues, invite readers into a kind of intellectual “play” that constitutes, in fact, participation, even collaboration, in the creation of meaning. However, what of more literal spaces in texts, not perceptual gaps composed by a poet, but rather material gaps “crafted” by manuscript damage? What more radical, “veered” reading follows if we pay attention to the physical damage, neither to lament the loss nor to restore what might have been there once, but rather to collaborate with its void? The damage to the final folios of the Exeter Book manuscript means that we read a different poem from any “intact” or “original” text we may try to (re)create; we read something that not only responds to, but also reifies the material effects of time and wyrd, the powerful other-than-human force that plays so prominent a role in the poem. This essay seeks to unsettle the text by engaging with both the poem’s extant words and the silent spaces of wyrd’s traces “inscribed” upon the material manuscript. Full article

The scholarly reception history of the Old English riddles and adjacent “enigmatic poems” of the Exeter Book reveals a long process of creating intelligibility and order out of a complicated and obscure manuscript context. Understanding this history of reception allows us to see the influence of Old English poetry on modern creative medievalism, including the unexpected influence of medieval “enigmatic” poetry on the modern genre of supernatural fiction. Specifically, it is argued that the scholarly reception of folios 122v–123v of the Exeter Anthology was instrumental in inspiring one of the acknowledged classic ghost stories of the twentieth century, M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. Full article

A sequence of Old English riddles from the Exeter Book allow an implement to speak. This article focuses on one example, Riddle 5, generally solved as either a shield or a cutting board, to show how each interpretation gives voice not just to an inanimate object but also to a non-elite member of early medieval English society—either a foot-soldier or a kitchen hand. The two solutions come together because the two answers are captured in a single Old English word—“bord”—and also because the two interpretations resonate in parallel ways, creating sympathy for down-trodden members of society who rarely get so much attention in the surviving poetic record. This article argues that Old English riddles provide an enduring legacy of social critique crafted through humor. Full article

This essay reads work by Samuel Beckett, especially his prose, with a focus on vegetal ontology and plant life, soil, mud, and dirt. By juxtaposing Beckett with recent fiction, e.g., the Netflix series Stranger Things, contemporary plant theory, and the general ecology of Erich Hörl, posthuman entanglements and relations are discussed as part of an ontological infrastructure in the texts, which can also be linked to Beckett’s interest in prosthetics and technical media. It is suggested that an approach of this kind might offer new perspectives on the dispersed subjectivity in Beckett’s texts. Full article

In this article, the relation between crisis, dying, and apocalypse is examined from the vantage point of Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophy of revelation. Following Rosenzweig’s suggestion that truth—for finite and temporal beings like us—can only be found in time, the article suggests that there exists an intrinsic relation between truth and death. Truth is not only or even primarily logical or mathematical truth according to Rosenzweig. Truth is the reality of our finite lives and implies an eschatological understanding of death as that which gives life unity by eternalising it as that which it forever was in the past. Life, Rosenzweig argues, is polytheistic by entailing manifold perspectives and possibilities, while death is monotheistic by endowing living beings with the unity and completion they lack in life. All death, even the most horrid death, is, if not a completion, at least an end, which gives the living the possibility to judge and verify the meaning of the past once and for all. Yet, if we believe Rosenzweig, the dead are not gone in the past but rather the eternal ground that makes present and future time possible. The dead, by literally being the past, reveal that all time exists after itself, as something that already was, and that the world is nothing but a world with many ends by dying away into the “life outside life” that Rosenzweig called God. Full article