Cultural Apocalypse

Abstract

The traumatic experience engendered by September 11 may be fruitfully viewed through Ernesto De Martino’s heuristic category of ‘cultural Apocalypse’. According to the Italian anthropologist, the Apocalypse is a long-standing archetype whose symbolic import exceeds the religious landscape, to flood across many other cultural domains such as politics, philosophy, literature and the arts. For De Martino, the archetype’s primary meaning would not hint at the violent annihilation of the mundane sphere along with all the forms of life contained in it but, rather, at the diffused and unsettling perception of the impending end of a given cultural order. In De Martino’s words, experiencing an apocalypse implies first of all a ‘loss of presence’, that is, being cast outside any possible secular or religious horizon of salvation, completely detached from the familiar, facing without any comfort the diabolical unhinging of all that has been known.²

It makes little sense to call September 11 the most horrible case of terrorism in history, but it was the most spectacular. Al Qaeda’s instinct for symbols ensured this much success: a nearly global perception that our ability to navigate the world was infinitely more precarious than it had been the day before. The perception was so wide and swift that for the first time in history not space but time became shorthand. If naming a city — Lisbon or Auschwitz — was enough for early ages to record deepest shock and horror, the twenty-first century began by naming a date.¹