Duane Armitage, “The Displacement of the Sacred in Modern Film: Film Nihilism from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Barbie and Deadpool”

About This Event

Duane Armitage will give the talk “The Displacement of the Sacred in Modern Film: Film Nihilism from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Barbie and Deadpool,"  as part of the Faith, Film, Philosophy 2024 series on the topic Spiritual Film Themes in a Secular Age.

Contemporary popular films manifest an eclipse of the sacred that reflects the secularism of wider culture. Insight into the marginalization of sacred themes in film can be found in Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s understanding of secularism, nihilism, and the death of God. The sacred, for Heidegger and Nietzsche, represents the metaphysical, that is, the transcendent world that grounds meaning, truth, and morality. The death of God primarily then represents the collapse of this supersensible world and its relocation elsewhere; for Nietzsche, the worry is its relocation in weakness and in the “victim,” for Heidegger, its relocation remains in the machinations of modern science and technology. Contemporary films such as Barbie and Deadpool illustrate aspects of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s diagnoses, such as the sacralization of the victim and the resort to imaginary worlds as alternatives to the metaphysical. Through Nietzsche and Heidegger, I argue that these elements represent distortions of metaphysics and morality that can only be grounded and made sense of in Christianity.

Duane Armitage, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Scranton, is a scholar of continental philosophy with specialization in Nietzsche and Heidegger, especially the theological dimensions of their thought. His books include Heidegger and the Death of God (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) and Philosophy's Violent Sacred: Heidegger and Nietzsche through Mimetic Theory (MSU Press 2021). Armitage has special interest in the social, cultural, and theological implications of the Death of God.

This event is part of Faith, Film, and Philosophy 2024, sponsored by the Gonzaga Faith & Reason Institute.