Abstract This essay offers a philosophical reading of apocalyptic thought, from the moment of its inception in the Jewish Apocalypse of Baruch , through Joachim of Fiore and Hegel, to its latest avatar in Jacob Taubes. It elaborates on the fundamental ambivalence which the apocalyptic mode of thinking contains from the start: the vacillation between the desire to destroy the world and the desire to transform the world. Its goal is to show that while the historical evolution of the apocalyptic desire moves gradually from the former to the latter, the purely negative element cannot ever be fully tamed or eliminated. Even if the annihilating vision gradually metamorphoses into a concept of innerworldly dynamics—as in Joachim's paradigmatic operatio spiritus fuelling the world's historical development, or in the Hegelian concept of work as ‘delayed destruction’—the process is inherently volatile: the apocalyptic dialectic always plays with fire.
Agata Bielik‐Robson (Sun,) studied this question.