The savior and nihilism

Abstract

Superhero narratives imply a profound reflection on the scope of sovereignty and its limits. But this is only a capillary manifestation of a much broader phenomenon embedded in the roots of modernity and its call to violence as destiny. This chapter explores, through Batman, the connection between the contemporary hero and nihilism. It begins with a comparative study of the most paradigmatic “vigilantes” in modernity, starting with Don Quixote and continuing with some major characters of the 19th-century Russian novel, especially Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. Quite the opposite of eccentric, all these heroes are “ultra-centric” because they are obsessed with the lost and are therefore declared enemies of the diversity that emerges from that change. A reference will then be made to the relation between Batman and the Gothic novel as a counter-romantic symbolic setting of the nihilism that possesses these monsters.