Western thought has moved by opposing reality and appearance. But from the beginning, with Hesiod and then with the Neoplatonists, the world is presented as if it were made up of a song, or several songs, and therefore by true or truth-like narratives. Nietzsche takes up this tradition, so to speak lateral, and affirms, overturning the philosophical tradition of the West, that there are no facts but only interpretations and that the path to truth is entrusted precisely to the ability to give form to this set of interpretations. This is the panorama of modernity, even of our modernity. What characterizes the narratives of the 20th century is the disappearance of the future. The heroes of these narratives are Kafka's K. and Vladimir and Estragon who, in Waiting for Godot, await whoever will come. In extreme modernity, in our contemporaneity, the corrosion of time, and of the future in particular, has also modified the grammar of common language, from which the possibility of articulating our expectations has disappeared, just as the subjunctives and conditionals that constituted the space of the possible against the empire of the present have dissolved. Film narration also confronts this different perception of time. Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola is a dramatic example. The film begins with the word “end” from the song The End by Jim Morrison. As Eliot wrote: “What we call the beginning is often the end” and “the end is where we start from”. The film proceeds with a revisitation of some great mythical elements of the West, the journey, the quest, or pre-Western ones like sacrifice. Everything implodes in the end in the now, in the time now, in the eon of the present on which, as Jakob Taubes wrote, the breath of death blows.
Franco Rella teaches Aesthetics at the Faculty of Design and Arts-Iuav Venice. He is the author of numerous essays and books, reprinted and translated several times, on the intersection of philosophical reflection with thought expressed through art and literature. His most recent books: l silenzio e le parole (2001), Figure del male (2002), Miti e figure del moderno (2002), Dall’esilio. La creazione artistica come testimonianza (2004), Scritture estreme. Proust e Kafka (2005), L’enigma della bellezza (2006), Micrologie (2007), La responsabilità del pensiero (2009).