“The Death of Man” in the name of The House that Jack Built

The modern era, according to Merab Mamardashvili, can be characterized as a time of anthropological catastrophe. In this regard, it seems more relevant than ever to turn to European attempts to comprehend this phenomenon. The appeal to Nietzsche's philosophy clearly shows the beginning of the desire of the Western tradition to overcome God and man. As a result, the most influential thinkers of the 20th century dissolve the status of a person and deny him his existential uniqueness. The analysis of the views on the human problem of the thinkers Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Baudrillard, and Derrida shows that there is a change in the status of a person in philosophy. The devaluation of man in the space of European philosophy, as well as a change in attitudes towards death in general, entails the emergence of such a phenomenon of modern culture as thanatopathy. The transformation of the attitude towards death on the part of a person is analyzed in the article through addressing Philippe Aries' play L'Homme Devant la Mort [Man in the Face of Death], which shows how a person's attitude to death has changed and what caused these changes. The “death of God” declared by Nietzsche entails the “death of man” because man and God belong to each other. It is these phenomena, in the author's opinion, that the modern Danish film director Lars von Trier is trying to comprehend in his work. The author's perspective continues the attempts already existing in the scientific research field to trace the reception of Nietzsche's ideas in Trier's work. Analyzing his latest film The House that Jack Built (2018), the author argues that in it the director is trying to make sense of the situation of “human death” in modern intellectual thought. Trier's film, in the author's opinion, becomes a great metaphor, which shows the world where God and Man died, and also explores the Nietzschean superman and the “beast of prey”. The main methods used in the article are philosophical, anthropological and textual analyses. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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