“The last outback at the world’s end”: Bob Dylan and Franco Berardi in the Garden of Eden

Abstract

As Marx observed in Capital, the proponents of each one of “the chief moments of primitive accumulation” (i.e. “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India,” and the Atlantic slave trade) sought to justify such acts by invoking the narrative of Genesis 1-3. Recent studies by Roland Boer and Christina Petterson, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, and David Graeber and David Wengrow, among others, have gone further, documenting an extensive pattern of engagement with Genesis 1-3 by the proponents of Western capitalist and colonial development (“Classical economic theory,” Boer and Petterson declare, “turns out to have been wrested from the Fall”). As such, argues Franco Berardi, the development of novel, more humane forms of political and economic relations depends on our ability to reclaim the Eden motif – especially the post-apocalyptic Eden depicted in Revelation – and repurpose it for liberatory ends (to usher in not a second coming of Christ, but a “second coming of Communism”). This paper argues that Berardi’s vision of a “poetic revitalization of language” designed to encourage humankind “to see and to actualize the hidden possibility” of our apocalyptic moment is embodied in the writings of Bob Dylan, whose six-decade canon is marked not only by a sustained engagement with the Eden motif (often in overtly political terms), but by lyrics designed to stimulate our “instinctive”, Eve-like ability to detect beneath capitalism’s “smooth surfaces” all the contradictions its proponents aim to conceal.