The End(s) of the World(s): Apocalypse and Infinity

About the event

Moving from Heraclitus and the Stoics to Nietzsche and Ilyenkov, this lecture rethinks the end of the world as a rhythmic process of repetition rather than a singular catastrophe. Apocalypse appears here not as destruction, but as revelation — a moment in which the infinite return of worlds becomes perceptible.

About the speaker

Oxana Timofeeva is a researcher at the Universität der Künste Berlin and a member of the artistic collective "Chto Delat". Her books include Freud’s Beasty Boys: On Sex, Violence, and Masculinity (2025); Solar Politics (2022), How to Love a Homeland (2020), History of Animals (2018), This is not That (2022), and Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (2009). Her new book On the Soul is forthcoming in 2026.

About the lecture series

The UCL Rabindranath Tagore Lecture in Comparative Literature is delivered annually by a scholar of international distinction. It celebrates the poet, playwright, painter and musician Rabindranath Tagore, whose eminent figure looms large in the history of UCL, a university which he joined briefly, in 1878, to read law and which he left without a degree. One hundred forty years later, Tagore is widely hailed as a model of the radical spirit that informs comparative literature in an age of shifting global cultural and political constellations. Tagore’s heroic vision of world literature (visva bharati) opposes hate-mongering nationalism at every level. His celebration of artistic creativity as wasteful spending (bājē kharaca) seeks to preserve the exuberance of poetic invention across all fields of inquiry and takes the excitement of drama, poetry, song and painting into society – and into the classroom and the lecture theatre.

Further information

This lecture is offered in association with the University of Heidelberg's Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS). The lecture features as part of EMERGENCE | EMERGENCY (1-12 June 2026): a series of lectures, discussions, seminars, and doctoral workshops offered by UCL Anthropocene to celebrate UCL’s bicentenary.

Credits

Jointly hosted by UCL Anthropocene and the UCL School of European, Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS), with generous support from CAPAS Heidelberg University, and UCL Global Engagement. Photo by Natalya Letunova on Unsplash