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compare spesso nella narrativa ballardiana, e in genere è gratuita, almeno apparentemente, come
accade in Millennium People (2003), il cui protagonista viene coinvolto in attentati che esprimono
sì un malessere sociale, ma la cui manifestazione è velleitaria e inconcludente. Ancora una volta,
come in The Crystal World, ci troviamo di fronte a un legame con un testo di Joseph Conrad. Se nel
primo caso si trattava del viaggio verso il cuore della foresta africana, qui si tratta appunto della
violenza di tipo terrorista, come l’attentato all’Osservatorio di Greenwich organizzato da Verloc, il
protagonista di The Secret Agent (1907). In Millennium People, a partire da un attentato
all’aeroporto di Heathrow, lo psicologo David Markham viene coinvolto nelle attività eversive di
alcuni abitanti del quartiere-bene londinese di Chelsea Marina, guidati da Gould, intellettuale dai
comportamenti criminali, figura ricorrente negli ultimi romanzi di Ballard, che vuole spingere alla
ribellione le classi medie, vittime della società consumistica che ne svuota di senso l’esistenza 69 .
Tra gli elementi di maggiore importanza nella narrativa ballardiana vi è il rapporto
dell’uomo con lo spazio e il tempo, decisamente rilevante anche per Bataille. Benjamin Noys
osserva: «[…] for Bataille it is impossibile to completely separate the spatial from the temporal, in
particular because spatial arrangements also dictate an experience of time» 70 . Osservando l’obelisco
eretto a Parigi in Place de la Concorde, dove fu ghigliottinato Luigi XVI, Bataille vede il
monumento come un tentativo fallito di controllare lo spazio e il tempo 71 . Come vedremo in
documented according to what he considered to be degenerative acts of sexual perversity (these perversities ranged
from benign fetishistic attachments to cannibalism and necrophilia). […] Krafft-Ebing’s medico-forensic study of
sexual perversity was a closed and official history of psychopathology. Yet, in this reconfiguration of this text, Ballard
pulls a revisionary masterstroke. Appropriating one of Krafft-Ebing’s designated perversions – ‘cannibalism’ – as a
metaphor for heretical authorship, Ballard invites us, the lay readers, to write an alternative set of narratives.» Ivi, p. 77.
69 «What Ballard defends as the “morally free psychopathology of metaphor, as an element in one’s dreams” [Revell,
“Interview with J.G. Ballard”, p. 47], is, when carried over by those who literalise metaphor into the domain where it
has no place, an id-driven psychopathology that lays waste to human life. This is less Nietzsche’s ‘beyond good and
evil’, and more Freud’s: “The id of course knows no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality” [Freud, New
Introductory Lectures, p.107]. Conrad was no less aware of this psychopathology than Ballard, except that the text
which exemplifies it is not Lord Jim but The Secret Agent. As in Millennium People, in which Gould insists that acts of
terror only have the power to disturb if they are pointless, so in The Secret Agent the Professor argues that “madness
and despair are a force” and that with such a force he can “move the world” [J. Conrad, The Secret Agent, p. 248]. In
both texts the apparent pointlessness of terror is its point: it is a brutal manifestation of the refusal of all moral and
social categories in the belief that senseless destruction opens up the channel to an authenticity of the solitary will and a
meaning defying sublimity. By blowing a hole in space-time, terror announces in as visceral and public manner as
possible its revolt against sociality itself. In The Secret Agent there is a reference to “sudden holes in space and time”
that permit terrorist explosions to take place: see p. 76. In Millennium People the terrorist bomb is that which “force[s] a
violent rift through time and space, and rupture[s] the logic that [holds] the world together” [Millennium People, p.
182]. Neither the Professor nor Gould has any political programme, and both are driven by monologic and deeply
infantile conceptions of the world that refuse to acknowledge the inescapability of contingency and shun the claims of
intersubjectivity. All that is then left are solitary id-driven wills proclaiming their right to assert themselves through acts
of motiveless violence in which any notion of ethical truth or programmatic social change has long since been
obliterated.» A. Gasiorek, op. cit., p. 212.
70 Benjamin Noys, op. cit., p. 71.
71 «The obelisk is an attempt by man “to set the most stable limits on the deleterious movement of time” [Visions of
Excess, p. 216], it is an attempt to control both space and time. As the anthropologist Marc Augé makes clear, “The
monument, as the Latin etymology of the word indicates, is an attempt at the tangible expression of permanence or, at
the very least, duration. Gods need shrines, as sovereigns need thrones and palaces, to place them above temporal
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