The latecoming of the posthuman, or, why “we” do the apocalypse differently, “now’”

Abstract

In an early passage in Specters of Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida comments with some asperity about the [m]any young people today (of the type "readers-consumers of Fukuyama" or of the type "Fukuyama" himself) [who] probably no longer sufficiently realize it: the eschatological themes of the "end of history," of the "end of Marxism," of "the end of philosophy," of the "ends of man," of the "last man" and so forth were, in the '50s our daily bread. We had this bread of apocalypse in our mouths naturally, already, just as naturally as that which I nicknamed after the fact, in 1980, the "apocalyptic tone in philosophy".