Review

Author(s): Paul Smethurst

Review by: Paul Smethurst
Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 92, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), pp. 929-930
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3734216
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 MLR, 92.4, I997 929

theory), and this relaxed attitude to theory informs the book at its best, much more
than, for example, where he argues about ideology that it is undone by the
performative effects of language. There theory becomes too relaxed, or too thin in
terms of its power of description, of the power of ideology, and the translations of
theory become parabolic for the book's way with theory.
UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG JEREMY TAMBLING

Apocalypse TheoiyandtheEndsof theWorld.Ed. by MALCOLM BULL.(WolfsonCollege

Lectures) Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 1995. viii + 297 PP. f50;
$54.95 (paperbound? I 5.99; $21.95).
This collection of essays theorizes 'ends' in both the teleological and the eschato-
logical sense. It is not specific to the problems of the approaching millennium, as
one might expect, but offers a genealogy, or rather an anthology, of apocalyptic
thinking from pre-Christian to modern times. The apocalyptic tone in recent
writings, suggests Malcolm Bull, is due to a sense of the limits of meaning rather
than to the anticipation of a historical end point or religious transcendence. But
ChristopherNorris argues that Derrida's deconstruction of nuclear discourse in 'No
Apocalypse, Not Now' interposes a critical space between 'rational' and 'logical'
approaches to the nuclear age, and the madness of unreason (p. 247). In this space,
he does not surrender to 'rhetorical abandon', but is somehow able to pass neatly
around the big bang that is the logical conclusion of nuclear discourse, and the little
whimper of philosophers quietly reaching their wits' end. Against this fiddling
around the edges of oblivion, Krishan Kumar's essay,'Apocalypse, Millennium and
Utopia Today', makes an unfashionable but refreshing call for vision, for a William
Morris to 'reshape our feelings' (p. 214), while other twentieth-century pundits,
Frank Kermode and Edward W. Said, focus on 'old age' and 'lateness', perhaps
sensing and contemplating their own ends.
Bull's introduction and sequencing of essays suggests a transition from Christian
eschatology to secular teleology, but as Bull acknowledges, Blumenberg destroyed
this argument, linking secular progress not with religious transcendence but with
future based on extrapolation (pp. 8-I5). What these essays do seem to illustrate,
however, is appropriation of a Christian interpretation of signs and symbols by
secular teleology, and the conflation of religious space-times 'outside time' with
everyday world history. In 'How Time Acquired a Consummation', Norman Cohn
claims that Zoroaster conceived of a historical conclusion to the battle between
good (Ahura Mazda) and evil (Angra Mainyu), making Zoroastrianismthe world's
first eschatological faith. Taking this a stage further, Christopher Rowland and
Bernard McGinn suggest that in medieval Europe, a sense of impending doom
brought the apocalypse closer: 'Allthings become everyday worse and worse, for the
end is drawing near' (p. 61). Richard Popkin then argues that in the seventeenth
century, Ranters, Levellers, and Diggers made use of the recalculated millennium
(I655-56) to demand changes in the social order and to bring man's world more
into line with God's. This really brought the apocalypse into focus, and historicized
and politicized European Christianity.At the end of the eighteenth century, argues
Elinor Shaffer, the 'end of time' is translated back into time again by Romantic
apocalyptics, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, as they articulate the hope that
sustained them during the political failure and disappointmentsof 1789- 1814.
The final contribution is from Edward Said, and this fittingly, is on 'late style',
particularly in the work of Theodor Adorno, as Adorno reflects on late style in
Beethoven. Here, the 'apocalyptic tone' of late-twentieth-centurywriting might be

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930 Reviews
reduced to the writing and composing of old men in worlds of their own, careless of
the passage of time. This edition is strongest in the medieval and early modern
periods, where the essays seem well researched, and may be of less interest to those
interested in apocalypse theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where
there is little analysis. Laurence Dickey's study of August Ciezowski and the
'teleology of universal history' is the only contribution on nineteenth century
thinking, and I found this rather dense and muddled.
UNIVERSITYOFHONG KONG PAULSMETHURST

Truth, Ethics and Criticism. By CHRISTOPHERNORRIS. Manchester: Manchester

University Press. I994. iX+ I48 pp. ? I3.99.
Christopher Norris writes with an unmistakable sense of mission. Through all the
articles, reviews,-and books that have poured from his wordprocessor over the last
decade can be felt the tireless throb of his defence of the values of Enlightenment
rationality, and its associated politics of emancipation through criticism and
reasoned dialogue. Unlike many of the critics and philosophers whom he attacks,
Norris is quite sure that there is such a thing as postmodernism, and that the term
reliably designates the entire gamut of thinkers, from Foucault, Baudrillard, and
Lyotard in France to pragmatists such as Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish and
communitarians like Michael Walzer in the United States. All this work is
indifferently characterized, says Norris, by a scepticism regarding the power of
reason, an irresponsible escalation of poststructuralist linguistic theory into a
politically enervating pantextualism and a deluded Nietzschean prejudice that truth
is never anything but the ruse of power or rhetoric. Readers familiar with Norris's
What's Wrong With Postmodernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1989),
UncriticalTheory(London: Lawrence & Wishart, I992), and The TruthAbout
Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, I993) will recognize many of the feuds resumed in
this, his most recent book (at least at the time of writing). They will also find here,
marvellously undiminished, all Norris's qualities of energy, fluency, and tenacious
lucidity.
Though this is a short book, it is, as usual, loud and crowded in its polemic. It is
almost as though the constraints of space have spurredNorris into making sure that
he leaves no cannon in his arsenal undischarged. As a result, the book appears
disconcertingly tumbled together. One line of reasoning abruptlyleaps the tracksto
another, there are breathtaking loops and swoops of association and perplexing
changes of pace, and the argument often doubles back bewilderingly on itself, with
not only particularpoints but even whole turns of phrase being repeated sometimes
only pages apart. It is a bit like a philosophical version of the film GroundhogDay, in
which you can never be sure when you are going to be yanked back to an earlier
point in the story. Yet through all this, the argument is never in danger of losing its
way, held together as it is in the unassailable coherence of passionate conviction
(not to say ideefixe).
However, from about half-way through, the book becomes something more than
a resumption of quarrelspicked at greater length in Norris's earlier work. From this
point on, the book is given focus by the interesting and robust criticism it develops
of the remarkableethical turn in recent cultural and political theory. Now of course,
Norris cannot withhold his qualified approval of some aspects of the preoccupation
with ethical matters visible, for instance, in the later work of Foucault, or in the
widespread admiration in which the work of Emmanuel Levinas currently basks.
But he also deploys against this work the argument to be found in Habermas's

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