Cultural apocalypses and psychopathological apocalypses

Abstract

The article thematizes the apocalypses, analyzing literary documents, produced in the modern West, either as expressions of the crisis of bourgeois society, or as its end, in the perspective of a Marxist apocalyptic. The author makes use of works by important literati, such as Sartre, Moravia, Camus, to show how, in contemporary times, a phenomenology of the impossibility of being is manifested in fiction, which he collates with psychiatric records - of Janet in particular - of reports of the experience of madness. These texts are revealing, according to De Martino's argument, of the tangency between an acute social crisis, whose modalities take place in different contexts, and individual psychic crises. The latter, which do not have devices equivalent to those of the popular religious tradition, are meticulously narrated by those who suffer them as a loss of presence, of the perceptive references of the collectively instituted and recognized reality. Methodologically, in summary, De Martino compares contemporary apocalyptic and psychopathological apocalypses, facing a task that is posed not only to historians and anthropologists, but to other humans of our time, in the face of the dissipation of the ethos of transcendence, valuing life. From this dissipation, we are faced with the prospect of catastrophe, due to the nuclear conflict, a risk that De Martino already pointed out, or due to the environmental collapse that, at his time, was not yet revealed with such force on our horizon. Thus, one of the riches of the text, among others, is that of anticipating, for reflection on the human sciences, the connection between the subjective experience of the end, including in this the solipsism of madness and its end-of-the-world delusions, and the objective risks that weigh on us.