A ira dos espectros inúteis: o terror em duas variações contemporâneas do Macbeth, de Shakespeare

We begin with the idea of wrath as a motor of history, as developed by Peter Sloterdijk in his article “The New Grapes of Wrath: Post Communism – Neoliberalism – Islamism” (in O Estado do Mundo, Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2006). Given the holistic centrality of contemporary capitalism, I follow Sloterdijk’s claim that the threatening and regulatory potential of the Communist “thymotic energy” is outdated. The wrathful spectrums which, on the contrary, fed the European social model have thus been transformed into “useless spectrums” (Richard Sennett), marginalized by a constant threat of assessment. Islamic terrorism does not, therefore, renew a productive wrath, but rather constitutes another side of this new emptiness (a concept which has led to the need for intersubjective recognition, here related to two recent variations on Shakespeare’s Macbeth).