Andrew McNeely’s Reviews > The Melancholy of Resistance > Status Update

György Eszter is not convinced by your efforts at reenchantment:

“…quite apart from the age-old possibility of seeing the heavens at all through such dense clouds, he was convinced that Valuska’s cosmos had no relation whatsoever to the real one; it was, he thought, an image, something remembered from childhood perhaps, only an image, of some once-glimpsed universal order, an order that had become a personal domain, clearly luminous landscape that could never be lost, a pure religion which assumed that there was or might once have been a heavenly mechanism ‘driven by some hidden motor of enchantment and innocent dreaming.’” (pp. 105-106)

Eszter’s description of his own disenchantment is one of the very greatest encapsulations of what Charles Taylor dubbed the “immanent frame”:

“The world…consisted merely of ‘an indifferent power which offered disappointment at every turn’; its various concerns were incompatible and it was too full of noises of banging, screeching and crowing, noises that were simply the discordant and refracted sounds of struggle, and this was all there was to the world if we but realized it.” (p. 117)

(sidebar: Eszter hadn’t read Hartmut Rosa yet).

However, unlike Taylor’s aesthetic trajectories in a secular age that lends itself weight to our flattened existence, Eszter, a musicologist by profession, argues to the contrary:

“Faith, thought Eszter, recognizing his own stupidity, is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different; in the same way, music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate.” (p. 117)

In Taylor’s framing, Eszter’s posture toward enchanted trajectories cashes out as a “closed spin”–materialism is just the way things are, a brute fact of life.