Commentary

We live in an age of terror, which like many an apparently antique phenomenon—the Scottish kilt springs bathetically to mind—is in fact of fairly recent vintage. Of course people have been dismembering and disemboweling each other since time began; but terror as a political concept, Terror as an idea worthy of upper-case signification, is no older than modernity itself. Indeed, it is twinned at birth with what for some is the very source of later modernity, the French Revolution. There can be no modernity without its attendant terror.

It was Hegel who showed us how terror springs straight from the heart of the bourgeois social order. The absolute freedom of that society—"freedom in a void," as Hegel scathingly called it—acknowledges no bounds, and is thus doomed to a raging, unappeasable fury. For all its materialism, it harbors a virulent hatred of finitude. If it seems to yearn for the carnal world, stuffing more and more colonies, conquests, and commodities into its insatiable maw, it is really only because it wishes to pound that world to pieces in its murderous infantile aggression. Like Conrad's crazed professor in The Secret Agent it is the ultimate anarchist, wishing to wipe the slate clean and start again ex nihilo, in a demonic reversal of divine creation. Like God, it is entirely self-causing and self-originating, confessing no dependency beyond itself. Like all desire (a phenomenon which some dewy-eyed postmodernists oddly regard as positive), it is in love only with itself. For how can any of its various self-realizations not seem wretchedly trivial in contrast to its own boundlessness? The various objects of this furious freedom are thus also obstructions to it. So it is logical, as Hegel sees, that it will end up by consuming itself, confronting itself as its own worst enemy and disappearing into its own sublime nothingness. Operation Infinite Freedom has been tried once already and failed. It is known as the Faust legend.

The freedom of modernity is not, to be sure, merely nothing. Only the George Steiners of this world, in their monotone way, regard everything that happened from the Enlightenment onward as a disastrous declension, while naturally taking full advantage of many of that epoch's precious bequests (free speech, plastic bags, redress against torture, central heating, and the like). As this issue of New Literary History makes ironically plain, the George Steiners of this world include, on this count at least, some of those who look with most disfavor on Steiner's own elitism. There are some curious bedfellows between these covers (or "weird," as the American neo-Gothic jargon has it), as the anti-Enlightenment rhetoric of cultural reaction joins forces from time to time with the language of the more radical and right-on. As far as the latter goes, one might allude to the essay by Michel Maffesoli, of which one might charitably remark that something has no doubt been lost in the translation.

The truth, however, is that for millions of previously dumped and discarded men and women, modernity has been an enthralling emancipation. Some on the cultural left tend to forget that democracy, equality, socialism, feminism, trade unionism, and anti-colonialism are as much products of modernity as profiteroles or the panopticon. The ontological homelessness which George Steiner sees as the curse of our condition is also the source of our creativity—which is to say that our culpa is felix, our Fall fortunate, our disabilities enabling. Without this divorce from the sensuous at-homeness of our fellow animals, we would indeed not endure most of the privations and oppressions that we do, but neither would we be able to compose sonnets or symphonies, or write distinguished essays in US journals about our not-at-homeness. Our fall up from the creaturely innocence of the beasts into history, language, and power is as much loss and gain as modernity itself. But to register this requires a habit of thought known as the dialectical, which...