The Technological End of the World

The article examines the problem of the technological end of the world from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The most general phantasmic frames of the apocalyptic scenario are outlined, supporting the correlation between the figure of the „chain reaction“ and the master signifier in the atomic bomb discourse. The research focus falls on famous speeches and utterances of George Robert Oppenheimer, which acquired an almost post-Kantian sense of categorical imperatives, making his case a typical example of the self-instrumentalization of bureaucratic science. Examining the perverse structure that enables such an inverted presentation technologies of the end as a universal good, the article insists on the role of the researcher as subject and his participation in the constitution of the moral law itself, and hence in the constitution of the universal.