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Abstract
Dedicated to Seoul, which may or may not exist on publication, this essay notates the transition between the nuclear age and the anthropocene and the ongoing speed race between them. Working with Derrida's 1984 essay “No Apocalypse, Not Now” together with Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, Gilles Châtelet's smiling diagrams and Ahmed Farag Ali's 2014 paper “Black Hole Remnant from Gravity's Rainbow,” new speeds of epochal nuclear textuality are noted: the modus of the (s)ext, the ge(n)ocidal epistemology and obliterating letteration of extinction, the aesthetic ideology of what constantly detains extinction in the sociality of death. If there is no apocalypse now, perhaps there is the fable of extinction. All tropes of death implode and melt here, including the so-called imminence of artificial intelligence, the Plastikbombe and cosmic différance. A number of mathemes take note. The nuclear itself does not read.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 In the same essay on Malabou, Derrida also exclaims “no more explosive surprise, no more letting come, farewell to the future!” And then goes on:
For the future to have a future, and because God himself remains still to come, should not his death, if it has ever taken place, be purely accidental? Absolutely unpredictable and never re-appropriable, never re-essentializable, not even by some endless work of mourning, not even, and above all, by God himself? A God who would have, without ever seeing it come, let an infinite bomb explode in his hands, a God dead by some hopeless accident, hopeless of any salvation or redemption, without essentializing sublation, without any work of mourning and without any possible return or refund, would that be the condition of a future, if there must be such a thing called the future? The very condition for something to come, and even that of another God, of an absolute other God? (xlvii)