Abstract

This article is based on the series The Handmaid’s Tale (Miller, 2017), as a starting point to inquire about the proliferation of dystopian fictions in contemporary audiovisual productions, currently postulated as symptom and treatment of horror. Starting from the pain of existing inherent to the subjects of language, both mourning and melancholia are outlined as possible responses to the traumatic, either due to the very incidence of language on the body, or due to the events and contingencies to which it is related. it is exposed in a singular life and in society. A position that does not reject the trauma allows a mode of treatment to be delineated; that a desire and an ethical subject can arise there, to the detriment of the risk of its own disappearance.

Keywords Dystopia | extimacy | pain of existing | duel | melancholia | trauma | wish | ethics.