Abstract

The opening question of this final chapter on Daniel Varuzhan's poetry is: What is the name of the "enemy" that destroyed the world of the ancient gods and condemned us to live under the spell of their disaster? The answer is, strangely enough, Christianity. The chapter offers a parallel with Hölderlin's late elegies and his dealing with the categoric (and catastrophic) "turning away" of the gods. The final question is: How to think the disaster without aesthetics, how to think mourning outside the essential relation to the "end of religion"? The chapter then delineates the necessity of working against the aesthetic matrix in order to receive the Catastrophe into the language of thought. The concluding section examines the 19th century debate on the "peoples without religion," which begins with Schelling and goes all the way down to Max Müller, Ignaz Goldziher (the author of a book on Hebrew mythology), and the representatives of an evolutionist theory of religion.

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