French Literature Reviews - 2026

Apocalypse: Imagination and Artistic Creation
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas

Cahiers du Cirhill Special Issue: Apocalypse: Imagination and Artistic Creation

edited by Marie-Claude Rousseau

éditions de l'UCO, 2004, €21.50

Publisher's overview:

(...) Do all the apocalypses that have found their way to audiences of the past and present, and that have been ceaselessly proclaimed, always say the same thing? Magnificently co-opted, the themes of vengeance and destruction are subverted—sometimes bent to the demands of entrenched power, sometimes subjugated to the destructive fantasies of self-proclaimed, narcissistic prophets. Much like the Book of Revelation in the hands of demagogues over the span of two millennia, do our contemporary apocalypses—drawn, filmed, embroidered, and sung—play upon every dissatisfaction and frustration, while simultaneously pandering to the certainty of imminent pacification and the reassuring guarantee of a perpetually surpassed future, a future that resembles an idealized, dreamlike present like a twin brother? Ambivalence, ambiguity, the struggle between two equally foundational principles: the reality principle and the principle of hope... Guy Lobrichon.

The volume engages with long-standing discussions concerning how catastrophic and destructive motifs are mobilized across various cultural forms. Such themes have frequently functioned as rhetorical instruments within historical and political discourses, reflecting shifting anxieties about the end of eras and the stability of social orders. Across visual, musical, and textual traditions, representations of cataclysm often reveal deep tensions between prevailing authorities and dissident voices, interrogating the mechanisms by which societies imagine their own transformations or dissolution over centuries. Readers interested in the intersection of cultural history, eschatological motifs, and the sociology of the arts may find it relevant.