The apocalypse always disappoints; it is that ambiguous and excessive event that does not reveal the truth of the end because it encounters death as the insurmountable impossibility that we are incapable of dominating or wanting: man is not some sort of ‘supreme hero of the negative’ or ‘final Hamlet’ (F 106). Our understanding, which takes us to the limits of comprehension, helps us to see that we will never know this universal death and that our ending will never be of any significance (F 107). Blanchot exposes the difference between the future treated as an object by totalising scientific knowledge and the future as what cannot be negated, as what remains unknowable and uncertain. The latter is why the apocalypse always disappoints: apocalyptic foretelling exposes us to the banality of an end that will never have any meaning for us as subjects.

[…] [A]ll modes of technique expose the human to a turning because all relate us to the unknowable and expose us to a profound powerlessness. 

[…] Noted at the start of this chapter was Derrida’s analysis which claimed that any attempt to shed light on the apocalypse leads only. to a brighter apocalyptic tone; Derrida suggests that by listening to the multiplicity of apocalyptic tones, by recognising that there is more than one tone, we allow the possibility that the other tone, or the tone of the other, might be heard. Towards the end of ‘The Apocalypse is Disappointing’, Blanchot is doing just this when he argues that Jaspers ‘[dismisses] the abstract shadow of this apocalypse as if it were an irritating fly and [perseveres] with the habits of a tradition and a language in which one sees nothing to change’ (F 108). The essay concludes by stressing that the choice between all or nothing, between transformation or destruction, is not the one and only truth of our situation. We should note this fly out of the corner of our eye; we should risk a surreptitious glance in its direction.

[…] the limits of history, world and culture are contested by an impersonal force which the human cannot master: the neuter as a sort of disobedient techne continuing where other modes of technique have left off.

Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot