The Antichrist Read Online Free PDF

the screen shadows were bound to seem real.
    When, now and then, I come upon an actor whom I recognize because I have seen him in a film in the theatre, it seems to me that because I have seen him on the screen I am not looking at him but at his shadow, although it is certain (and my intelligence tells me so) that he is the originator of the shadow that I know from the screen. Nevertheless, when I meet the living and breathing man he becomes for me a shadow of his own shadow. If it were plausible – that is to say, if it were truly possible to animate the shadows that we project on to the screen with technology’s assistance – I should certainly see in the living actor something more than just himself, a living being. I should rather see a person who has the power to infuse his shadow with the very breath of life. It is thus a mysterious force that condemns a living person, God’s creation, bestowed with the divine gift of being able to animate his shadow on the screen, to appear as his own shadow. Yes, one could say that he is even less than a shadow of himself, since the shadow is actually his true existence;he is not himself but, as it were, his own
doppelgängers
– a
doppelgänger
that has no existence; he is, this actor, the
doppelgänger
of his own shadow, one that he projects on to the screen daily. A single time he had his own form captured on film. A single time, but for all eternity the most fleeting of all fleeting things of our earthly existence (namely a shadow) will last as a reality. To be one’s own
doppelgänger
would in itself be a frightful event! But what can we say to the fact that the
doppelgängers
of their own shadows are among us – living people, walking, living, eating, drinking and loving?
    And it gets still
more
terrible. For even a
doppelgänger
must die – one day both the original
and
his
doppelgänger
will die. And when an ordinary man dies his shadow also disappears. But the actor who plays in the cinema will live for ever on the screen, the only real milieu of his actual life. That is to say, his shadow or, more accurately, his true self (for he is only the
doppelgänger
of his shadow) is ‘eternal’. That is also to say, certain men have lived not as men but as shadows and therefore cannot die. They cannot die because they have never lived. They are shadows. They have willingly, more or less voluntarily, become shadows. They have sold their shadows for money and said these were not shadows but
actually themselves.
And they sold not only their lives; they also sold their deaths. Hollywood paid them. In exchange they forfeited their hope of salvation. They were not only shadows for their entire lives;
they remained shadows after their deaths.
On the screen, for which they had lived when they were still alive, they still had the chance to be alive and remain that way for all eternity. Because during their lifetimes they saw their shadows as themselves and sold them as themselves, and under such circumstances death was not a phenomenon with which they concerned themselves – once they had signed a contract with Hollywood. Perhaps an ordinary man still counts on eternal salvation. But a man who lives by being a shadow while heis alive possesses, as it were, his
own
eternal salvation. He is convinced – and not without merit – that the screen, for which he has already lived as a physical phenomenon, guarantees him a comprehensible, rationally believable eternity even after he is dead. The inventor of film has offered people the prospect of an immortality that they can understand while they yet live. The ancient world knew of a Hades that was the residence of the dead, those who had crossed into the shadow world.
    The world in which we now live knows a Hades of the living – it is the cinema.
Hollywood is the modern Hades.
There, shadows become immortal during one’s lifetime.
    Indeed, ‘modern’ people are