READING GROUP | LA FINE DEL MONDO

22 April and 13 May 2024

with Daniele Balicco

After two appointments dedicated to Franco Fortini and bell hooks, IUNO’s third reading group focuses on the Italian anthropologist, historian of religions and philosopher Ernesto De Martino taking in consideration his unfinished masterpiece La fine del mondo (The End of the World), a contribution to the analysis of cultural apocalypses , on which he worked since the second half of the 1950s.
The volume is a text of comparative anthropology, written in a cultural climate dominated - just like today - by the fear of an atomic apocalypse.
De Martino investigates this fear as a symptom of a long-term cultural trajectory, within which Western culture reveals its symbolic fragility. In this essay, the Italian anthropologist tries to understand its meaning by reconstructing a history of the rituals of the end of the world (in classical culture, in anthropology, in the history of religions), comparing it with contemporary forms, such as novels, paintings, music scores, critical theories, political movements, psychiatric reports.
In his analysis, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, Western culture began to increasingly produce forms and the themes In his analysis, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, Western culture began to increasingly produce forms and themes that are uncannily similar to ancient rituals of the end of the world, experienced in different times and geographies. With a remarkable difference, though. Western culture is forcefully expressing the desire to "lose presence", that is, to experience the knowledge of the sensorial and emotional abysses that open beyond everyday experience, to the point of the possibility of self-destruction. However, Western culture doesn’t possess the rituals, the symbolic techniques and above all the qualitative control of time with which both classical culture and non-Western cultures have always protected these forms of knowledge from the possibility that they were trulytransformed into the end of individual and collective life.