This paper considers contemporary attitudes of “the end” from a deconstruc- tive approach. Contrasting Derrida’s various writings on the “end” and its role in philosophical discourse with what Marina Garcés has called the “posthumous con- dition,” I reflect on the difficulty of conceptualizing “never-ending endings” and, more broadly, on the inherent paradox of any “meta-eschatology”: that is, of any at- tempt to historize, differentiate, and produce typologies of endings. However, I also claim that this difficulty does not relieve us of the task of thinking critically about the anguish and the desires that the proclamation of endings produces. Quite the opposite: in the context of an increasingly “postological” intellectual environment, thinking about the meaning of the endings, the intertwinement of “pre” and “post,” and the possibility of an actual apocalypse must remain the task of enlightened cri- tique, capable of turning the focus from the end in general to the subject of each end.
