APOCALYPTIC CYCLES
by Felicitas Loest & Jenny Stümer
We are proud to announce that the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies is continuing its successful work in a second funding phase until February 2029. The funding was awarded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research based on a thorough evaluation of the centre that began in summer 2023 and culminated in February 2024 at an on-site audit by an international evaluating committee that confirmed CAPAS’ outstanding work in building an internationally recognised and highly innovative centre for advanced studies in Heidelberg. After receiving the official funding note in December 2024, preparations for the second funding phase began, including the nomination of the new academic advisory board as well as the planning of the academic agenda and outreach programme for the next four years.
Our work in the second funding phase builds on the results of the past four years and continues to develop Apocalyptic Studies as an internationally visible, independent field of study. At the core of this aspiration lies an expansive engagement with the notion of apocalyptic experience, explicitly with a view to its temporal, spatial, and affective alignments. This central focus offers a multitude of new approaches, questions, and themes which shape the growing scholarship and creative practice at the centre.
New Approaches
Since the beginning of the first funding phase, our efforts have been dedicated to the comparative analysis of apocalyptic imaginaries. Our aim was to unpack how these imaginaries shape historical and present exposure to crisis, transformation, and rupture. In this second funding phase, we seek to develop these insights, specifically by engaging with the non-linear temporalities, distinct spatial constructions, and emergent affective dispositions of the apocalyptic we have repeatedly identified in our discussions. The premise of an apocalyptic boundary object, which has helped us to contour the apocalypse as a form of cultural imaginary, both robust in meaning and interpreted differently across communities, has led us to understand apocalypse as semantically and experientially charged—as something through which hyperobjects, in Timothy Morton’s sense, appear real and tangible but also increasingly local and intimate. This insight has vast implications for a transdisciplinary analysis of apocalypse vis-à-vis its penchant for political and ideological articulation of ‘the world’ and for the identification of its varied emancipatory potentials. Our application of ‘apocalypse’ is primarily interested in a nuanced and diversified confrontation with ‘the end’ which occupies collectives and individuals alike (often simultaneously) through the frames of discrete sensibilities, geographies, and histories.
This lens is attentive to the widely different subjectivities, positionalities, and vulnerabilities emerging in the face of the (post)apocalypse or the many endings of our different worlds and times. As a method, apocalypse further puts these experiences into tension, offering novel opportunities to accentuate and converge a transdisciplinary engagement with the coordinates of worlding in the context of a newly emerging field.
Apocalyptic Studies
Apocalyptic Studies The focus on apocalyptic experience gathers the central concerns of our re- Detail from Koen Taselaar’s “End, And” (2024), Jacquard woven tapestry, 350 × 1900 cm. search to date, including the anticipat- 9 ed and actual collapse of systems, the perspectives and expectations invoked by radical, catastrophic change, as well as the feelings, outlooks, and attitudes towards the aftermath of worlds and their real and imagined endings. In considering culturally and politically diverse socialities of lived rupture, apocalyptic experience is pivotal in bringing a critical politics of vulnerability and subjectivity to the critical discussion of the central risks of our time. While perhaps most acutely felt in the context of irreversible climate change, pending nuclear warfare, and uncertain ethics of emerging artificial intelligence, this line of inquiry involves not only questioning which constructions of subjectivity and experience have produced an increasingly apocalyptic world, but also discussing which practices of political, cultural, and scientific worlding are up to the challenges of today—or not.
In the wake of racial capitalism and global colonisation, we posit the loss of worlds and the experience of worldlessness as the central motifs of a habituated and destructive way of living.
We also draw attention to the various efforts and movements that tirelessly work against such forces, including those that are critical of futurity and progress, those that reflect on and potentially break with the legacies of violence, and those that question epistemological and ontological forms of de/worlding. The aim is to demonstrate how tensions between materiality, subjectivity, and power expand and challenge a previously taken-for-granted normative concept of the world, while simultaneously postulating far-reaching approaches to how these upheavals relate to established modes of knowledge production.
Annual Topics
In order to sharpen these tools, we are introducing annual topics in the coming four years: Starting with a consideration of biopolitics (2025), we will then focus the discussion on subjectivity (2026) and vulnerability (2027) before shifting the view to the prospects and constraints of transformation (2028). The four annual topics address key findings of the previous funding cycle. They also reflect central aspects of our current approach in an effort to simultaneously deepen and expand research in these areas through the purview of an apocalyptic prism.
As we reflect on the achievements and collaborations of the past phase, we look ahead with excitement and anticipation to the next four years of research and learning at CAPAS. As new questions emerge and urgent challenges continue to shape our world, we remain committed to fostering critical inquiry, inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue, and imaginative thinking. We are grateful to all who have contributed to the life of the centre and look forward to deepening these exchanges as we enter this new chapter together.
