Annihilation aesthetics: The disappearances of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Ten years ago, an edited volume was curated for Thesis Eleven that sought to address the legacies of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seven decades on from the atrocities. At the time, it was felt that while the violence of the bombings was fading from memory, there was also a normalisation in the appearance of atomic clouds in every kind of representation that dealt with end of world narratives. This was matched by a declining interest in mass movement protest against the existence and development of nuclear technologies, which offered a marked departure from previous campaigns for nuclear disarmament that were notably prevalent during the 1980s and 90s. Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed to be fading from memory, as the world was dealing with a multitude of catastrophic threats marking the post-Cold War period, even if the aesthetic of the destruction appeared like an ever-present strategic and cultural motif that was continually rearticulated.

Today, we are in a different political and strategic moment. As the spotlight on the history of the bomb has been given renewed cultural focus through popular films such as Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, there has also been a stark and ominous return to the language of nuclear annihilation. The threat of nuclear violence once again looms over zones of crises, notably Ukraine and the Korean Peninsula. Moreover, as the technological world continues apace, Big-Tech pioneers like Sam Altman, chief executive officer and co-founder of OpenAI, now openly call for a new ‘Manhattan Project’ to reign in (or legitimise?) the destructive potential of artificial intelligence (Johnson, 2023). So how are we to make sense of this situation today? What can still be said about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years on? And can we return to those horrifying events from 1945 so that we might be able to offer a deeper and more reflective critique on technological violence?

By recognising that visibility and invisibility are not always opposites, the new kinds of exposure given to those events 80 years ago are creating new forms of forgetting. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in fact unrivalled moments of technological violence, which gestured towards what can be seen as ‘spectacles of disappearance’, so the disappearance continues through the violence of various kinds of forgetting and the absolving of responsibility. This special edition began precisely as a response to this kind of violence, directly focusing on the spectacle of past and potential nuclear violence to address the aesthetic question of disappearances today. Through Caroline's work on war and technology (Holmqvist, 2013, 2024) and Brad's work on disappearances, which in collaboration with the artist Chantal Meza sought to rethink its aesthetic terms (Evans and Meza, 2023), it was clear to us that a new conversation was indeed necessary so that the disappearances within technology could be better understood.

Hence, looking at the importance of imaginaries of total destruction – what we are electing to call annihilation aesthetics – the volume set out to consider the historical present of technologically enabled violence, dealing in the process with concerns about mass terror and mediatisation, the logics of technological violence from the nuclear to the artificial age, the importance of culture in developing a viable critique, a rethinking of the violence of such annihilation through frameworks of human disappearance and vanishment, the importance of art in dealing with the memory and shadows of annihilation, along with the security and strategic imperatives the prevalent public return to narratives of technologically enabled oblivion make altogether more explicit.

It seems clear to us that the challenge of reckoning with the atomic bombings lies in understanding not just the destruction wrought, but just as much (or more!) in comprehending the afterlife of that devastation – how it is seen, or not seen, how it is rendered expressible or consigned to silence. The themes of silence, silencing and disappearance feature in different ways in the essays of this volume. By way of opening this topic, perhaps even in a framing gesture, we will highlight two works from the 1950s: the first a piece of absurdist theatre, Rhinocéros (1956) by the French playwrite Eugène Ionesco, and the other the epic poem Aniara – fragments of time and space (1959) by the Swedish writer and Nobel Laureate Harry Martinsson. ¹ These two works, each and together, offer insight into the ways in which the most abhorrent and frightening happenings recede into the background, into how annihilation vanishes from view. The strength of annihilation is precisely the ability to author its own disappearance through a kind of violence of organised forgetting that is capable of hiding in plain sight. More broadly, these examples also suggest the importance of the arts in providing a counter-narrative at an all too human level to such extreme acts of violence. Challenging contrite readings of Theodore Adorno, this opens up alternative discussions on the poetics of disappearance, which also speak to the very idea of art as being something less about representation than a transgressive witnessing to history (Evans, 2021). Dreams of Disappearance, as Meza's artwork suggests, is not just about the atrocious past, but of a mourning to come, for an atrocity that is still in the making, which continues to devastate in The Dust of New Mexico – a true valley of death – to echo the title of the other featured artwork that bookend this volume.

In Ionesco's Rhinocéros, we get to know a handful of individuals whom, one by one, alongside other inhabitants of a town, are transformed into stampeding rhinoceroses. ² This happens gradually and inexplicably. At first, the population is horrified to find a rhinoceros roaming the streets, but soon they become more tolerant. What begins as grotesque absurdity fades into eery normality as the characters one by one succumb to the metamorphosis. The townspeople soon learn to repress or forget their fears and begin instead to rationalise the hideous transformation: ‘after all, rhinoceroses are living creatures the same as us’, says one of them, uncannily. Only the character Bérenger refuses to ‘capitulate’, though he is no hero but ambiguously and awkwardly left alone at the end of the play. First performed in post-war France, Rhinocéros is widely interpreted as an allegory of the spread of fascism and the ease with which authoritarian ideologies take hold. But its reach is broader: Ionesco portrays the collective slide into unthinking conformity, the surrender of ethical reflection, and the terror of standing apart. And could that horn not be seen as precisely that which drives everything forward? Forceful, pointed, unstoppable, it marches into the future to create its own winds of change. The horn as such becomes the symbol of technology, which others prize and makes what is already a formidable force deadly in its momentum. The play's absurdist tone thus belies a profound moral urgency. Catastrophe, Ionesco suggests, is not always sudden; sometimes it is gradual, mundane and bureaucratic. Indeed, catastrophe can be contagious; most perilously, it is normalised. And who doesn’t desire to become-Rhinoceros in these conditions, to become a power that literally marches into oblivion? We might recall here Salvador Dali's response to Hiroshima, Raphaelesque Head Exploding (1951), which was inspired by rhinoceros horns, which the artist claimed were ‘the only ones in the animal kingdom constructed in accordance with a perfect logarithmic spiral’. The straightness of the march is thus also concealing, for in its wake we find a swirling vortex of devastation – a chaos out of the order that further dissipates as it moves.

A similar logic animates Harry Martinson's Aniara (1956), a science fiction epic poem comprising 103 songs. In Martinsson's work, nuclear war and environmental destruction have rendered the Earth uninhabitable; as a result, a spaceship – Aniara – sets off to transport 8000 refugees to Venus and Mars. When a navigational mishap sends the ship irreversibly off course, it becomes a vessel of existential exile, drifting endlessly into deep space. The poem is structured as a series of meditations on despair, memory and the loss of meaning, narrated by a crew member known only as the Mimarobe. At the heart of the ship is Mima, a sentient machine that absorbs and reflects human thought, desire and memory – until it too collapses under the weight of human destructiveness, unable to cope with the dreadful insights into the death of mankind. Aniara stages a slow-motion annihilation: not death by blast, but by disintegration of perception, imagination and hope. (It is easy to see why operatic interpretations abound, most recently by the American composer Robert Maggio.)

Both texts, in their distinct ways, bear witness to what Gunther Anders calls the Promethean Gap: the chasm between what humanity is technologically capable of doing and what it can ethically contend with. In this regard, and as Hannah Arendt so acutely observed, thoughtless and banal conformity may be as horrific as the most spectacular crime. Together, Rhinocéros and Aniara evoke an aesthetics of annihilation: not the visual spectacle of destruction but the slow erasure of the faculties that allow us to discern, to exercise judgement and to empathise – to care. This is a kind of disappearance that works to a different temporality, slowly vanishing before our eyes. Neither Ionesco nor Martinsson makes any attempt to resolve the condition of catastrophe, be it nuclear annihilation, moral collapse or existential exile. Rather, they ask us to remain attuned – emotionally and perceptually sensitive – to the lasting effects of catastrophe. They warn of a state of stupefaction, where people are overwhelmed into inaction or silence. But a silence that could also come from making too much noise, too much commotion. The Aniara spaceship, drifting through space, embodies a loss of direction, purpose or grounding that is as much ethical, political and existential. In the post-catastrophic condition, we know that something terrible has happened; the real question is whether we have the capacity to respond, to feel or to act. In Rhinocéros, such degeneration occurs through conformity; in Aniara, it is through the piecemeal disintegration of memory, language and human connection. The outcome however is the same. The disappearance of what makes us human as such.

But how are we to make sense of this today? We live in an age that is oversaturated by images and all kinds of banal representations. We also live in an age saturated with extinction discourse and surrounded by new and emergent forms of threats from technologies such as artificial intelligence, which are posing new questions about what is seen and unseen, what is perceived and what remains hidden from us in terms of the mechanisms, operations and decisions for power. Yet perhaps understanding and reasoning is no longer enough. Perhaps the question is not whether we understand what is happening; it is whether we feel it. But even this poses a number of challenges. If one of the causalities of the post-war moment was the removal of the politics of emotion from the sphere of thought and action, today we are also overconsumed by regimes of feeling (Evans, 2021). The digital age in fact has led to the hyperintensification of everything, where politics itself has been turned into a competition wherein truth has collapsed into feeling and human life tethered to a digital nervous system that has led to the hyperarousal of all sensations, often with disastrous personal and social implications. If the past then was concerned not just with understanding but the mechanisms through which we understood, the challenge today is not just about seeing or feeling, but what one sees and how one feels. And it is through confronting this realisation that we learn of the urgent need to be more attuned to a deeper poetic sensibility, for it is precisely through poetics that the world’s beauty and pain can be better encountered. This also allows us to move beyond the limits of representation and rethink what annihilation aesthetics means today?

Our volume begins by recognising that representation falters in the face of annihilation because annihilation can never be ‘represented’. This is not simply because the magnitude is too great, but because the violence undoes the very terms of intelligibility. The term ‘annihilation aesthetics’ emerges in response: it is not a genre or a form, but a mode of estrangement. ‘Annihilation aesthetics’ conveys a refusal to normalise what should rightly remain disorienting. The objective is rather to sustain that rupture. We are reminded of Chantal Meza's opening artist statement, which explains the different creative processes involved in the technological production of images of destruction and the artistic Study for A Bomb, which has no intention to disappear a life. ‘Creators and destroyers of worlds are masters of illusions’, Meza writes.

Me in my studio, the Manhattan project in the laboratory in the desert, all of us are concerned with conjuring a future. Yet there is a difference. I have no faith of certainty in mine, which is to say, I don’t wish it to follow a clear line. History is not on my side. I cannot curate its projection. Theirs is mapped. An ordinance of destruction. Enola Gay had a flight path that cut the sky. Little Boy, fell from the heavens like a surgical needle. Deadly and sure.

This takes us into the heart of our concerns, for it takes us directly into what Meza terms the ‘sublime space’, which allows us to conceive of a new kind of justice – which is not juridical or technical but literally conceived. This conjures the power of abstraction and the logics of the surreal as we try to make sense of this theatre of the absurd. It has been suggested that when Stanley Kubrick set out to make Doctor Strangelove, the original intention was to make a serious movie about the horrors of impending annihilation. He soon realised however the utter banality and absurdity of it all demanded a response that was as comic as it was tragic. It required a different tonality, a different sensibility so that the terror wasn’t truly crushing and all truly lost. Invoking the tragically sublime, this becomes a way to resist against the forces of vanishment and the very logics for rule that continue to threaten to send us all, through accident or desire, into oblivion.

In November 2023, 1 month into the war, Israel had dropped more than 25,000 tonnes of explosives on the Gaza Strip. By way of comparison, the atomic bomb Little Boy, dropped by the United States on Hiroshima during World War II, yielded 15,000 tonnes. As of the time of writing in May 2025, Israeli bombings of Gaza amount to the equivalence of six Hiroshimas. What are we to do with this violence? Can its magnitude even be felt? In ‘Annihilated landscapes: disappearance, desolation and the memory of the abyss’, Brad Evans and Daniele Rugo offer a conceptual vocabulary for this horrific reality, meditating on disappearance, ruination and the impossibility of recovery. Their concern is not with destruction as such but with the annihilation of meaning: the ways in which certain forms of violence do not merely kill or displace but subtract life from visibility and knowability. The authors draw a line from Hiroshima to Beirut, to Fukushima, to Gaza – not to equate these scenes of devastation, but to register a shared condition: landscapes in which life has not simply ended but has been withdrawn, emptied out, rendered unspeakable. What they call annihilated landscapes are spaces in which perception falters, and where the categories through which we think we ought to understand loss – witnessing, memory, time – are themselves undone. The point of departure is not narrative, but absence; not testimony, but the ruin of sense. Through close readings of films such as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Homo Sapiens, and Stalker, Evans and Rugo chart a trajectory of aesthetic refusal. These works do not represent annihilation in any straightforward way; rather, they are chosen as they work at its edge, staging disappearance as an aesthetic and political problem. Hiroshima emerges here not (only) as a historical event but as a paradigm of obliteration. And what follows Hiroshima is not simply its memory but the proliferation of other absences that draw their intelligibility from that original scene. Gaza, then, appears as the most recent instance of totalised destruction, the new metonym. The memory of the abyss, the authors argue, is the ongoing and necessarily incomplete labour of reckoning with what resists both remembering and forgetting. Gaza is staged here not as analogy, but as continuation: another site through which the totalising logics of annihilation are enacted and reiterated. And yet Gaza appears as the contemporary form of a condition that has become structurally ordinary: the rendering of human and non-human life into a landscape of desolation without horizon.

How, then, to write? It is to remain with the rupture, to mark a moment in which the very possibility of marking is brought into question. As with Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness, the act of inscription is less about remembering than about insisting on the ethical imperative not to let disappearance pass unmarked (Weber, 2023). For what vanishes in the annihilated landscape is not only life, but the conditions of human, ethical relation – the fragile, uneven and often unrecoverable ties through which vulnerability becomes legible. In such spaces, reciprocity is not simply denied; it is rendered unintelligible. And so it is to hold onto the power of the unintelligible, to tarry with its implications, not out of surrender, but precisely to wager forgetfulness against the violence of an organised forgetting, such that the void created doesn’t simply become another space that is subjected to a woeful abstention that removes all traces of human denial.

In ‘Nuclear memories for the future: Gaps and forgetting in European publics’ understanding of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’, Benoît Pelopidas, Sterre van Buuren and Alexander Sorg together examine further the fading and uneven memories of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The article identifies two key asymmetries in public memory: between the two events and between generations. Hiroshima has come to dominate as a universal symbol of nuclear violence – a shorthand for mass death and epoch-shattering rupture; a singular event, a time zero, as much as a ground zero (Bousquet, 2006). Nagasaki, on the other hand, is marginalised in collective memory: irregularly and selectively remembered. And, even when recalled or invoked, the bombing of Nagasaki is rarely understood as a distinct moral or historical event. This erasure is not incidental, the authors argue. Nagasaki troubles dominant narratives: it renders visible the routinisation of mass violence, the redundancy of ‘shock value’ in just war reasoning, and the disquieting possibility that the most devastating acts can unfold not through deliberate rationality but logistical inertia. The argument unfolds as a meditation on the politics of forgetting: the erosion of historical knowledge over time, but also the structuring of oblivion through cultural hierarchies of attention. We are not always oblivious to oblivion they council, even if a remembering remains closely related to the failure to ‘comprehend’ in any meaningful aesthetic sense without developing better tools to understand properly the modes of perception.

Pelopidas et al. compellingly argue that the failure to remember Nagasaki speaks of something much more profound than a gap in public knowledge; they seek to unpack the ethical and epistemological consequences of structured forgetting. As they show, the forgetting of Nagasaki obscures the conditions under which political decisions are made, frequently of conditions of contingency, error and bureaucratic drift. The second bomb was dropped with casual banality: its timing shifted for weather, its target altered mid-flight due to cloud cover, betraying what the authors call a ‘moral recklessness’. What disappears when Nagasaki is eclipsed by Hiroshima is a more troubling register of history: one in which the catastrophic is not only imaginable but eminently repeatable through everyday operations. We may recall Zygmunt Bauman's point here that while Hiroshima was exceptional, Nagasaki normalised the violence through its sequential happening. ³ This insight also resonates with Pelopidas's earlier work on the ‘unbearable lightness of luck’, where he argues that nuclear stability has rested less on rational control than on a series of fortunate accidents and unrepeatable coincidences (Pelopidas, 2017). When nuclear history is framed exclusively through calculated deterrence or technological mastery, the role of chance is effaced. Forgetting, in this sense, is not neutral: it is politically generative. It creates the illusion of control, naturalises the absence of catastrophe and sustains the dangerous belief that what has not happened cannot happen again, that somehow it belongs to the realm of the unthinkable. This also invites further reflection on the issue of control, which is a concern that shadows all the essays that appear in this volume. Why is the ongoing quest for technologically enabled security continually overshadowed by the exponential increase in the potential for our veritable ruination? To counter this, the authors close by urging a broadening of nuclear memory beyond Hiroshima. Remembering nuclear testing, near-misses and survivorship across global sites of exposure can restore a sense of shared vulnerability (Barad, 2019). Doing so, they argue, reactivates the imagination – reconnecting memory to possibility and contemplating a future that remains open not only to disaster but equally to political responsibility that is inseparable from how we reimagine the future.

Dealing specifically with the future present of catastrophic imaginaries, Robert E. Kirsch and Emily Ray in their contribution to this volume, develop the concept of bunkerization to understand how political life in the United States has been reconfigured around fantasies of survival, sovereignty and consumer responsibility in the atomic age. At its core, bunkerization names a process and a fantasy by which the home becomes a hardened site of resilience, a personal fortress constructed not through collective political action but through market participation. This again is all about creating a certain desire for security, which feeds directly into the ethos of the marketplace for anxieties. Against the backdrop of nuclear threat, climate collapse, pandemics and general systemic breakdown, citizens are increasingly interpellated not as democratic subjects, but as consumer-sovereigns responsible for their own survival through strategic purchases and domestic preparations. It thus becomes a paradigm for security governance, through which imaginaries of threat drive spending habits. Thus understood, the authors argue that bunkerization is not a marginal or fringe phenomenon; rather, it functions as a mainstream organising principle in American political life. Bunkerization is both a literal and metaphorical hardening of everyday space: its logic extends from Cold War fallout shelters to home surveillance systems, panic rooms and stockpiled provisions. The home becomes not only a shelter from catastrophe, but also a site for the performance of ideological loyalty, where survival itself is cast as a patriotic act. At the heart of Kirsch and Ray's analysis is an inversion of Carl Schmitt's famous definition of sovereignty: ‘sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt ref). In a bunkerized society, by contrast, sovereignty belongs to those who are decided by the exception – those who prepare themselves for a disaster that is perpetually imminent but never fully arrives. This is a sovereignty of reaction, not action; it thrives not by determining the political order, but by fortifying the home against the collapse of that order. In this way, the bunker is an aesthetic and ideological coping mechanism for a world where state guarantees have eroded, and collective projects of safety have been displaced by market-based logics of self-defence.

Kirsch and Ray carefully situate this condition within the broader dynamics of American empire and neoliberal governance in the nuclear age. Rather than investing in public infrastructure or civil defence in the face of existential threats, the state encourages citizens to internalise responsibility for security. Agencies like FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) promote self-preparedness, and markets flourish in selling ‘resilience’ to the anxious consumer. Drawing on Carl Schmitt's notion of the katechon – the force that holds back the end of the world – the authors argue that the American state maintains its imperial fantasy not by preventing catastrophe but by seeding the future with bunkerized nodes of survival: miniature fortresses that might carry its cultural DNA past collapse. This bunkerization of life is symbolic as much as physical. It structures how threats are imagined and how security is pursued: not through solidarity or public investment but through withdrawal, privatisation and enclosure. Society, in other words, needs to mobilise annihilating fields of perception, so that the fortification of life can not only be normalised but also projected as a desirable condition into the future. The authors critique this futurity as a failure of political imagination. Against the fantasy of consumer sovereignty, they call for a return to collective approaches to shared threats. Speaking to the logics of destruction invoked by Rugo and Evans, the ‘ruins gaze’ embedded in bunker ideology is not only seductive but politically disabling, for any escape from ruination is fully denied. The answer to such polycrisis, the authors insist, cannot be to burrow deeper into isolation but to commit to new forms of common life that reject survival as a private good. This means reimagining the security imperative and the very desire to frame life within catastrophically threatened enclosures, which in the end only leads us to live out the fantasy that is being set against.

Yet this poses another challenge for us. How can we reimagine what ordinarily seems to be the unthinkable, not in terms of its occurrence, for we know that that is a possibility, but in terms of what remains? What, in other words, is the ethics and imagination of the nuclear condition? The entanglement of nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence exposes a deepening fracture in contemporary ethical reasoning. While these technologies differ in historical and material terms, they share a commitment to a particular form of abstraction (Evans and Meza, 2021), predictive control and the fantasy of disembodied decision-making. At the core of both lies a displacement of ethics: not merely in practice, but in its very conception. Ethics is made out to be something computable, optimisable and externalised. This shift, especially evident in the context of autonomous weapon systems, has given rise to a form of ethical reasoning that recasts judgement as algorithmic procedure (Renic, 2024; Schwarz, 2018, 2019). In such framings, moral questions are reduced to technical puzzles, resolved through rule-based decision schemes and probabilistic assessments. This logic not only narrows the space for ethical reflection but effaces the essential relationality of ‘ethics’. The idea that violence can be managed ethically through automation mistakes ethics for governance and response for control. It is not the disappearance of ‘the human’ in sentimental terms that is at stake, but the effacement of the very conditions that make ethics possible: exposure, vulnerability and the demand for responsibility.

Against this backdrop, Caroline Holmqvist and Elke Schwarz in ‘Imagining spectral violence: On morality and meaning in the cyber-nuclear age’, propose a reorientation that restores ethical thought to these questions and conditions. Drawing primarily on existentialist and phenomenological thinkers, notably Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, they approach ethics as an ongoing practice marked not by resolution or certainty but by hesitation, implication and the readiness to confront failure. In this view, technological systems are not ethically inert, but dangerous precisely when they allow responsibility to be imagined elsewhere – clouded over by discussions of humans ‘in-the-loop’ or ‘on-the-loop’ in what is in any event a dissipated form of decision ‘making’. Violence exceeds the capacities of computational rationality to register its effects; in this sense, it is ‘spectral’. The notion of spectral also gestures toward the absences and disavowed traces in algorithmic war. These are not only, or even primarily, metaphysical residues but the aftermaths of decisions made without human witness or response.

For Holmqvist and Schwarz, this is a cue to explore how, in the context of nuclear and algorithmic violence, annihilation must be understood not merely as physical destruction but as ethical erasure: the disappearance of the human as a moral subject within systems governed by abstraction, automation and disembodied rationality. Nowhere is this more visible than in the logic of nuclear deterrence, which rests on the perpetual threat of unspeakable violence. For after all, deterrence is a doctrine that wagers security on the willingness to commit suicide or genocide – a wager that, far from being an aberration, has become the normalised foundation of global order (Evans, 2017; Scarry, 2014). That this remains the prevailing logic is all the more sobering given the current unravelling of arms control regimes and the retreat from disarmament commitments across nuclear-armed states. Eighty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear deterrence not only endures, it is intensifying –underwritten by the same fantasies of control and wilful oblivion that have sustained it from the start. ‘Deterrence’ is not simply a strategic posture but a form of collective psychopathology: a structure of thought that substitutes equilibrium for empathy, and that holds entire populations hostage to the latent possibility of annihilation (Weiner, 2023). In the face of such violence, the ethical crisis lies not only in what is done but in what is accepted – the fact that we live with, administer and, in some sense, legitimise the very conditions of annihilation. As Marc Crépon has shown, this predicament and condition depends on le consentement meurtrier, a ‘murderous consent’, in which democratic societies become complicit in the perpetuation of catastrophic violence through abstraction, passivity and selective blindness (Crépon, 2019). Confronting our collective implicit consent or complicity surely must be at the forefront of political and ethical debate as regards apocalyptic violence; yet current trends of rearmament, heavy militarisation and war-blindness seem to suggest that the opposite is occurring.

If the preceding reflections are intended to unsettle the terms through which ethical responsibility is conceived in the face of algorithmic war and nuclear abstraction, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee's contribution to this volume, ‘Post-August 1945 apocalypse: Imagined annihilation after atomic bombs’, returns us to a quieter, but no less insistent, question: what are we really doing when we imagine the end of the world? His concern is not with destruction as such, but with the forms of thought and feeling that gather around it – the stories we tell, the images we consume, the futures we come to accept without quite noticing.

At the centre of Taek-Gwang Lee's text is a familiar paradox: that the end of capitalism is harder to imagine than the end of the world. This is not simply an observation about ideology, though it is that too. Lee is interested in how catastrophe comes to feel more plausible than political transformation – how extinction, once unthinkable, has become a kind of ambient possibility, something woven into everyday life. He reflects on how visions of global catastrophe often serve as the stage for an imagined human unity, one that eludes us in ordinary political life. But this collective identity, forged in the face of annihilation, carries its own tensions. It is abstract, depoliticised, and risks substituting shared vulnerability for structural critique. Rather than offering a straightforward diagnosis or call to arms, Lee stays with the question of how such imaginaries take hold. He suggests that their endurance lies not only in resonance, but in the relief they provide. Faced with complexity, apocalyptic narrative offers coherence and closure. What disappears in this process is the possibility of transformation that does not hinge on collapse. The future is rendered thinkable only insofar as it confirms what already is. As Holmqvist and Schwarz also argue, the problem (or answer) is not imagining the Apocalypse. The task, rather, is imagining Otherwise.

There is, throughout Taek-Gwang Lee's text, a quiet attentiveness to what has been lost. Not just a repertoire of utopian alternatives, but a political imagination capacious enough to hold contradiction, to dwell in uncertainty, to make room for something other than disaster. Lee gestures towards the ways in which contemporary technological and economic systems have reconditioned the very terms through which imagination operates – privileging abstraction, spectacle and control, while eroding the space for refusal or care. His argument does not turn on hope, nor does it rest on despair. It simply insists that imagination is not neutral – that the ways we think and feel about the future are already shaped by the conditions we inhabit. In this sense, the imagined end of the world becomes not just a mirror of the present, but a kind of containment of its possibilities.

When thinking about possibilities we find ourselves not just dwelling on how the future may appear before us. But the future is also felt into existence. Such affective registers are a central concern in the final essay for our volume, Michael Shapiro's ‘The bio-historiography of a lethal career: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer’. Shapiro has long pursued ‘literary justice’ in response to the witnessing of atrocity and war crimes (Shapiro, 2014). Consistent with his distinctive and compelling style, the turn to cinema here offers yet another way of thinking and reimagining the violence of our nuclear present. Situating the horrors of the bombing of Hiroshima at a point of intermezzo where past, present and futures collide, Nolan’s biopic can be read both as an attempt to illuminate the circumstantial accidents of the past, while also serving as a warning, not about mere mechanisms of control and certainty, but in relation to the ambiguous space that makes such experiments possible as the ‘ought to never happen’ moves into the eternally possible. What also appears in this mediation is a return to the sublime, but not simply of awe and wonderment. The sublime, as Shapiro reminds, resides also in the mundane, which coupled with the normalisation of prejudice and race enables the unleashing of a terrible violence once the capacity to inflict such violence is possible.

The key term in art for understanding this violence for Shapiro remains contingency. What are the strange happenstances and accidents of history that make such a tremendous accident possible? Crucially for Shapiro, just because we are speaking of contingency or circumstantial happenstances doesn’t absolve us of any responsibility. Echoing perhaps Gilles Deleuze's instance that the task for philosophy is to become worthy of the event, with Shapiro we read that the task for politics and ethics is to become worthy of the contingent moment, especially when there is so much on the line. That Oppenheimer might therefore be seen as a modern Prometheus should perturb us not only for his mastery of science and a certainty about his position in history. What was dangerous was his failure to really grasp the contingency of that moment, the utter fragility of his own science, methodological deductions and imperfect calculations, which brought such epic horror into the world. What are the chances this could happen? Shapiro's essay asks. ‘Uncertain’ is the response, which is all the more dangerous, for it is precisely in that very space of technological uncertainty where the fire burns, especially when society is consumed by a scientific model for rule that kills at speed. Considering responsibility then, it is not enough to simply dwell on the violence or debate too much whether Oppenheimer felt genuine remorse as he became a destroyer of worlds. It is to question the very conditions that make it possible, not least the scientific and technological fetishism of the war paradigm that continues to dominate societies.

As a point of conclusion, we would like to address the evident crisis of thought we are facing today. In the aftermath of the horrors of World War II, which included both the concentration camps and the atomic attacks, European intellectuals, in particular, were thrown into a crisis, all of which centred in one way or another on the disappearance of the human subject. While debilitating, it also proved to be remarkably generative and would give rise to a remarkable aesthetic reawakening that for a time gave renewed appreciation to the arts and humanities as viable forms of political and social critique, including how we could look upon the intolerable and sense the unthinkable. Many of those gains however have been slowly eroded, all while the violence continues apace, with the production of new machines of annihilation our ethical judgements are incapable of responding to, for as we seek a deeper understanding, the killer machines have already transformed. Countering this demands a new radicalism, which is not wedded to security, ideology, technology or desire alone, it needs to be reframed through a fundamental critique of the violence of time, which the poetic field offers as a different form of the contingent, which may bring a little destruction, but as Meza councils, it is never set or capable of disappearing a life, let alone annihilating an entire peoples.