[FRA:] Enlightenment under attack

[Catherine Liu]

In response to Ralph's comments:

>
>Ideologically, the assault on Enlightenment values, though 
>narcissistic and self-serving, prepares the way philosophically for 
>fascism to take over.  It is both liberal and illiberal, depending 
>on what senses of the term you are using.  It represents what's left 
>of liberalism under all meanings of the term but is fundamentally 
>illiberal in its philosophical underpinnings.  Yes, these people are 
>pilloried by the hysterical Right as the academic left, but not a 
>one of them has a left bone in their bodies.

"Narcissistic" psychologizes what is fully saturated by the 
political: neo-pragmatism and cultural studies alike in their 
rejection of universal values offers the rationalization for new 
forms of domination: centered on responding to "individual" 
particularities, its form of anti-Enlightenment is merely an 
'updated' enlightenment.

>DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT is hardly a counterexample to my thesis. 
>Politically, it's nowhere in particular, and as an argument, lacks 
>historical concreteness.  It is rather a dubious metaphysical 
>excursus, or more generously, a metaphorical meditation that cannot 
>survive being taken literally.
>

I don't know what 'being taken literally' means, but I have always 
read it as a condemnation of Enlightenment instrumentalization of 
reason as a betrayal of reason; but it does have the advantage of 
articulating the creative and powerful faculties of bourgeois 
consciousness, which does free us from the chthonic gods and the 
endless cycles of mythology for forms of domination, inner and outer.

Catherine Liu