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Androids, titans, zombies and the ending of all endings

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2018

Abstract

The paper focuses on temporal dimension of "Anthropocenic myths". Since when we speak about Anthropocene, we often speak about the end of the world at the same time.

Our present, ranging from philosophy to pop-culture, is thus instinct with apocalyptical, post-apocalyptical and eschatological visions. Yet these terms can be filled with different contents: in fact, we distinguish not just the one, but many ends of the world.

The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro attempted in his text "Arret du monde/Halt of the world" to create a short list of the ends of the world, making the relation between the man and the world the main criteria. We know, for example, stories where the world terminates with the man, but also some visions of the man without the world (such as in post-apocalyptic imagination) or of the world without the man.

This paper builds on Viveiro de Castro's text, but it shifts its focus on the re-presentations of the body and corporeity in contemporary popular myth and the fantastic. What kind of the end of the world do we deal with in a story where zombies roam or where humankind exists alongside androids? What, in contemporary imagery, remains from humans and humanity after the end of the world? In fiction, it is often an approach to the body that reveals what end the mankind has casted upon itself; and the particular end, again, says a lot about the humankind itself.