PHILOSOPHY

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Much has been made of Nietzsche’s most famous pronouncement — that ‘God is dead’. Less has been made of why that is, and what that means.

The assumption of a transcendent entity has fixed our society and inner lives for most of mankind. Such an assumption does not vanish without leaving traces, as the content surrounding Nietzsche’s famous proclamation suggests:

After the Buddha died, people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave – a monstrous and unearthly shadow. God is dead; but given the ways of men, perhaps for millennia to come there will be caves in which His shadow will be shown (emphasis mine).

The ‘caves in which [God’s] shadow will be shown’ refer to God’s insistence upon modern society in the form of a haunting, or various symptoms. That is, where a traumatic event occurs that changes one’s relationship with the world, psychoanalytic theory from Freud to Lacan suggests that trauma unconsciously persists in symptoms and insists on active human behaviour. For instance, if a child’s mother did something traumatic to a child, the child (once grown) will not necessarily bear a conscious grudge towards their mother, but will still exhibit unconscious symptoms of the repressed trauma. If the child’s mother was a travel agent, for example, and this was a source of trauma for the child, the child may become a recluse through having developed an unconscious phobia of travel.

In the case of traumatic events affecting the social consciousness, such as the death of a collective faith, the persistence of trauma through symptoms of behaviour are less ascertainable. Nonetheless, I argue that the ‘death of God’ informs both our political and popular landscape.

1. Political

God is dead; the ghost of this repressed trauma haunts human behaviour, leaving a craving for messianic authority figures.

2. Popular

However, the development of quasi-divine political figures is nothing new. Many monarchies were historically legitimised through the belief that rulers were divinely ordained. The subterranean symptom of the process of secularisation instead arguably finds its most profound articulation in popular culture, through the rise of supernatural horror and fantastical literature.

The Christian God thus inspires awe and terror. The symptom of the collective loss of religious awe manifests in politics; I argue the loss of terror manifests itself in the rise of supernatural horror. Horror movies have never been more fashionable, and fantastical literature is a touchstone of popular culture. Thus does the ‘fear of God’ leave its ‘shadow’: in the world of vampires, ghosts, and monsters.

For another perspective on this ‘shadow’, pair with Walter Benjamin’s Capitalism as Religion, which argues that capitalism itself functions like a collective faith: demanding continuous devotion, generating guilt, and offering consumption as a form of secular salvation.