Co(s)mic Pessimism: From Fantastic End to Subjective Humor

The article explores how postmodern philosophy and contemporary pessimistic thought transform the apocalypse from a singular catastrophic event into a repetitive structure. Special attention is devoted to the early visions of the end of the world in the works of Karel Čapek and Andrey Platonov, where the issues of technology, labor, exhaustion, and the language of revolutionary eschatology become connected to a broader anthroponegative temptation. This temptation is one that acquires new dimensions in contemporary speculative fiction through the work of Liu Cixin. The central thesis of the article is that, through the postponement and repetition of the end, a specific form of subjective humor emerges, in which human extinction begins to acquire the structure of a joke, while the apocalypse itself turns into a comic mode of existence.