Anti-Apocalypse was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. As the year 2000 looms, heralding a new millennium, apocalyptic thought abounds-and not merely among religious radicals. In politics, science, philosophy, popular culture, and feminist discourse, apprehensions of the End appear in images of cultural decline and urban chaos, forecasts of the end of history and ecological devastation, and visions of a new age of triumphant technology or a gender-free utopia. There is, Lee Quinby contends, a threatening "regime of truth" prevailing in the United States-and this regime, with its enforcement of absolute truth and morality, imperils democracy. In Anti-Apocalypse, Quinby offers a powerful critique of the millenarian rhetoric that pervades American culture. In doing so, she develops strategies for resisting its tyrannies. Drawing on feminist and Foucauldian theory, Quinby explores the complex relationship between power, truth, ethics, and apocalypse. She exposes the ramifications of this relationship in areas as diverse as jeanswear magazine advertising, the Human Genome project, contemporary feminism and philosophy, texts by Henry Adams and Zora Neale Hurston, and radical democratic activism. By bringing together such a wide range of topics, Quinby shows how apocalypse weaves its way through a vast network of seemingly unrelated discourses and practices. Tracing the deployment of power through systems of alliance, sexuality, and technology, Quinby reveals how these power relationships produce conflicting modes of subjectivity that create possibilities for resistance. She promotes a variety of critical stances—genealogical feminism, an ethics of the flesh, and "pissed criticism"—as challenges to apocalyptic claims for absolute truth and universal morality. Far-reaching in its implications for social and cultural theory as well as for political activism, Anti-Apocalypse will engage readers across the cultural spectrum and challenge them to confront one of the most subtle and insidious orthodoxies of our day. Lee Quinby is associate professor of English and American studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the author of Freedom, Foucault, and the Subject of America (1991) and coeditor (with Irene Diamond) of Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance (1988).

This text re-examines 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion's' popularity, investigating why it has persisted, as well as larger questions about the success of conspiracy theories even in the face of claims that they are blatantly counterfactual and irrational.

Streete studies the political uses of apocalyptic and anti-Catholic rhetoric in a wide range of seventeenth-century English drama, focusing on the plays of Marston, Middleton, Massinger, and Dryden. Drawing on recent work in religious and political history, he rethinks how religion is debated in the early modern theatre.

The concept of ‘performativity’ has risen to prominence throughout the humanities. The rise of financial derivatives reflects the power of the performative sign in the economic sphere. As recent debates about gender identity show, the concept of performativity is also profoundly influential on people’s personal lives. Although the autonomous power of representation has been studied in disciplines ranging from economics to poetics, however, it has not yet been evaluated in ethical terms. This book supplies that deficiency, providing an ethical critique of performative representation as it is manifested in semiotics, linguistics, philosophy, poetics, theology and economics. It constructs a moral criticism of the performative sign in two ways: first, by identifying its rise to power as a single phenomenon manifested in various different areas; and second, by locating efficacious representation in its historical context, thus connecting it to idolatry, magic, usury and similar performative signs. The book concludes by suggesting that earlier ethical critiques of efficacious representation might be revived in our own postmodern era.

Apocalyptic rhetoric creates dangerous politics; three great thinkers show how clear-eyed realism is our best hope.