| Summary: | Based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and its film adaptation Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola, my aim in this dissertation is to put two powerful human constituents head to head - genius (the gift of artistic creation) and evil, that is, the physis and its negative. Following an initial examination of the relationship between these forces which are so integral to and primordial in the construction of human identity, I follow the clues that both Conrad and Copolla leave us in the abovementioned works, building the concept, throughout this theoretical text, that both the gift of artistic creation and evil can reside in the same identity abyss which exists in the innermost part of each one of us. There, the possibility of creation and destruction may simultaneously exist. This premise immediately begs the question - Could it be that the artistic representation of evil allows us to touch upon it without leading to contamination from it or, in contrast, like Conrad's Kurtz, we take the risk of entering the Heart of Darkness and from there be restrained by our inner evil? The answer that we rehearse here sets of from the following hypothesis: The horror of the abyss of otherness may, therefore, be what compels those who possess the gift of artistic creation - or genius - to go on a journey into their own inner void, into their heart of darkness. However, when confronted with what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe refers to as the "complete absence of the self" by going on this journey into their own abyss, artists may succumb to vertigo. And, if they do not adhere to the plan that Nature intended for them by bestowing this gift upon them - not bringing a masterpiece back from the abyss - they may unload evil (in another way).
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