Page - 34 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

world surrounding them, which is brought about by the hegemony of neo-liber- al capitalism and its concurrent forms of civilisation.7 In a similar vein, but with regard to the rise of fascism, Walter Benjamin con- cluded his famous The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) as follows: “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”8 The proliferation of apocalyptic tales in contemporary future fictions also allows for the conclusion that once again humanity has reached a point at which there is a certain aesthetic pleasure involved in contemplating its own destruction: “Catastrophe on a global scale remains a curiously popular form of screen entertainment.[…] Such narratives not only seem strange visual companions to popcorn and ice cream, but also are highly marketable.”9 In an at- tempt to explain this odd phenomenon of taking pleasure in contemplating the end of the world as we know it, Elizabeth Rosen follows a similar interpretation: “No doubt, we do love apocalypses too much. But given that the world some- times appears to be coming apart at its economic, political, and social seams and that there is ‘more and more information, and less and less meaning’ (Beaudril- lard Simulation and Simulacra), our fascination with the apocalyptic myth is cer- tainly understandable.”10 The contemporary human subject under late capitalist conditions is thus not only fundamentally estranged but also irredeemably over- charged with the complexities of this world and the proliferating information that circulates within it without creating much viable meaning for individuals and local communities, as Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy also illustrates. “APOCALYPSE” NOW AND THEN Margaret Atwood’s future fictions Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam are all written around an apocalyptic event which wipes out al- most the entire human civilisation on Earth and which would therefore certainly be seen as catastrophic by ordinary standards. Here it becomes evident that the meaning of “apocalypse”, originally derived from the biblical Story of Revela- tion, has undergone a profound semantic shift up to the present. While in pop- ular fiction today, “apocalyptic” is often understood as catastrophic and thus 7 Cf. Critical theory on capitalism and alienation ranging from Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1932), via Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944), to contemporary works like Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (2013). 8 Benjamin 2008, 42. 9 Tate 2017, 13. 10 Rosen 2008, xi. 34 | Stephanie Bender www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 31–50