The Ruin of Kasch

by Roberto Calasso, Richard Dixon (Translator)

A brilliant new translation of a classic work on violence and revolution as seen through mythology and art

The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects―“the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else,” wrote Italo Calvino when the book first appeared in 1983. Hailed as one of those rare books that persuade us to see our entire civilization in a new light, its guide is the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who knew the secrets of the ancien régime and all that came after, and was able to adapt the notion of “legitimacy” to the modern age. Roberto Calasso follows him through a vast gallery of scenes set immediately before and after the French Revolution, making occasional forays backward and forward in time, from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot, with appearances by Goethe and Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and Marx, Walter Benjamin and Chateaubriand. At the center stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary kingdom based on the ritual killing of the king and emblematic of the ruin of ancient and modern regimes.

Offered here in a new translation by Richard Dixon, The Ruin of Kasch is, as John Banville wrote, “a great fat jewel-box of a book, gleaming with obscure treasures.”

Genres: History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Italy, Italian Literature, Literature, Essays

432 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1983

About the author

Roberto Calasso (1941 – 2021) was an Italian writer and publisher.

Calasso was born in Florence in 1941, into a family of the Tuscan upper class, well connected with some of the great Italian intellectuals of their time.

Calasso worked for the publishing firm of Adelphi Edizioni since its founding by Roberto Bazlen in 1962 and became its Chairman in 1999. In 2015, he bought out the company to prevent it from being acquired by a larger publishing firm. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

He was the author of an unnamed ongoing work reflecting on the culture of modernity, which began with The Ruin of Kasch in 1983, a book admired by Italo Calvino. Dedicated to the French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord or, Talleyrand, it was followed in 1988 by The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, in which the tale of Cadmus and his wife Harmonia becomes a pretext for re-telling the great tales of Greek mythology and reflecting on the reception of Greek culture for a contemporary readership. Another world civilization is surveyed in Ka (1996, where the subject of the re-telling is Hindu mythology). K restricts the focus to a single author, Franz Kafka; this trend continues with Il rosa Tiepolo (Tiepolo Pink), inspired by an adjective used by Marcel Proust to describe a shade of pink used by Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo in his paintings. With La folie Baudelaire, Calasso once more broadens his scope from fresco to a whole civilisation, that of Paris in the latter half of the 19th century, reconsidering the lives and works of the post-romantic generation of writers and artists from Baudelaire to Valéry. In one of his more recent works, Ardore (2010), the author returns to India for an exhaustive analysis of the theory and practice of Vedic sacrifice and its significance for post-modern epistemology.

Along with his status as a major analyst specifically of the works of Kafka, Calasso was, more broadly, active in many essays in retrieving and re-invigorating the notion of a Central European literary culture. He also served as the president of the International Alexander Lernet-Holenia Society, which promotes the publication, translation and study of this multi-genre Austrian writer and his focus on the identity crisis of his characters at odds with postimperial Austria and Central Europe.

Reviews

[Fede · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a trap.
It lures you with its simple premise - a historical portrait of Talleyrand, the French statesman who effortlessly got through the Ancien Régime, the Revolution, the Terror, Napoleon's empire and the Congress of Vienna - and locks you up in a maze of concepts that may or may not make sense but blows your mind nonetheless.
Calasso's book deals with the so-called post-historical (post-1945) age, an abstract picture whose modernity is still haunted by the ghosts of old Europe's ideology, disillusionment, moral bewilderment, social turmoil. Soon enough the picture turns into a jigsaw puzzle made of fragments of high-brow literature, historical facts, leftist philosophy and anthropology whose cryptic message it's up to the unfortunate reader to decipher.
Like it or not, you are alone into this.

Two parallels can be drawn to understand how this work should be approached: Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition", a conceptual silloge of the 60s culture, and W. Burroughs' 'cut-ups'.
Calasso's text is divided in chapters that are only apparently disconnected. It starts off with a depiction of Talleyrand as the embodiment of the modern age, the player who always wins because he has nothing to lose - no faith, no ideology, no expectations nor hopes: a chameleon who truly belongs in the shapeless world we have inherited from that featurless era. Then the book turns into a nightmare, a rabbit hole that leaves you no choice: either you give up and stop reading or you gather all our knowledge and mental strenght and hold on to the end.

The first part is a long excursus on sacrifice. Sacrifice (latin: sacrum facere, 'to make [something] holy') was the means for mankind to connect with reality. The ancient world was aware of being a small, irrelevant part of a system beyond space and time. A human or animal sacrifice was a symbol and a device, a representation and substitution allowing mankind to deal with the chaos of the origins. It re-established an order that life had destroyed. When our civilisation(s) got rid of its ritual ties with the unknown and unknowable, a new order took over and economy was born: all planes of reality other than the visible and tangible hic et nunc of humanity ceased to exist; the world became utterly self-referential. Modernity started on the day history committed the ultimate decide: the French Revolution was indeed the death of the European divine monarhcs, to whom no sacrifice was due anymore. Unfortunately, when our civilisation destroyed its gods it found itself too lost to fill the void laft by their disappearance.
The 'Ruin of Kasch' Calasso refers to is the legendary decline of a nilotic tribe that occured as soon as the ritual murder of their king came to an end - a poignant metaphor of the decline of the modern Western world. Ritual sacrifice was indeed a way to diverge the death pulsion toward a deity, ergo the outside. Once the deity is removed, mankind's death drives are directed against itself. Enter Freud and psychoanalysis, but also Marx: the transition from a society based on symbols to a a society based on exchange value. From quality to quantity, from temple to factory, the human psyche was shattered in order to reshape the past and control the future. As for the present, it's a soul-engineering lab.

Literature and philosophy play a huge part in this monumental research. Stirner and Nietzsche, the pioneers of anarchy and Nihilism, are omnipresent here, together with Sainte-Beuve and J. Bentham. It's a torture machine of references and parallels, a healthily humiliating experience in which one must face one's intellectual limits and inadequacy. And yet,
I enjoyed this book a lot.
I enjoyed it because it made me realise how pretentious I am in my abysmal ignorance; because it's a truly post-modern essay, something I had never come across before; because Calasso is the most controversial intellectual; because I got utterly lost in this hellish Encyclopedia of the modern world.

Beware, all of you who decide to start this journey: it's endless and there's no way out and you'll probably hate yourself all along the road.
If you don't, this book is not for you.

[Szplug · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was steered to Calasso's first English translation by Hugh Graham, citing its exploration of man's moral separation from the cosmos as a prime inspiration for his superb-but-little-read book The Vestibule of Hell . I owe Graham a double round of thanks; not content to thrill me with one masterpiece, he has led me directly to a second.

The Ruin of Kasch has three hundred and fifty-six pages that read like half again as many—Calasso, certainly as well-read in a broad field of studies as any author I've recently encountered, has created a cornucopia of delights that reveal themselves through sundry chapters that, taking Revolutionary France as locus, dip back and forth repeatedly across millennia of time and text. One of the principal actors is Talleyrand, who died under a cloud of opprobrium after surviving the Ancien Regime, the Revolution, the Directory, Napoleon, and the Congress of Vienna. Notorious for his malleable politics and morals, Calasso studies the crippled aristocrat's multifaceted masks and concludes that every revolution needs a Talleyrand to help chaos assume an acceptable form. Yet Talleyrand is supported by a vast and multi-talented cast: Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Sainte-Beauve, Fénelon, Marx and Engels, Nietzsche, Stirner, Louis XV, the Duc d'Orleans, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Céline; and that's just if we ignore the trips into ancient Africa, Vedic India and the Bhagavad Gita, and the charcoal years of the twentieth century. The pace is languid and conversational, the quotations from sources liberal and revelatory, the digressions numerous and fascinating—Calasso meanders whilst sketching his ideas, jarring the reader from any zone of comfort but rewarding with brilliant, brisk forays into completely new scenes and encounters.

Calasso is painting here with both grand and subtle strokes—his canvas a swarthy, rolling landscape exposed to a sky livid with detonating rainbows—in order to capture and display the great and irrecoverable loss suffered by man when he withdrew faith in the meaning of sacrifice; when he forgot that the universal duality of the profane and the sacred, the known and the unknown, possessed a legion of dangers to those who would rend the veil between them. Modernity has brought the infinite into the finite vessel of humanity, has made society comparable only to itself, strive to be sufficient unto itself; and this same society has forgotten that sacrifice served the invaluable function of recognizing the noncorrespondence between the discontinuous and the continuous, let slide the memory of deceiving the outside through the ritual of substitution. Now the word encompasses everything, and that everything is man—and infinite whisperings and nightmares and abattoirs and charnel houses have now made themselves known in all their hungering horror. The depiction is fleshed out with musings on the sibling natures of capitalism and socialism; the conversations with the dead that have been labelled history; the straitening structures of philosophy and those systems that would compress life within; and forays into the differences between Eastern and Western wisdom—yet such arid descriptions perform little service in depicting the puzzling, confounding, difficult, brilliant nature of the work in its whole.

Calasso has created a true gem of a book here—the history he exposes is indeed conversations with the dead, but he steers the exchange so that the colloquy falls outside the bounds of conventional discourse—and by mixing these departed voices with the fully, richly alive voice of his own, the flow of words streams forth to guide the reader along an immensely enjoyable, challenging, and illuminating voyage, drifting the waters of a time when the void was bearing down, in fuligin might, upon the boundaries of a world preparing itself for great bloodshed, servitude, and anguish to accompany its newfound wonders, liberations, and joys. Highly recommended.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Maestro views Civilization-History-Politics through timeless poles of Ritual and Sacrifice. Using Talleyrand as a drifting sort of focus, there's a great deal that is pondered, rather than explored. This glossing is perhaps history by other means yet the Vedic sources failed to anticipate the suicide bomber. The Anti-Oedipal project of D and G is strangely parallel but the A-O appears more concerned with the Immanent and the ties between the molecular and molar; whereas Calasso broods on taste (perhaps echoing F is For Fake), the biological requirement for repletion (Valery's accursed cyclomania) and the totemic. Napoleon maintains a presence throughout the rolling text as Stendhal, Marx and Proust form a Greek Chorus of sorts. This is was a truly challenging work, but one perfectly suited for these uneasy days of self-confinement. It is a true shame most of us don't have cork-lined rooms.

[Kansas · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2024...

"Pero algo tengo que hacer,: entonces me encierro y leo, con un frenesí que me hace estremecer con frecuencia, de noche, cuando me sorprendo insultando en voz alta a seres extinguidos y sin embargo horrendamente activos."

El título "La ruina de Kasch" hace referencia a una leyenda africana de Sudán, que Calasso rescata para construir una especie de tratado en torno a la naturaleza del poder y su transitoriedad, la inevitabilidad de la corrupción que lo acompaña y su legitimidad y sobre todo y una vez abierto el melón, sobre todo se detiene en un tema eternamente obsesivo para él: el sacrificio. Antes de referirse a la leyenda del derrumbe de Kasch, Calasso usa a Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord —embajador, obispo, consejero de reyes, estadista conspirador y actor clave en la historia de la legitimidad política—, conocido por todos simplemente como Talleyrand. Calasso de alguna forma noveliza la vida de Talleyrand, rescatando citas, viajes, mezclando hechos del mundo real con crítica y ensayo literario, filosofía, en un intento por situarnos en el viejo mundo. Nos sitúa en el viejo mundo justo en una época que tras la Revolución Francesa cambia la mentalidad, y ahí está esta figura tan compleja como Talleyrand para mimetizarse y camuflarse cual camaleón para ir acomodándose a los tiempos. Talleyrand siempre tuvo la capacidad de ver los acontecimientos históricos con perspectiva e incluso manteniendo una distancia respecto a estos acontecimientos, viendo venir los rios de sangre.


"Nos movemos hacia un mundo desconocido sin piloto y sin brújula; hay una sola cosa cierta, y es que esto terminará en un naufragio.

Revolucionaria, para Talleyrand, es una era en la que los hechos y las palabras, desvinculados de cualquier dependencia y arrojados como proyectiles, pesan continuamente sobre la vida, la plasman con rudas yemas, la obligan a ser reacción."


Talleyrand es la figura que víncula, ese lazo entre lo viejo y el mundo moderno que estaba llamando a la puerta y que Calasso quiere visibilizar a toda costa. Yo no conocía la figura de Talleyrand aunque si a algunos de sus contemporáneos como Chateaubriand pero puedo entender porque Calasso lo haya elegido para narrarnos el paso que va de los rituales y sacrificios antiguos hasta la revolución y el comienzo de la modernidad. Talleyrand puede proporcionar la clave de cómo pudo sobrevivir durante la Revolución Francesa adaptándose, y para ello Calasso lo rodea de personajes y citas, hasta que nos narra la leyenda de la ruina de Kasch que sirve como ejemplo práctico para lo que Calasso nos quiere hacer ver. La leyenda de la ruina de Kasch queda registrada por el antropólogo Leo Frobenius en 1911, tal como le fue narrada por un desconocido. Trata de un antiguo reino que basaba su supervivencia en el sacrificio periódico del rey, determinado por los sacerdotes que se guiaban por la posición de las estrellas en el cielo. Sin embargo, un día llega un extraño de Oriente, Far-li-mas, que tiene un gran talento narrando historias e hipnotizando a quienes las escuchan. Su hechizo al narrarlas es tan abrumador, que los que controlan esta sociedad, osea los sacerdotes, se olvidan de mirar el cielo y llegado un punto ya no se sacrifica al rey. A partir de aquí, deviene el derrumbe de Kasch. Esta historia sirve como un patrón para relatar el acenso y caída de los gobernantes, y establece un paralelismo con lo que se va repitiendo en las diferentes épocas y civilizaciones, y no hay duda que vamos a encontrar similitudes con lo que está ocurriendo ahora mismo en el mundo.


"Una vez, en una carta enviada en 1809 desde Ginebra, Madame de Staël supo decir a Talleyrand las únicas palabras que habrían podido traspasar su invisible coraza: Adiós. ¿Sois feliz? Con un espíritu tan superior, ¿no vais a veces, al fondo de todo, es decir, hasta el dolor?


Sin entrar en más profundidad, porque entre otras cosas, quizás de los libros de Calasso, este puede ser el que más me ha costado por todos los análisis filosóficos en los que se embarca hacia la segunda mitad, si que tengo que admitir que resulta fascinante la erudición de Calasso por cómo va cambiando los giros y haciendo surgir todos estos pensadores, filósofos, artístas y corruptos enganchados al poder que pueblan las páginas de este libro. Calasso crea un texto saltando entre historias que van desde la Revolución Francesa hasta la Primera Guerra Mundial. Ensayo, historia, novela, filosofía, se podría encuadrar en cualquier género, pero sobre todo es un texto arrollador y esencial para quién le interese entender de dónde viene el mundo moderno, y quizás hacia dónde va...


"He aspirado una vida nueva, como los criados que frecuentemente aspiran perfumes cuando abren la puerta de un salón. Esa embriaguez suspendida duró poquísimo. El hielo volvía a caer: Mañana veremos llegar el alud, el triste alud de los hombres de Estado."

♫♫♫ November - Max Richter ♫♫♫

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Half of this went right over my head - his glosses on the Vedas and Das Kapital, etc. - but what a style!

[the true historian's] desired prey is primarily what has eluded memory and what has had every reason to elude it. After lengthy training in this struggle with the opaque, he will be able to test himself against Plutarchan figures, who are, in contrast, obscured by an excess of testimony - that thick carapace history secretes to keep them remote from us. And the end of his arrogant rise, the historian wants to meet Napoleon as if the latter were a stranger. At this point he becomes part visionary, and can muster the insolence to begin a book as Léon Bloy did: 'The history of Napoleon is surely the most unknown of all histories.'

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first saw this in an upright position, sandwiched by two other books, with only its title and author “Calasso” emblazoned on its spine and visible to the eye. I immediately felt a mysterious pull of strange familiarity, like when you meet someone you’re sure you’ve met before but could not pinpoint the when, where, why and how of your acquaintance.


I then freed this from the bookstore shelf, excitedly opened it, and there, on the inside back cover, was the mystery solved: “Calasso” is Roberto Calasso, author of “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,” one of the best books I’ve read in recent memory which had made my imagination spinning magically in colors, Greek gods and goddesses prancing before my eyes for days and weeks as I go about my erstwhile humdrum daily routine.


“The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,” however, was the only book I’ve read of Calasso prior to this, so it was not much of a surprise that his name only registered a vague familiarity, in contrast with the title which would not have escaped my instant recognition. Anyway, this incident made me realize that it is imperative for a reader like me, who is not getting any younger, to at least write a short review of a book he had finished reading lest he loses track of what he had already read. For indeed it often happens that I would see a book, remember somehow that I’ve read it already, but would be in a complete bewilderment because I could no longer recall what the book was all about.

This title is not as enjoyable as Cadmus and Harmony for it felt like a long, continuous rumination about anything and everything by an intellect far much superior than mine, interspersed with historical figures, famous personages and important events I had no, or very little, knowledge of. But this difficulty did not prevent me from finishing the book with unquenched interest for the simple reason that many times along the way I’d manage to stumble into some gems of thought that I’d find completely new and would occupy my mind for days. Like this one about “Law and Order.” Tell me if it does not give you a pause, and perhaps see for the first time why dictators obsessed with order would sometimes spit upon the concepts like the rule of law and due process:


“It is significant that we say ‘law and order’—that it is not enough to say only ‘law’ or only ‘order.’ In fact, the word ‘order’ does not repeat, does not ECHO, the meaning of ‘law.’ Order is what law, on its own, cannot achieve. Order is law plus sacrifice, the perpetual supplement, the perpetual extra that must be destroyed so that order may exist. The world cannot live by law alone, because it needs an order that law alone is unable to provide. The world needs to destroy something to make order; and it must destroy it outside the law, with pleasure, with hatred, with indifference.

“The modern age is founded on the misguided assumption that the words ‘law’ and ‘order’ are synonyms, that we say ‘law and order’ because if we use an emphatic pleonasm we will command more respect. Destruction, precisely because it no longer has an acknowledged existence, takes shape in darkness, gathers together, adapting its dimensions to the law that would claim to deny it. The more vast and ramified the law, the more devastating the destruction that eludes it. Every war arises for the purpose of creating the order which the law is always powerless to provide. The Marxist idea of revolution acknowledges this impotence of the law and at the same time appropriates the whole apparatus of sacrifice, exploiting it to establish an order that denies the metaphysical foundations of sacrifice.”


Do we remember marvelling at the audacity and apparent novelty of President Duterte’s declaration that he would happily slaughter the millions of drug addicts ‘to save the Republic’? Well, apparently this tack is even older than the Republic he seeks to save. Callers even coined a term for a society advocating such a measure of self-preservation or improvement: an “experimental society”—


“The experimental society surely did not have to wait for Lenin, much less for Hitler, to make itself heard. These two were epigones who simply found they had suitable means for implementing the visions of general improvement that so many of their predecessors had harbored. The cold and inventive face of the experimental society, its technological face, is scornfully silent, anonymous; this society is concerned above all with establishing new procedures in factories, offices, banks, rural areas. In its other aspect, spouting words and always full of plans, the experimental society finds its original tone in the voices of the provincial Jacobins. Here is a certain Monsieur Leclerc speaking on May 12, 1763, as a delegate from the Lyons committee to the Jacobins of Paris: ‘We must establish a Machiavellianism of the people; we must wipe althaea is impure from the surface of France.’ And here is Monsieur Baudot speaking before the Jacobins of Strasbourg, on 19 Frimaire, Year II: ‘The egoists, the thoughtless, the enemies of liberty, the enemies of all nature, must not be counted among her children. Aren’t they perhaps just like all those who oppose the public good, or who simply play no part in creating it? Let us destroy them completely…Even if there were a million of them, shouldn’t one perhaps sacrifice the twenty-fourth part of oneself to destroy a cancer that could infect the rest of the body?’ But these voices still tremble with indignation. They do not have the purity of one who is concerned solely with the future of the nation, like Monsieur d’Antonelle, who held that ‘to construct the republic it was necessary to establish approximate equality and, to this end, to exterminate one-third of the population.’ With this sober suppression of ‘one-third of the population,’ so that finally money and property would not be so unevenly distributed but would be judiciously uniform, the aim was to eradicate all possibilities for insolent luxury—courtesans, games of chance, vast empty spaces—just as the profligate use of wit was likewise condemned as essentially contrary to republican virtue. In its clear phrasing and its eagerness for mediocrity, this obscure proposal expresses the idea that later would merely add, for variety and spice, specific designations of Jews or kulaks or class enemies in general as the prime candidates for membership in that ‘third of the population.’ In the proposals of the provincial Jacobins, Burckhardt saw ‘the innermost nucleus of the Revolution,’ and he noted: ‘Here the new France can clearly be discerned. It does not aim at socialism or at communism, through which its proponents would achieve only a mediocre universal wretchedness and the equality of enjoyments (whereas they wanted equality of rights, with the secret qualification that later the others would be overpowered). Rather, they want new private property, distributed in a more or less uniform fashion, but in abundant measure. And in order for those chosen few to be WELL OFF, a great mass of people must die. The goal is the modern WELL-BEING of the Frech.’ From his observatory in Basle, enlightened by hatred, Burckhardt recognized the numbing well-being of capital and the punitive wretchedness of socialism as stars in the same constellation.”


The Philippine government says we can rely on the “good faith” of China as we allow it to continue building one artificial island after another in areas within our maritime jurisdiction then fortifying them with military installations and weapons of war. We have, allegedly, developed “friendship” with this world power which we should not disturb by confrontational talks or noisy diplomatic protests. Callers would have instantly denounced the folly of this thinking. Quoting one Archbishop Fenelon from the 17th century he wrote:


“‘We should acknowledge the fact that, in the long run, the greatest power always dominates and overturns the others, if the others do not unite to act as a counterweight. People cannot hope that a superior power will remain within the confines of careful moderation, or that, from a position of strength, it will desire only as much as it could obtain from a position of weakness. Even if a prince were enough of a paragon to make such admirable use of his property, this wondrous situation would come to an end with his reign. The natural ambition of sovereigns, the flattery of advisers, and the prejudice of entire nations prevent us from ever believing that a nation capable of subjugating others would refrain from doing so for whole centuries. A kingdom that could boast of such extraordinary justice would be an ornament to history and a marvel whose like we would never see again.’”


Calasso then added a passage from the Greek historian Thucydides:


“‘We believe by tradition so far as the gods are concerned, and see by experience so far as mankind is concerned, that, according to a law of nature, everyone inevitably exploits all the power at his disposal.’”

The late Philippine politician/senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago once said that she likes to read books because by reading books she in fact allows herself to talk and commune with the dead. To this Calasso would have agreed:


“What are the dead for us, if not—first and foremost—books? Among all forms of prehistoric religion, the strangest and most difficult to understand in our own day seems the cult of the dead, the constant presence of the dead in every aspect of life. To a prehistoric man, in contrast, our strangest and most mysterious form of worship would be our use of books. Yet these two forms of belief converge. Concretized as portable objects that accompany us—our parasites, persecutors, comforters—the dead have settled on the written page. Their power has never diminished, even though it has been wondrously transformed.”


In my study room I am surrounded by books. It is like being in a tomb of the greats and the near-greats who come to life if I hold them by my hands and cast my eyes upon their dusty pages.

[Tijana]

Propast Kaša je neobična knjiga. Nije narativna proza definitivno, nije ni teorija mada čitaoca teroriše svim mogućim od istorije preko teologije, antropologije, klot filozofije, pa do marksizma, psihoanalize, političke filozofije i dekonstrukcije u svim mogućim kombinacijama. (I pošteno priznajem da sam jedan deo koji mi je baš išao na nerve a predstavljao nekakvo visokoparno skakutanje s Lakana na Marksa i Štirnera pa natrag na kraju preskočila, moglo mi se.) "Esej" je negde najpribližnija odrednica mada je ovo previše dugo za bilo kakav esej; ne može se reći da je u pitanju knjiga meandrirajućeg toka jer nema toka a često ni bilo kakve struje nego eto, delta Nila.
Ako to imamo u vidu i ako smo spremni da pretrpimo trenutke kad npr. Kalaso u pet redova odrecituje imena Adorno, Horkhajmer, Niče, Hajdeger, Marks, g. Ome, Genon, Frojd, Špengler, Vitgenštajn (nađite uljeza!) bićemo štedro nagrađeni. Jer Kalaso je teško načitan, da, ali je i zaista inteligentan, sjajan stilista, gaji prefinjenu pakost kakva se retko sreće i na mahove je čista naslada čitati ga. I pravo je osveženje kad neko razmišlja i piše o bitnim stvarima (ključnim tačkama evropske istorije ali i centralnim pojmovima religije tipa "žrtvovanje") a da se... kako da kažem... ne usteže da ulepša rečenicu nekom šljokicom niti se trudi oko privida naučne objektivnosti/istorijske vernosti. Negde oko pola knjige sam shvatila da odsustvo nelagodnosti koja obično prati, recimo, probijanje kroz neke savremene teoretičare, potiče odatle što Kalaso ne insistira na nekom dubokom i zakukuljenom smislu do koga treba da ronimo kroz mulj latinizama nego ako ga uhvati zanos stvaranja hermetičnih lirskih fraza, uhvatio ga je, nema ljutnje. (Posle je naišao onaj preskočeni deo koji je to malo opovrgao, ali šta da se radi.)
Dakle. Oko fokusa knjige - a to je Taljeran*, eks-biskup, plemić i diplomata, retko kompleksna figura, i njegova uloga u formiranju savremenog shvatanja politike i države - Kalaso plete neverovatno raskošnu mrežu anegdota, suludih istorijskih podataka, odlomaka iz lične prepiske, biografskih analiza potonjih pisaca, odjeka u savremeno doba, antropoloških i teoloških ekskursa, mitova, svega. I to je super i beskrajno zanimljivo (osim kad se nasukate na neko raspredanje koje vam baš ne leži) i inspirativno i leti u hiljadu smerova odjednom. Ima trenutaka kad Kalaso ume da iznervira, jako, kao kad negde pred kraj razveze zašto Valter Benjamin nije čitao Selina kad bi mu se Selin sigurno svideo, ali ne, on je bio pun nepoverenja... pa ne, čekaj, probaj da se setiš (a znam da znaš) da je Selin bio krajnji desničar i antisemita a Benjamin Jevrejin i levičar pa će ti se samo kasti odakle "nepoverenje". Ali takvi momenti su ipak retki i nadjačavaju ih oni pomenuti trenuci čiste naslade.


*nek crkne nova transkripcija, za mene je Taljeran sa lj

[Tom Ewing · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this one as a fresh-face graduate, I finish it 19 years later at roughly the age Roberto Calasso was when he published it, his first book, and the foundational section of his life's work, an exploration of sacrifice, myth and modernity. Most of Calasso's cast and almost all his themes turn up here - Baudelaire; Kafka; the Vedic seers of ancient India and their elaborate edifices of ritual sacrifice. Other figures - like Saint-Beuve and Walter Benjamin - appear as echoes of the author and his methodologies. Like Calasso (and the Vedics), they are collectors and connectors. He weaves vignettes, quotations, theory and scraps of observation into a work that circles its ideas obsessively - sometimes at a playful distance, sometimes more closely and densely, always repeating and recurring.

Those ideas being? Wellll.... The Ruin Of Kasch is not a particularly easy book - it defeated me three times, once because I lost it on a train, twice during the long and rather abstract section on Vedic sacrifice that follows the telling of the titular story. Which isn't from India, by the way, or explicitly linked to the previous 100 pages about Talleyrand and the French Revolution. Still, the Ruin gives the book its name, and offers a fair summary of its concerns.

It's the story of an African kingdom based on ritual sacrifice of the king by his priests. A storyteller, by the power of his stories, distracts the priests from their duties, and the sacrificial order collapses. The storyteller inherits the kingdom, and all live happily ever after. Except when they die the kingdom also collapses and is now lost to the sands of the Sahara, survived only by its stories.

The condition of modernity, Calasso implies throughout the book, is a movement away from continuity (maintained by ritual and sacrifice) and towards change. Sacrifice as an institution is overturned, but the body counts of experiment (its replacement) have hardly been lower. The book, largely about the 19th Century, is haunted by the bloody 20th and its despots.

This makes Calasso sound a conservative thinker, and perhaps he is, but if so it's a conservatism of an old, fatalist kind. The central figure of the book is not any of the futile reactionaries trying to hold back the tides of change, but instead Talleyrand, despised as a hypocrite by right-thinking critics in his time, but a man who accepted the age of experiment and, by surviving through it and guiding its transitions, infected it with continuity anyhow. And though the monsters of experiment Calasso has in mind often operated in the name of socialism, his thinking applies just as much to the neoliberal or libertarian utopias dreamed up since then.

The Ruin Of Kasch reads like a scrapbook, constantly shifting subject, with no particular narrative and highly variable momentum. As a reader who loves making connections and is easily seduced by them, that appealed to me. Even so, parts are frustrating and others impenetrable. The key to finishing it on my fourth attempt was Wikipedia - being able to look up dry summaries of the abbey at Port-Royal, or Max Stirner, was invaluable. But it was worth the effort - a mix of history, philosophy, spiritualism and anecdote, I've not read another book quite like it.

[Karellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, I finally finished it. I lived with this book for almost six months. In the middle I became jaded and read another book and returned to Kasch. But what a book. What an incredible writer.

There are many scholarly reviews of this book, which I cannot begin to compete with. It’s been an education for me, no doubt. And I don’t regret spending so long with it. I’m not one of those who skims through seventy odd books a year. I need this level of intellectual stimulation. I’d rather spend the entire year reading Calasso or Enard than the trash that others digest in an hour on their commute.

So what’s it about? Calvino says it’s about two things: Talleyrand, and everything else. Well there’s certainly plenty about the infamous French statesman, and about Napoleon - no folks Napoli isn’t named after him - and the intriguing era of 19th century France. But there is so much more too, and I found myself constantly checking google regarding the minor characters in this densely plotted miraculous tale: it’s created a whole new world of literature that I might explore, if only one had the time. But some of us have to work for a living, so I’m pleased to have finished this.

Kasch is the first part of a unique cycle of books that Calasso began in about 1980, and was originally published in ‘83, but I think only recently translated. Hitherto I was familiar with his most well known book in English “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”, and there are the books he has written about Kafka and Baudelaire, but there are now nine books in the series, with the latest to be translated next year.

It’s quite a challenge, but I might just have to gobble them all up. It will be a feast. Lasting several years. It reminds me of the 10cc lyric “One night in Paris is like a year in any other place”. So true, but one might also echo : “One book by Calasso is like loving every woman”. Or reading fifty others.

I give this 5 stars, but even that doesn’t do it justice. To all readers of serious intellectual non fiction, I recommend Kasch. Take a year off, but read it. If you claim to understand it, well either you’re a genius, or a braggart. It’s defeated me, I don’t mind admitting it.

[J.R. Gerow · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most difficult book I read in 2018, Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch, I picked up at the donation table disbursing the personal library of a dead poet to his semblables around Montreal in a dark bar before a reading. It had everything you look for in a fascination: quotes from Italo Calvino and The New Yorker, a scarcely comprehensible synopsis about history, art, philosophy, civilization, unrecognizable classical art on the cover and bits like “establishes a genre all its own” on the sleeve.

And I found it all of that, to be sure. Moving (not even effortlessly, but with a total disregard for the constraints of form) between diligently reported history, direct quotes, bits of historical fiction, free verse, theory, and philosophy, it was a marvelous network of free association, an indeterminate literary feast.

So let’s focus on the good points first.

Spanning centuries, continents, cultures, and languages, The Ruin of Kasch still has, I hope, a core idea about the glue of civilization that it wants to build around. Calasso centers his view of history around a formative myth, the ancient civilization of Kasch, located somewhere in Eastern Africa or the Middle East. In the myth, the kingdom of Kasch was effectively ruled by its priests, who performed ritual sacrifices of kings and other select in accordance with their religious order, which divined the future from the stars. One such select was a great storyteller, who had a plan to avoid his own sacrifice. The storyteller made a practice of telling stories all night that were so irresistible that eventually even the priests had to stop to listen, neglecting their duties of monitoring the stars. As the priests slipped in their abilities to uphold the old order and the storyteller tightened his grip on the rest of the city, he eventually told a story that incited the populace to bloodshed against the priest class, effectuating a revolution that led to the storyteller being crowned king. In the myth, the storyteller’s new order was only able to stretch his natural life, after which the kingdom fell to ruin.

To Calasso, this myth encapsulates the key functions of every society: it engages in sacrifice in order to maintain a given state of social order (isn’t the rule of law always undergirded by violence). But from time to time, a great storyteller or revolutionary or what-have-you will convince society to sacrifice its sacrificers, embrace a new order. The irony for Calasso is that society never removes the element of sacrifice from its social order. It is sacrifice that makes social order possible. It merely substitutes one mode of sacrifice for another. In the end, if the kingdom attempts to eschew sacrifice altogether (the storyteller’s reign), it will only sacrifice itself.

For Calasso, the truly wise may be able to see this transference for what it is. Calasso spends the first hundred pages or so of the text picking apart Talleyrand, a French minister under the Ancien Regime, the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Restoration. Though many regard him a serial traitor, Calasso treats Talleyrand with a reverence that suggests his infinite flexibility to amend himself to the times was a genius, seeing the transference of power and the recasting of stories like legitimacy for what they were – revolutions in the selfsame order of sacrifice.

I’m simplifying what is a very long, tangential, metaphorically and mythically dense work – almost beyond forgiveness. But it’s an overbearing text, to be frank, and for folks like me it helps to break it down to its core.

In the ripples from this argument, Calasso’s daunting knowledge of history and philosophy ornament the tree in a dozen fascinating ways. From his views of capitalism –

wherein reducing everything to an exchange value, a kind of digitality, allows the old priests of sacrifice to be replaced by new priests of continual economic experimentation, and ultimately destruction –

to Freud —

wherein sacrifice and psychological substitution are effectively the same, so as Freud observes the power of any inanely repetitive process to fill the human psyche with a kind of uncanny dread, forcing us to try to numb ourselves (further “sacrifice” or render insensate some aspect of the psyche) in order to protect ourselves, until we at last cannot, which process of repetition, substitution, and sacrifice revolting the psyche is analogized on a civilizational scale to how the old order always eventually overwhelms and repulses its followers –

to Polybius —

who saw forms of government as a cycle, running from monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy before starting over, and in which Calasso sees sacrifice as the common element greasing the gears —

you get the idea. The whole of history is on the table. There are no borders to the argument, and it its worst, it feels as though it could care less for structure, either.

At risk of being the ignoramus who exposes himself when all he had to do was act nice and pet the book, I’ll go ahead and say that, at a macro level, the book often loses thematic coherence, and often buries its sense in a self-indulgent web of names and intellectual ballyhoosiery that one is often tempted to suspect there is not nearly so much sense there as pretended at.

Consider how seriously opaque it can make itself (and pity the reader who picked it up before Wikipedia was available):

“Just as Benjamin viewed Baroque tragic drama through the window of the Expressionist morgue, so Schmitt saw wars of religion in terms of Rathenau’s bloodstained fur coat, the incursions of von Salomon’s outlaws, and the carts loaded with banknotes during the Weimar Republic’s inflation.”

Which is the first sentence of a section that is preceded and followed by no real explanation of those names or references.

Or how abstruse:

“(… to listen to a story that is a person, time changed into space, a space that expands and coils in time, resting on a false present, a radiant hollow facing an echoing past; not knowing where your feet are sinking, but surrounded by noble architectural remnants, no more solid than a filmy layer covering other surfaces, whose enamel no one will mar; traversing them, we once again find ourselves on contemporary soil, brimming with ephemeral, overlapping memories – but like visitors this time, alien to this and every other ground.”

If you just had a mental sensation akin to trying to sneeze so hard that your whole brain squished forward half an inch and then went nowhere, that’s correct.

Or, lest you fear that he’s simply too smart to follow at all:

“What are the dead for us, if not – first and foremost – books? Among all forms of prehistoric religion, the strangest and most difficult to understand in our own day seems the cult of the dead, the constant presence of the dead in every aspect of life. To a prehistoric man, in contrast, our strangest and most mysterious form of worship would be our use of books. Yet these two forms of belief converge. Concretized as portable objects that accompany us – our parasites, persecutors, comforters – the dead have settled on the written page. Their power has never diminished, even though it has been wondrously transformed.”

Which is to say, the dead live on in books. *Mindblown.gif*

And that’s just picking from the last few pages, when I started saying to myself, wish I’d highlighted some of the nonsense, though.

So my TL;DR boils down to this: it’s a visionary text in the sense that blending history, historical fiction, poetry, philosophy and theory all into one freeform package gives Calasso the liberty to make associations by poetic logic between disciplines that frankly feel magical sometimes, lighting an obscurity just enough for its murky dimensions to feel divine, and he uses his freedom to light some profound ideas at the heart of this book, and make whole threads of history seem to leap into coherence.

And yet, in so vastly indulging himself, he has also lost a great deal of the necessary discipline to build a real arc in the work, to make it mean something through each juncture of its outline, and so cheats that squinting reader who is dead sure there is something buried in that impenetrable web of sense and helps himself to an often undeserved portion of their attention for many meandering pages at a time.

Behold, and take caution.

[Monty Milne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This life of that extraordinary man Talleyrand – “who betrayed everything except style” – provides the frame around which this multi-faceted discourse is woven. Near the end of his own life Talleyrand gave a funeral oration for an obscure diplomat which Calasso dissects as a superb example of calculating political theatre. Talleyrand ticks all of Nietzsche’s boxes, and yet one is torn between admiration at his achievement of making himself a consummate work of art, and disquiet at his fundamental deceit and solipsism. And yet he claimed that under the passing regimes which he variously served, undermined and betrayed he was really all along working for the France that had an eternal reality beyond the accidents of its sometime rulers. Is that true? With someone as slippery as Talleyrand, it’s hard to know.

Most of this book is not directly concerned with Talleyrand. It’s difficult to give a flavour of such a complex book, much of which I confess I had to re-read before it began to make sense (and even then, some of it was beyond me). I was struck by the discussion of Marx and his hatred for the Lumpenproletariat – thieves, prostitutes, the homeless – whom he hated and saw as a counter revolutionary element. (This made me ponder how my own love of those who are most disadvantaged is in part a rejection of Marxism). Max Stirner is noted as “the author of the only book in the West to express the idea of revolt in its chemically pure state” ; I haven’t read him, but this makes me want to.

Other things that struck me: the Nahuatl word for decapitation is the same one used for picking an ear of grain, because death is necessary for new life. And the gods have ichor, not blood, because bread, wine and blood are bound together with death as well as life, and hence not appropriate for immortal beings. There is a lot of fascinating material on substitute sacrifice, and an intriguing account of how God spends his day according to the Jewish theologian Yeshuotl.

I must confess that although the book often delighted and intrigued me, there were also times when it bored or baffled me. I think it is worth making the effort to tackle it, but as to what it all means, how it all fits together, or what kind of conclusion it comes to, that is something I cannot quite decide. But then this book is perhaps less about system and more about style – like Talleyrand, or indeed life itself, it is perhaps best experienced as a kind of poetic ecstasy rather than a dismal science.

[Simona Moschini · Rating 5 out of 5]

La figura di Tayllerand, maestro di cerimonie della cesura storica tra Età Moderna ed Età Contemporanea, si staglia maestosamente al centro di questo affresco - impossibile da riassumere - tra storia, filosofia e letteratura.

[Remus Pop · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a book! Picked it up in a bookstore before Christmas... aiming for something intellectually stimulating. Oh boy, I did not know what I was picking. I'm still mystified by the anonymity of this author in my circle of friends. I was lured to this book by Italo Calvino's review, as well as a déjà vu of getting close to an author with a style reminiscent of Borges.
Rituals, sacrifice, myths, modernity, traditions... all these majestic themes blended together with cross-cultural references, personal philosophical reflections/digressions, historical anecdotes, etc. Such a rich and complex book. Wow.

In a time when I'm feeling particularly disenchanted with the present-day world (mostly due to its lack of substance), this book was a great companion in helping me understand how the heck we got here. Wars, political/social crimes, discrimination, environmental degradation, economic systems (even progress) as hidden forms of sacrifice were a powerful revelation, but one that does not heal the disenchantment. This is the rational, secular, modern world's need to reconcile itself with mortality, the sacred, and the social order.

Loved this passage on the evolution and fragmentation of power over time.

"In the beginning, power was spread in one place, aura and miasma.
Then it was brought together in Melchizedek, priest and king.
Then it was divided between a priest and a king.
Then it was brought together in a king.
Then it was divided between a king and a law.
Then it was brought together in a law.
Then law was divided into many rules.
Then the rules were spread about in every place."

[Olaf Leeuwis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Een van de beste boeken die ik ooit gelezen heb en ik heb maar moeite met onder woorden brengen waarom dat is.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roberto Calasso, on his birthday May 30
A immense and enigmattic brilliance and scholarship, expressed in gorgeous prose; Roberto Calasso forges an art of myths, history, philosophy, literature, in fact the whole of Western Civilization. His works are like the colored patterns of light shining through stained glass windows, transforming and illuminating his subjects in beautiful, glorious ways.
All his work pursues an arc of discourse which parallels that of the psychologist James Hillman in building on the foundation of Jung's theory of archetypes; that which lives within us is not wholly our own, is eternal and full of numinous power as an informing and motivating source.
The Ruin of Kasch is a critque of modernity and the loss of the sacred, but also a history of civilization and its shaping forces. Here he gives us Talleyrand, a type of the Universal Human as a master storyteller and protean genius, able to adapt and change in a chaotic and shifting environment.
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony describes our origins and primordial connection to the sacred, and describes with stunning beauty our deepest layer of being and the classical civilization which arose from it.
His evocations of the worlds of Kafka in K., the Venetian painter in Tiepolo Pink (whom the sensitive and insightful Kalliope calls theatrical. enigmatic, and phantasmagorical in a wonderful review on Goodreads), and the great poet in La Folie Baudelaire are essential works on the towering geniuses who helped create us as we are today.
In both the celebrated Ka and Ardor, he explores India as an elder culture and exemplar of adaptation and the sustaining function of literature, following the pioneering work of Alain Danielou (especially in The Gods of Love and Ecstasy: Shiva and Dionysus).
The Oxford lectures collected in Literature and the Gods are superb and insightful, as is all his writing. The 49 Steps, another essay collection, is a panorama of literature and the power of storytelling to create and transform humanity.
If we read to acquire a rich personal culture, to enter a conversation of great ideas over vast gulfs of time and place, to become part of the memory of the world and to help reimagine our place in it and reinvent how to be human, Roberto Calasso is an excellent partner on the journey.

[Brett Glasscock · Rating 1 out of 5]

a painful read. the historiography around talleyrand and the revolution was quite well written. but around page 150, it devolved into uber postmodern abstract nonsense. every sentence sounded like "the limit--thus abandoned by modernity, was the point at which the dual subject collapsed into one through the sacrificial knife. Modernity thus fetishizes the limitless, which collapses on itself, but never the two into one."

like what are you talking about. ive grown very annoyed by this deleuze and guattari style of writing that invents its own terms, leaves their definitions vague at best, and then makes totalizing arguments about The History of Everything. since the pieces of the argument are so vacuous and ill defined, theres no real meaning behind the rhetoricity of the words, and it becomes the readers job to read any meaning into them--an experience thats fun and experimental the first time, and exhausting every time after.

[Victoria Jackson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really didn't like the high brow approach which made it virtually unreadable. Little snippets about Napolean, Talleyrand. I ploughed through it - skipped, skimmed over some - too rambling and philosophical.

[Neil Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely and majestically unreadable. I wouldn't change a thing. Five stars.

[Thomas Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth it purely for the discussion of Marx and Stirner towards the end

[dv · Rating 4 out of 5]

«Se dobbiamo davvero trovare una discriminante fra ciò che si può dire del moderno e tutto quello che incontriamo in ogni età precedente – non sarà forse una certa capacità di farsi trascinare dalla forma o dal gesto, di ignorare il limite anche quando esplicitamente lo si difende, di invadere comunque ogni area riservata, magari con la scusa di custodirla da ogni oltraggio?»

La lettura di questo libro di Calasso mette in difficoltà e soggezione, ci si perde di fronte alla profondità, alla complessità e all'erudizione messe in scena in questo libro "ibrido" per cui ogni etichetta sarebbe riduttiva, reso affascinante dalla figura di Tayllerand, centro dell'età delle rivoluzioni che seppe governare. Del libro Calvino disse: "La rovina di Kasch tratta di due argomenti: il primo è Talleyrand, il secondo è tutto il resto". E mi sembra che questo dica tutto.

[Tom Simmonds · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony , I found myself at home with his style, a hybrid of mythical anthology, literary criticism, and commentary.

This book is a work of staggering and captivating erudition, which if i am to tell the truth, i don’t think i fully understood.

Calasso seems to be making a point about modernity and the demise of ritual sacrifice, expressed through the life of Talleyrand.

[Angie Dutton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feels like something I'm going to have to reread and take a lot more time with at some point. One of those books that you can't really skim through.

[James Mordechai · Rating 2 out of 5]

I honestly don't know what I just read. It went over my head.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

(Update November 2024 I have just reread my review and corrected a few mistakes but I must add that while in 2014 I thought I would try this book again I can assure you that in 2024 I will never pick up this or any other unread works by Calasso. Life is too short now for perusal of what I don't like. There are far to many other books to read. I cannot be bothered to give second chances to books I know i don't like).

I came to this book from The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony ready to be entranced and fall in love, all the more so as one of the central characters is Talleyrand the great survivor of French and European history who was so memorably described by Napoleon as a "Shit in silk stockings". I perhaps should have noted that this book was compared in structure and style with Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition (a book I hated and couldn't finish) and Burrough's 'cut ups' (works which I have never been able to take seriously - I spent to many hours of my youth, enjoyably, stoned with pot heads and other druggies talking a load of balls while under the influence. Drugs can get a cute guy naked and in your bed but doesn't create art - not that I was trying to make art - only trying to make boys who thought they were artists - and weren't). I can't describe how disappointed I was, only some one who knows the incredible anticipation of a new work by an author whose previous work you have loved can understand the soul destroying disappointment of finding yourself lost in a trudge through a mire of pointless obscurantism and leaden prose all designed to obfuscate the obvious. But because I did love 'The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony' and read it several times and was intrigued by the books proposed contents I dived in and found myself in a swamp of awful pretentious crap.

But I am sure I will pick this book up again and try and read it because part of me will always think that I must have missed something and only if I approach it in the right frame of mind it will reveal those secret wonders that I could not find. I don't know if that shows optimism or just stupidity - the later probably.

[Mike E. Mancini · Rating 5 out of 5]

RIP Roberto Calasso.

[Andrew Hanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

calvino’s review of this being first about talleyrand then about everything else is probably the most accurate thing i can really think of to characterize this book. it’s just a really well written cabinet of curiosities and a confirmation that the world still contains people who want more than anything to just learn a bunch of shit. if anyone were to ask my favorite genre, it would be whatever this one falls in.

[Kane De Antonis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Puzzling, interesting, challenging, wide ranging. Unique in its scope and its commentary. What is the culture of modernity? Can we trace parts of it back to its birth in the enlightenment? What have we lost in modern society, that once existed as a given in our distant past?

I enjoyed reading this, it was like rummaging through a chest of assorted philosophical thoughts and historical peculiarities. Not for everyone though.

[Jaime Mozo Dutton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I'm just becoming dense in my old age or perhaps I lack the patience to give this book a really good go but whatever the reason I just found the form of the narrative in its choppy style unapproachable. It may be far better than I give it credit for but I gave up a quarter of the way in, it's all well and good being clever but fiction should be enjoyable too.

[Andrea Giovanni Rossi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rimuovere il sacrificio e il sacro dalla società equivale a distruggere la possibilità stessa di comprendere il mondo

[Tyrone_Slothrop (ex-MB) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Testo post-moderno sul moderno

Per parlare del moderno, di quella frattura storica che è alla base del nostro tempo contemporaneo, Calasso fa una scelta stilistica e strutturale estremamente complessa ed anti-convenzionale, creando un oggetto-testo che rifugge categorizzazioni, distruggendo qualunque tentativo di inscatolamento di questo libro non solo in "genere letterario" (concetto aberrante) ma anche solo in "forma letteraria".
Una raccolta eterogenea e (apparentemente) disordinata di aforismi e saggi brevi, di citazioni (centinaia e tutte con le corrette fonti in appendice), di riflessioni filosofiche ed aneddoti storici - inutile tentare una descrizione o una sinossi, molto meglio leggere e godersi questo libro che è una vera gioia per la mente.
Ovviamente, è necessario un certo livello di cultura, perchè Calasso scrive per chi legge e chi ha letto e non gli interessa scrivere per tutti, arrivando ad un certo qual esoterismo che rende il tutto ancora più affascinante.
Dal punto di vista stilistico questa collezione eterogenea di pensieri, pezzi storici , riflessioni filosofiche sul moderno fa ricordare la scrittura libera e indefinibile di un Manganelli o un Landolfi

Il tenue filo conduttore del libro (se proprio se ne vuole trovare uno) è la figura di Talleyrand come incarnazione di un principio di stabilità nell'irruzione della modernità: un principio diabolico, multiforme , indefinibile dal quale si dipana una scrittura che tutto avvolge e tutto considera, portando il lettore in dimensioni alte e profonde - la riflessione sul moderno apre quindi ad un pensiero ampio e sconfinato.

Nasce il moderno quando gli occhi che guardano il mondo vi scorgono «questo caos e questa confusione mostruosa», ma non si allarmano troppo, anzi li esalta subito la prospettiva di inventare una strategia di movimento all’interno di quel caos

la storia della precarietà dell’ordine: dell’ordine antico e dell’ordine nuovo. La storia della loro perpetua rovina.

Si arriva infatti a parti complesse in cui si rianalizza la storia della filosofia dalla prospettiva del concetto.arcaico di.sacrificio, con una analisi che si rifa alle filosofie orientali e ai lavori dei maggiori antropologi - davvero interessante ed illuminante soprattutto la presentazione del sacrificio come sostituzione, concetto che si traduce nel moderno scientifico e tecnico e che permette di capire che l'idea stessa di "sacrificio" è ancora ben presente nella modernità.

l’immensa astuzia sacrificale: la sostituzione. Sacrificando qualcosa che sta per un’altra si avvia la macchina stessa del linguaggio e dell’algebra, la digitalità conquistatrice.

la sua descrizione insostituibile della società della sostituzione, dello scambio, quale essa è – oggi, ora, ovunque, nella fissità della sua perenne espansione.


Ma anche la trattazione del pensiero moderno di Marx è di grande interesse (ed anche profetica, visto che lo stesso pensatore tedesco ritorna sempre in auge anche oggi), soprattutto per la presentazione della figura di Max Stirner (che, confesso, a me ben poco nota), inquietante e rimossa, ma, forse, più influente di quanto si sia disposti ad ammettere.

Max Stirner, l’autore dell’unico libro occidentale che esprima la rivolta nel suo stato chimicamente puro,

il mondo di oggi discende, senza saperlo, da Stirner.

una discriminante fra ciò che si può dire del moderno e tutto quello che incontriamo in ogni età precedente – non sarà forse una certa capacità di farsi trascinare dalla forma o dal gesto, di ignorare il limite anche quando esplicitamente lo si difende, di invadere comunque ogni area riservata


C'è tempo, in questo testo indefinibile ed incontenibile, anche per un omaggio raffinatissimo e sommesso ad Osip Mandelstam


Più che pensieri, sono lembi di pensieri. Come i ricordi, lancinanti perché mai posseduti: si avvicinano e si perdono, creste dell’onda mnemica.


Opera consigliabile solo a chi cerca qualcosa di diverso nella scrittura, a chi piace andare in direzione opposta alla maggioranza ed esplorare i veri scrittori che sanno aprire mondi nuovi, piuttosto che cercare leggibilità, luoghi comuni e frasi fatte per vendere di più.