Cultural apocalypse and capitalist realism, the debate around the end of the/a world

In Capitalist Realism, Fisher intervenes in the debate on the end of history starting from an interpretation of the apocalyptic fiction Children of Men as a symbol of the current sterility of culture to innovate. From there, Fisher deploys the notion of "capitalist realism" as a synthesis of the colonization of the cultural imagination by economic reason in neoliberalism. In this way, he re-actualizes Jameson's dictum that, today, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism". In this essay, I propose to put Fisher's theory in dialogue with that of the anthropologist Ernesto de Martino, who in his last and unfinished project tried to explore in depth the characteristics of the apocalyptic ethos in which the West was already immersed. De Martino develops a theory of apocalypse as an anthropological trope in dialectical terms, constantly oscillating between the risk of a definitive collapse of the existing universe of meaning and its eschatological reintegration into a new cultural order. According to his thesis, culture mobilizes a cyclical temporality in which, unlike Fisher's, the future as a project does not play a central role. Instead, the anthropologist understands culture as an organizing ethos that established a functional and specific intersubjective space. In this sense, cultural apocalypse has more to do with the impulse of refunding a common space than with the enclosure of the historical continuum. My aim is to show how the contrasted and combined analysis of these two discourses serves to reconceptualize the cultural crisis from a new perspective, contributing to the long debate on the end of history as a crisis of the political imagination in which Fukuyama, Jameson, Fisher himself and, much earlier, Benjamin have participated.