Apocalypse Pedagogies: Teaching (in) the Eclipse of Meaning

• In Event: Disruptive Historicizing and Futurity in Curriculum Theorizing

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that apocalyptic narratives—religious, mythological, scientific, and popular— collectively herald and produce a broader crisis of meaning. Drawing on Lacan’s later psychoanalytic theory, we explore how such narratives function pedagogically in a cultural moment marked by unmeaning: the collapse of stable epistemologies, signifiers, and symbols. We examine how apocalyptic discourses reflect and shape our psychic and symbolic realities, and using the Lacanian concepts of the Real and the sinthome, we theorize approaches to pedagogy that work against restoring normative functions of meaning. These “apocalypse pedagogies” employ practices that engage with trauma, affect, and desire, and, inspired by aesthetic curriculum theory, produce caesural ruptures—spaces for confronting crisis, addressing the Real’s presence, and resisting simplistic closure.

Authors

• Ralph J. McCoy, Purdue University

• Jake Burdick, Purdue University