Icone della fine. Immagini apocalittiche, filmografie, miti

On the idea of end, as it seems, all our thoughts end up stranding. The thought of end is tangled up in a net of paradoxes and contradictions, whether it is conceived as the individual end we use to call "death" or as the collective end that western tradition conceives through the biblical symbols of Apocalypse or through the empirical paradigm of catastrophe. Nevertheless, imagination can pass the line where concept has to stop, the line beyond which our intellect experiences the dizzy absence of thought that comes with the idea of the end. We can't really think the idea of end, so on the end grows a wide and luxuriant forest of images. The project of Modern Age, with its affirmation of that particular form of absolutism of reality which aims to take the tecno-scientific and productive capacity of human kind to extremes, starts up a gigantic mechanism which removes the issue of end. This is the ideology of progress, that is to say the cosmic and historical projection of that same faith in infinite which used to characterize ancient Christian culture. But nowadays the adventure of Modern Age has finished. The crisis we are living in (which includes all the ecological, economic and political levels of crisis we are afflicted by) poses again the problem of end. For this reason, the imagination of end and of its symbolical and figurative dimensions is again of great importance. The "icons of end" that have been elaborated during the wide path of western tradition reoccupy the blank pages of our present, the spaces of our social imagery that now coincide with the myths of mass culture, motion pictures and popular narratives: Titanic, Apocalypse Now, The Day After, vampires, Frankenstein, mummies, up to the more recent and exotic zombies. This book offers a journey among images of individual and collective apocalypses that have always haunted the human mind.