Abstract

The Book of Revelation, the much-disputed final book of the Christian Bible, is seen by many as the definitive apocalyptic text, both due to its place in the holy book of a major world religion but also the prevalence of its images in popular culture.  Herein this article decodes and discussed ideas surrounding apocalypse and analyses chapters17-18 of Revelation through the lens of Justin McBrien’s ‘Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene’, a work that established the notion of the Necrocene, an epoch defined by capitalist accumulation hurling humanity toward the apocalypse. The article seeks to craft a new definition of apocalypse, not simply as the end of the world or as an unveiling, but as a distinct literary feature that, through the use of imagery and metaphor, unveils the cause of the end of the world – a cause which, through the lens of the Necrocene, can time and time again, in various works, be traced back to capitalism.

Keywords

the book of revelation, capitalism, capitalist, late capitalism, necrocene, anthropocene, apocalypse, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic

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