Theopoetics’s Weblog

“The philosophical overcoming of the myth is not simply a letting behind of the mythical, but a constant struggle with(in) it: philosophy needs the recourse to myth, not only for external reasons, in order to explain its conceptual teaching to the uneducated masses, but inherently, to “suture” its own conceptual edifice where it fails in reaching its innermost core, from Plato’s myth of the cave to Freuds myth of the primoridal father and Lacans myth of Lamella. Myth is thus the Real of the Logos: the forighn intruder, impossible to get rid of, impossible to remain fully within it. Therein resides the lesson of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: enlightenment always already “contaminates” the mythical naive immediacy; enlightenment itself is mythical, i.e. its own grounding gesture repeats the mythical operation. And what is “postmodernisim” if not the ultimate defeat of enlightenment in its very triumph: when the dialactic of enlightenment reaches its apogee, the dynamic, rootless postindustrial society directly generates its own myth. The technological reductionism of the cognitive partisans of Artificial Intelligence and the pagan mythic imaginary of sorcery, of mysterious magic powers, etc, are strictly the two sides of the same phenomenon: the defeat of modernity in its very triumph”