Apocalypse Here and Now

Abstract

The apocalyptic references included in the zombie filmography, and the messianic and Christological references present in LaBruce’s latest films, simultaneously evoke an “end of times” and a new beginning, a fracture in the present that is not a projection of the future but a busting of subjectivity into modernity. Thus they invite a turning toward the past, so as to retrace the origin of those cultural apparatuses that curb the imaginary and render the thought of this temporality exceptional. There are many possible paths that can be taken, but the one that I would particularly like to focus on leads to an investigation into the political ontology upon which the Oedipal “futurist” ideology is founded, the ideology that constitutes the polemic objective of antisocial queer theories. Edelman, as well as Bersani and de Lauretis, contrasts the subject of the drive with a not-well-delineated liberal subject who is devoted to the attainment of social recognition, usefulness and pleasure. Despite the fact that in the United States the adjective “liberal” has an undertone of meaning that distinguishes it from the Italian “liberale,”¹ it is undeniable that the subject against whom the three thinkers argue is none other than the current and politically correct version of the individual who is at once a citizen and a subject of the modern state (and of that which is left of it in the postmodern world of globalization). Suspending judgment about what the reality of the human is, I will attempt now to explore that theoretical smithy of the political modern imaginary in which both the individual and the state are shaped: the thought that Thomas Hobbes developed in Elements of Law Natural and Politic (1640),² in De cive (1642) and above all in Leviathan (1651). I will investigate the temporality in which Hobbes positions individuals, and the one which, instead, he renders inaccessible to them. Finally, I will show how within the temporality of the state, beneath or above it, the opening of another temporal dimension has always been possible. To this end, moving continually in reverse on this journey, I will invite readers to glance at two traditions of thought that historically precede the break enacted by Western modernity in Christianity, but that linger in it like specters: the Hebrew and the classic Greek. After the zombie, before it, we will meet other monstrous figures of the end of times, and other metaphors of the bestiality of the human.

Translation by Julia Heim

Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.(William Shakespeare, Hamlet)