/lit/ - Literature

>>12633429
>The Enlightenment, it would seem, has no original commitment to democracy. On the contrary, the issue was contested from the start.
>maybe it goes without saying, but this is one of the central fallacies (or just historical misreadings) of steven pinker in his most recent exhortative tract. jihn gray--who has had his own interesting journey through political commitments, in the obverse direction of land and moldbug--has made this same observation at every available opportunity.

i would actually agree with this - the Enlightenment does *not* have an original commitment to democracy, and this is the kind of stuff that would tickle Land also (hence, Dark Enlightenment and so on). but the Enlightenment understood as such should be anathema to tyranny also.

go far enough down the Critical Theory wormhole and Enlightenment actually begins to seem, i think, much more of a radical prospect than it is generally regarded to be. a truly Enlightenment state might well be absolutely as anarchic and quarrelsome and ungovernable as a pirate armada - *which might be just fine for all of the pirates involved,* and *good fucking luck* for anyone else who wants to to govern those places Imperially. see pic rel for more details.

NB: can we have a moratorium (in advance) on shitting on Frank Miller also, or conflating Xerxes' portrayal as celestial hermaphrodite with evil? i want to fucking skip ahead to the next chapter of the Great Conversation where we stop assuming that every time a being of broad-spectrum sexual interest is also presented in a position of power that it necessarily it means Trans Is Evil or that there is anything there to unpack that is worth unpacking. it's the same way i feel about Kefka: hey, guess what, the guy with ??? sexuality turns out to be *a tremendously gifted actor* in many ways. leaving aside the fact that Kefka is an obvious sorcerous genius (who can also create things like Slave Crowns, which are no mean feat) - the fact here is that the question is not one of sexuality but one of *talent* and *authority.* in 300, most of Persia doesn't seem to care about Xerxes' gender, and *neither does the fucking Empire of FF6.* *nobody fucking cares about any of this shit.* Gestahl doesn't care. Leonidas doesn't even care. i don't care, you don't care, nobody fucking cares. how about appreciating Movie Xerxes for convincing half the known universe for following him to Greece? or Kefka for being - clearly - one of the great Magitek Free Agents of that world?

sorry, i guess that was a micro-rant but i really fucking hate that these things are still required, sometimes. back to Radical Enlightenment -

(cont'd)