Pornografia della catastrofe. Morte individuale e morte collettiva nell’era dell’Antropocene

This article aims at analysing how a particular representation of (individual and collective) death is symptom of a particular organization of culture and symbolic representations. Starting from the reflections of Jankélévitch, Bauman and Gorer, I analyse the characteristics of what could be called “pornography of catastrophe”, i.e. the condition of human being in the Anthropocene faced with the possibility of individual and collective death. The “deconstruction of mortality” and the “deconstruction of immortality” are at the basis of this “pornographic” imaginary, as well as the all-modern and postmodern impossibility of inserting death within the symbolic exchange of our culture (the reference is to Baudrillard). Thus, the pornography of catastrophe feeds in a contradictory way on a series of elements ranging from the need for domination to the quiet of extinction, from the Promethean delirium of a certain transhumanism to the eternal mechanicism/machinism in the representation of Nature (internal and external to the human). Catastrophe is “pornographic” – individualism of the specter and impossibility of symbolic and social elaboration – also from a strictly epistemological and ontological point of view, starting from the uncertainty and indeterminacy of “natural facts” within non-linear systems, denoting a certain difficulty for human moral psychology to adapt to contradictory forms of temporality. Analysing some elements of the so-called collapsologie, death, collapse and impotence seem to be correlated with this “pornographic” attitude, so that reactivating the imagination, at this moment in sapiens' history, becomes an immediately ethical-political task.