Destituire la macchina. Science-fiction e filosofia (Marker, Gilliam, Carpenter)

The present essay focus on three cinematic science-fiction: Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962); John Carpenter’s They Live (1988); Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995). These three paradigms – implying subtle and ramified relations between dystopia and uchrony – are investigated in the light of the concept of “machine” and “Mac Guffin” plumbed, respectively, by Furio Jesi and Alfred Hitchcock. The thesis of the essay is the following: that science-fiction is a product consubstantial to Capitalism. More: that it is a product that shows dreams and nightmares of Monsieur Le Capital. Or rather: that it is a mythological machine; an ideological dissimulation of reality. It is therefore a question of deconstructing this machine. Not so much in order to trace it back to a primordial substance, but rather – by means of an accelerationist impulse – to bring the functionalism of the machine to completion: by dismissing it and – perhaps – recomposing it otherwise.