Literature of Violence or Literature on Violence? The French Enlightenment on Trial

JUST AS THE NOTION OF POSTMODERNISM has permeated most theoretical debates today concerned with aesthetic, cultural, and political experience, so too has the notion of enlightenment. More to the point, the historical Enlightenment has long served as postmodernism’s whipping boy, which the latter leaves for dead each time it announces the demise of modernity in the end of history, narrative, or philosophy. From the Romantics through Nietzsche, to the Frankfurt School or the works of Derrida and Foucault, the critique of enlightenment has exposed the “lie” of Reason. Posited by Enlightenment thinkers as the universal liberator of society, reason was to unshackle humanity from the darkness of human instinct and the violence of religious, political, and social obscurantism. Yet, as modern critiques demonstrate, disguising itself under the mask of Law, Imperative, or Right, reason has instead proven itself to be the reappropriation of the very violence and ignorance it set out to eradicate. As Jiirgen Habermas remarks, “The permanent sign of enlightenment is domination over objectified, external nature and as repressed natural nature…. Reason itself destroys the humanity it first made possible” (110).