CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Oxana Timofeeva What Does the Apocalypse Reveal? Subjectivity Between Immortality and Extinction
In contemporary culture, the apocalypse is imagined primarily as catastrophe—planetary collapse, extinction, or the end of history. Yet the original Greek apokalypsis (ἀποκάλυψις) means "revelation": disclosure, exposure, even intimacy. This project rethinks the apocalypse through this revelational sense, proposing an ontology of revelation that links cosmic temporality, material memory, and subjectivity.
Rather than a singular eschatological event, the apocalypse is approached here as a material process of disclosure. Drawing on Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies of revelation, but distancing itself from their theocentric frameworks, this project interprets revelation as the moment when the unconscious of nature, history, and subjectivity comes to light.
I connect this process to ancient and modern notions of cosmic recurrence—from Heraclitus’s ever-living fire to Nietzsche’s eternal return—to show that the apocalypse is not simply the end, but a temporal fold where extinction and immortality meet and converge. Memory becomes the key term here: not personal recollection, but the material archive of existence—a collective and ecological continuity of traces.
Subjectivity, understood not as an autonomous "I" but as embodied experience, serves as the medium of revelation—the site where the world remembers itself on the verge of annihilation. In this light, the apocalypse is not merely a vision of destruction, but a mode of truth-telling in which what was repressed, forgotten, or extinct returns. Revelation thus appears as the world’s most intimate gesture of self-exposure, both cosmic and existential.