Hannibal Lecter - Den Nietzscheanska Antihjälten: Mordet som estetisering och mening i det senmoderna samhället

Sammanfattning: The intent with this bachelor thesis is to examine the aesthete serial killer and aesthetical serial killings as representation and identification in late modern society. By combining representational theory and Nietzschean philosophy the thesis wants to explore how the philosophy of early modernity has shaped ideological and existential representation, manifest and reproduced in popular
culture, and how this reproduction can be interpreted as metaphor in contemporary society. The thesis will therefore explore the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter in NBC’s Hannibal. By exploring the aesthetical murders and the construction of the Hannibal Lecter character in the light of sociological theory and Nietzschean philosophy, the thesis will show how the fictional aestethical
murder and aesthete killer internalize different, sometimes paradoxal, discourses as a cultural manifestation of industrial seriality, Renaissance holistics and fascist/nazi elitism. The thesis will also show how this manifestation is brought together in a discourse shaped by Friedrich Nietzsches
philosophy regarding the will to power, the Übermensch and individualistic self realisation. In this discourse, strengthened by the moral relativism the Hannibal narrative presents, the formation of an Nietzschean antihero can take place, undermining the discourse of violence as pathological behavior presented by the morals of modern society and the clinical psychiatry. By analyzing the fictional serial killer as metaphor and identification, the thesis would like to help put the existential position of the modern citizen in perspective, and by that maybe tell something about the place of man in a technological, institutionalized world.