End of Meaning
End of Meaning The specter of the apocalypse has always been a semiotic fantasy: only at the end of all things will their true meaning be revealed. Catastrophe terrifies and tantalizes to the extent…
Specifikacia End of Meaning
End of Meaning
The specter of the apocalypse has always been a semiotic fantasy: only at the end of all things will their true meaning be revealed. Catastrophe terrifies and tantalizes to the extent it promises an end to this task. Our long romance with catastrophe is inseparable from the Western hermeneutical tradition: our search for an elusive truth, one that can only be uncovered through the interminable work of interpretation.
Here, it seemed, was the apocalypse America had long been waiting for; until it became just another event. 9/11 is this book's beginning, but not its end. And, indeed, the real lesson of 9/11 may be that catastrophe is the purest form of the event.
From the poetry of classical Greece to the popular culture of contemporary America, The End of Meaning seeks to demonstrate that catastrophe, precisely as the notion of the sui generis, has always been generic. This is not a book