Lecture: "Apocalyptic Imaginary and Truth" 16.00-18.00, 24 September 2024, B429

Jacques Lacan’s concept of the imaginary offers an approach to the understanding of apocalyptic imagination in terms of its position in the imaginary as the site of its truth. What is the status of truth at the level of the imaginary? Does the same ontological conditions underlie both apocalyptic imagination and the formation of the subject at the level of the imaginary?

Drawing on Lacan, the apocalyptic imagination of the end can be viewed as the episodic outbreak of the perpetual crisis of subjectivity in the ontological field of non-relation between the demand for there being the One and the desire for the non-existent Other. The lecture offers a philosophical analysis of the ontological conditions of apocalyptic imagination from a perspective of psychoanalytic theory on existential issues. Scholars and students working in the interdisciplinary field of apocalyptic studies, as well as the broader interested audience are warmly welcome. 

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Ervik Cejvan (PhD) is an affiliated researcher in the philosophy of religion at CTR, Lund University. His interests intersect philosophy, spirituality, psychoanalysis and art, the questions concerning excess, transgression, eccentricity and collapse. The present lecture explores themes he developed as a visiting researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia in May 2024, with a generous grant from Åke Wiberg’s Foundation.