/lit/ - Literature

>>12633650
so Pirate Enlightenment, then. the Enlightenment with teeth - or, in ancient Greek terms, a quarrelsome little coalition of micro-states that, if you were Persia, you would have thought would have been a cakewalk. in the Iliad it was the same thing, you know: the Greeks are fighting with each other when they're not fighting the Trojans, and after they go home their wives murder them, or they go insane (those that in fact make it home at all, unlike, say, Odysseus).

the Enlightenment today is perhaps on his back legs and then some, if only because the Marxist-Hegelian project in the West has been so psychologically successful, if not necessarily politically. but the fallout caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union really was dispiriting, i think, for a great many of those thinkers. but the Enlightenment really might be understood as a kind of radical project, in its own right, or at least much more radical than it is usually understood to be when seen through the lens of continental philosophy or critical theory. a genuinely irrepressible freedom...if you read Hegel on this (or, well, anything about the French Revolution) we can see that the logic of Revolution has no end of seemingly baked-in disasters: not only the guillotining of monarchs supposedly divinely blessed by God, but the turning of that guillotine on the crowd themselves, and then the turning of the guillotine on those who turn it on the crowd, and then Napoleon...who manages to conquer most of Europe before leaving everyone in a state of bewilderment and confusion once the great run plays itself out. and then a year of Victorian anxiety, before later paroxysms of blood and destruction, then the looming spectre of nuclear annihilation, and now today...

the Enlightenment often sometimes seems to me to be precisely the kind of anathema to some of the more tyrannical aspects of totalitarian Marxism, although it really does have to be understood from a particular vantage point, which is one which does not immediately allow itself to be buried under an avalanche of guilt and dread and debt and anxiety. radical freedom itself - even if it were manifested in anarchic pirate warfare, and memorialized with a skull and crossbones - isn't necessarily pretty, and it may not - unlike Hegel - have anything like a Spirit waiting at the end of it. it might just be a ferociously powerful *desire to be left in peace,* or at least to be left in peace in order to own the grim and peculiar destiny that is one's own...

i prefer civilization to piracy, obviously, but i think if that crucial grain of frenzy and madness goes missing there's no substitute for it. Land finds this in Bataille, but there are other ways also...