Apokalipsa spełniona. Casus epidemii AIDS

Disasters are hardly ever unequivocal. Any attempt to sort them out remains a forever open task. A natural part of everyday life in the past, disasters have been reinvented by the modern world as a challenge that essentially needs to be eliminated from public life. Due to the dramatic expansion of humans and human activity, one can hardly call them ‘natural’ anymore. This article focuses on disasters and their significant culture-forming potential, discussing it primarily on the example of the AIDS epidemic. With this new epidemic, the catastrophic vision of history was rekindled and a specific (post-)apocalyptic social climate was created. AIDS, called the plague of the 20th century, revived the language and symbolism characteristic of many earlier epidemics. The impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic was extremely powerful, ‘infecting’ the social iconosphere with a specific malady-oriented aesthetics. This process can be particularly seen in popular culture texts and in the space of participatory culture.