The key to the garden of Eden, or, the way to Apocalypse.

摘要

This dissertation examines the theme of Apocalypse in its relationship to selected texts surrounding the last century, and argues that an understanding of apocalypse as unveiling rather than as end, as immanent rather than imminent, has specific ramifications for the philosophy of language, ethics, education, and cultural construction.;D.H. Lawrence's final work, Apocalypse, serves as the impetus for the project, and his concern is that society consists of "a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bringing the evil into being." These weak individuals are described by Lawrence as Patmossers, those who follow "Apocalypse" rather than Christ's command to love one another, and understanding apocalypse as unveiling could allow for a more radical communal love on earth, unconcerned with judgment or individual salvation.;Following Lawrence's analysis, and examining the theme of apocalypse in recent literature through a Jungian understanding of art as social medicine, apocalypse is presented as an archetype or symbol being collectively misunderstood, that could correctly be understood as its origin as Apokalypsis, or uncovering, unveiling. Throughout the dissertation, this role of apocalypse as unveiling is traced in the literature of William Butler Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and Cormac McCarthy.;The philosophic views of Emanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben regarding apocalypse are than examined alongside the analysis of the literary authors above in order to analyze the ethical, political, and practical applications of understanding apocalypse as unveiling in order to determine what a corrected cultural understanding of apocalypse as unveiling could reveal. Agamben's argument in The Coming Community suggesting "The novelty of the coming politics [will be] a struggle between the State and the non-State" is shown to be based within an ontology of apocalypse where whatever singularities recognize that apocalypse signifies the impossibility of judgments as more than mere 'spatializations of time,' and that the world post-judgment day is a world without judgment or the violence of predication.