The Atomic Fear: Translating (Post)Marxist Fantasies About the End of Times

Abstract

This article focuses on the topic of the nuclear fear and its ideological use in Italy during the period of the Cold War (1950s–1980s). I argue that the debate on nuclear weapons in Italy played an important role especially among intellectuals affiliated with the Italian Communist Party, in a delicate historical moment between the crisis of traditional Marxist Communism and the rising of the New Left. By contextualizing the subject of the nuclear bomb in Italy within the theoretical categories of realism and symbolism in the first half of the article, I demonstrate how the representation of the atomic bomb in the 1950s and 60s was caught up in the representative framework of Marxist realism. In doing so, I concentrate on a special issue of the periodical Il Verri and on the finale of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’eclisse. In the second part, I describe how the debate about the atomic weapon transitioned from reality to symbol through an analysis of the topic of nuclear fear in Paolo Volponi’s novels Corporale and Il pianeta irritabile. In conclusion, I emphasize how the atomic explosion becomes a symbol for a psychoanalytical state of melancholia, following a perceived loss of Marxism as a viable answer to socio-economic problems, as a way to decipher this period of modern Italian history. Nevertheless, I ultimately suggest that the apocalyptic images of destruction, both in Volponi and Antonioni, bear a messianic message of social change and suggest the possibility of a post-Marxist ideology taking place in the new world order.