De Martino e l’Antropocene

This article discusses Ernesto De Martino’s reflections on the end of the world and shows their being perfectly organic to the present-day ‘culture of the Anthropocene’, concerned as it is with the sense of its own ending. While first presenting the end of the world as a physiological cultural theme, which appears in every culture based on either a cyclical or a linear conception of time, De Martino – as this article explains – later came to a more dramatic interpretation, reading the end of the world as an upsetting anthropological risk. To overcome it, he ideated the concept of ‘ethical time’, which allowed to envisage a new kind of history, no longer linked to a particular society or culture, but concerning the whole humanity.This article discusses Ernesto De Martino’s reflections on the end of the world and shows their being perfectly organic to the present-day ‘culture of the Anthropocene’, concerned as it is with the sense of its own ending. While first presenting the end of the world as a physiological cultural theme, which appears in every culture based on either a cyclical or a linear conception of time, De Martino – as this article explains – later came to a more dramatic interpretation, reading the end of the world as an upsetting anthropological risk. To overcome it, he ideated the concept of ‘ethical time’, which allowed to envisage a new kind of history, no longer linked to a particular society or culture, but concerning the whole humanity