Apocalyptic Cinema Kierkegaard

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The access to the contents of this doctoral thesis it is limited to the acceptance of the use conditions set by the following Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en PhD Dissertation Apocalyptic Cinema as an Earnest Thought of Death Kierkegaard and Melancholia Roger Mas Soler PhD Programme: Philosophy Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - Department of Philosophy Københavns Universitet - Department of Arts and Cultural Studies Supervisor: Dr Begonya Saez Tajafuerce (UAB) Co-Supervisor: Isak Winkel Holm (KU) Co-Supervisor: Laura Llevadot Pascual (UB) 2017 Écoutant, en effet, les cris d’allégresse qui montaient de la ville, Rieux se souvenait que cette allégresse était toujours menacée. Car il savait ce que cette foule en joie ignorait, et qu’on peut lire dans les livres, que le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne disparaît jamais, qu’il peut rester pendant des dizaines d’années endormi dans les meubles et le lingue, qu’il attend patiemment dans les chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les paperasses, eu que, peut-être, le jour viendrait où, pour le malheur et l’enseignement des hommes, la peste réveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité heureuse. La Peste, Albert Camus Acknowledgments To my family, for their unconditional love and support, and for creating everyday new occasions for me to be grateful to them. Especially to my mother, for her endless sacrifices, which I do not deserve. To all my friends, for everything. I have no words to describe how much I owe them. Their presence has filled my life with great happiness. My eternal gratitude to Ignasi and Toni, for sustaining me when I was unable to stand on my own. To my colleagues in the United States and Denmark, for to accompanying me and helping me in this process. To Guðmundur, Rasmus, Claus, Sam, and Uroš, for their love when I was going through one of the worst periods of my life. To Bjarke and Stine, for their friendship, advices, and assistance. To the Hong Kierkegaard Library, the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research, the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona— with a special mention to its Department of Philosophy—for accepting me as a researcher. To all the people of these institutions, for their teachings and for providing me with the means to carry out my investigation. To Gordon Marino and Cynthia Lund for their dedication. To the Government of Catalonia for granting me a FI fellowship, which allowed me to write this dissertation. To my teachers and to my students, who have made me a better professor and a better person. To Isak and Laura, for their collaboration. To Begonya, for putting her trust in me, for her supervision, and for her tireless commitment. Without her this dissertation would not have been possible. In loving memory of my grandparents. 5 Abstract The aim of this dissertation is to argue the potentiality of some apocalyptic movies to be a special occasion to think earnestly about one’s own death in the terms explained by Søren Kierkegaard in the discourse “At a Graveside” (1845). In order accomplish this, I will first examine Kierkegaard’s thoughts on death in his corpus, in which he criticises the external understanding of death and underlines its inexplicability and its irreducible subjective aspect. In this section I will focus specifically on what is stated in the aforesaid discourse. Second, I will defend cinema itself as a privileged medium to convey the apocalyptic imaginary. Third, I will examine the field of apocalyptic movies in order to define a type of cinema—which will be called montrage apocalyptic cinema—that, in the light of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on death in “At a Graveside”, will be considered as a special occasion to think earnestly about one’s own death. In this regard, I will argue that, for their features—which revolve around the essential ambiguity of our existence—, these apocalyptic films have the capacity to allow us to subjectively confront and appropriate the thought of one’s own death. And finally, I will analyse Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) as a paradigmatic example of this type of montrage apocalyptic cinema. 6 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. 5 Abstract .............................................................................................................................. 6 Abbreviations of Søren Kierkegaard’s works ................................................................. 11 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 15 1. Methodological introduction ....................................................................................... 17 1.1. Genesis and objectives......................................................................................... 17 1.2. Structure, state of the art, limits, and exclusions ................................................. 20 1.3. Final methodological considerations ................................................................... 25 2. The thought of one’s own death .................................................................................. 27 2.1. Awareness of mortality ........................................................................................ 27 2.2. Death as taboo in contemporary Western societies ............................................. 28 2.3. Critiques of the taboo argument .......................................................................... 31 2.4. The contemporary episteme of death................................................................... 36 3. Approach to Kierkegaard ............................................................................................ 39 3.1. Authorship, indirect communication, and the hermeneutic problem .................. 39 3.2. The single individual: subjectivity, truth, and anxiety ........................................ 52 3.3. Kierkegaard as a key strain in the philosophy of death ....................................... 58 Chapter I: Death in Kierkegaard ................................................................................. 65 1. Early writings .............................................................................................................. 67 2. Middle writings ........................................................................................................... 80 3. Late writings ................................................................................................................ 87 4. “At a Graveside” .......................................................................................................... 92 4.1. Preamble .............................................................................................................. 92 4.2. The Epicurean position ........................................................................................ 93 4.3. Memento mori and living as dying ...................................................................... 94 4.4. The problem of representation ............................................................................. 97 4.5. The earnest thought of death ............................................................................. 102 4.6. The certain uncertainty of death ........................................................................ 109 4.7. The fear of death ................................................................................................ 111 4.8. Death’s retroactive power .................................................................................. 113 4.9. The temporal double-movement of the earnest thought of death ...................... 117 7 4.10. The earnest thought of death and repetition .................................................... 121 4.11. Self-examination .............................................................................................. 134 4.12. Final notes ....................................................................................................... 136 4.13. One step further ............................................................................................... 137 Chapter II: Apocalyptic Cinema ................................................................................ 139 1. Historical approach .................................................................................................... 141 1.1. Pervasiveness of apocalypticism ....................................................................... 141 1.2. Apocalypse as a literary genre ........................................................................... 144 1.3. Sources of the apocalyptic genre ....................................................................... 146 1.4. Contemporary nuclear dread ............................................................................. 151 1.5. Secularisation of the apocalypse and penetration in popular culture ................ 153 1.6. Mass appeal of

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