Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
http://www.egs.edu
Course Introduction:
This seminar brings together film director Joshua Oppenheimer — whose documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, and post-apocalyptic musical drama The End, have explored the mechanisms of self-deception underpinning mass violence and denial — and philosopher Srećko Horvat, author of After the Apocalypse.
Horvat redefines the apocalypse not as a distant end-time scenario but as a revelation of the present: climate breakdown, nuclear threat, pandemics, rising authoritarianism, and extreme inequality expose a world already in crisis. The apocalypse is not something to come — we are already living after it. Oppenheimer’s The End refuses the consolation of futurity. Set after ecological collapse, it follows a wealthy family surviving in a bunker, clinging to the rituals and narratives that protect them from guilt and responsibility. By staging the apocalypse as a musical — a form whose beauty has always moved us, and always kept us from seeing clearly — Oppenheimer turns the genre of consolation against itself: the loveliness that draws us in is the same loveliness that makes denial possible.
The seminar will explore the apocalypse as a condition of the present rather than a fantasy of the future. Both Horvat and Oppenheimer have spent their working lives confronting systems of violence and the stories we tell to make them livable — from ecological devastation to genocides, occupations, and war. But the deeper subject of their work has not merely been the obvious perpetrators alone. It is the rest of us: the ways we all, in everyday life, participate in and naturalize exploitation; the narratives that render invisible what we would rather not see. In a world where systems of violence are revealed and rationalized away in real time, the question is not only how the powerful profit, exploit, and absolve themselevs — but how we all do, and how we move from complicity toward subversion and active resistance.
https://pact.egs.edu/schedule/
http://www.egs.edu
Course Introduction:
This seminar brings together film director Joshua Oppenheimer — whose documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, and post-apocalyptic musical drama The End, have explored the mechanisms of self-deception underpinning mass violence and denial — and philosopher Srećko Horvat, author of After the Apocalypse.
Horvat redefines the apocalypse not as a distant end-time scenario but as a revelation of the present: climate breakdown, nuclear threat, pandemics, rising authoritarianism, and extreme inequality expose a world already in crisis. The apocalypse is not something to come — we are already living after it. Oppenheimer’s The End refuses the consolation of futurity. Set after ecological collapse, it follows a wealthy family surviving in a bunker, clinging to the rituals and narratives that protect them from guilt and responsibility. By staging the apocalypse as a musical — a form whose beauty has always moved us, and always kept us from seeing clearly — Oppenheimer turns the genre of consolation against itself: the loveliness that draws us in is the same loveliness that makes denial possible.
The seminar will explore the apocalypse as a condition of the present rather than a fantasy of the future. Both Horvat and Oppenheimer have spent their working lives confronting systems of violence and the stories we tell to make them livable — from ecological devastation to genocides, occupations, and war. But the deeper subject of their work has not merely been the obvious perpetrators alone. It is the rest of us: the ways we all, in everyday life, participate in and naturalize exploitation; the narratives that render invisible what we would rather not see. In a world where systems of violence are revealed and rationalized away in real time, the question is not only how the powerful profit, exploit, and absolve themselevs — but how we all do, and how we move from complicity toward subversion and active resistance.
https://pact.egs.edu/schedule/
