The End of the World. Capitalism and Mutation.

  • Daniele Balicco Università degli studi di Siena
Keywords: Anthropological Mutation, End of the world, Capitalism, Initiation, Collective unconscious

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show a possible way to investigate the radical transformation of everyday life in Western societies that, from Pier Paolo Pasolini, we started to define by the term “mutation”. This article will propose three possible research hypothesis. Can we read the “mutation” as a radical leap in the history of the human adaptation to our biophysical and social habitat? Or, more simply, the current transformation of the elementary forms of everyday life must be interpreted as a cultural metamorphosis internal to the long history of the capitalistic "creative destruction"? Finally, is there a way to try to investigate our age by the overlapping of these two different temporal logics?

If we interpret the present as the result of a struggle between different and conflicting temporalities, we may read the increasingly occurrence of aesthetic representation of the end of the world (in films, novels and critical theories) as a symptom of a more general crisis of human abilities to symbolize the time. Moreover, we may also try to grasp the meaning of some symbolic mass consumption - such as video games, pornography, drugs, tattoos, and so on – with an anthropological prospective. The idea is to investigate these practices as rites of initiation that have been blocked. Finally we will read all this practices as an unconscious and collective demand for a deep and personal experience of time that our new microelectronic age does not know and does not know yet to think.

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Author Biography

Daniele Balicco, Università degli studi di Siena
Daniele Balicco is a PhD researcher and free-lance Journalist. He published a volume on Franco Fortini, Non parlo a tutti. Franco Fortini intellettuale politico (2006). He is member of the editorial board of the journals "Allegoria" and "L'ospite ingrato". He also collaborates with the editorial project Altronovecento (Jakabook publisher), with the newspaper "Il Manifesto" and with the website: www.leparoleelecose.it

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Sitografia

Bellofiore, Riccardo, “Il capitale come feticcio automatico e come soggetto, e la sua costituzione: sulla (dis)continuità Marx-Hegel”, Consecutio Temporum, 5 (2013)

http://www.consecutio.org/2013/10/il-capitale-come-feticcio-automatico-e-come-soggetto-e-la-sua-costituzione-sulla-discontinuita-marx-hegel/ (ultimo accesso 10/01/2015).

Published
2015-11-30
How to Cite
Balicco, D. (2015). The End of the World. Capitalism and Mutation. Between, 5(10). https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/1810
Section
Logics of Power, Practices of Resistance