Lux lucet in tenebris

Look, I too can do what my great rivals can do; indeed, I can do it better than they…. Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an orator!

“Where there are no gods, the phantoms reign,” Novalis had prophesied. Now one could go a step further and say: gods and phantoms will alternate on the scene with equal rights. There is no longer a theological power capable of taking charge and putting them in order. In which case, who will risk dealing with them, arranging them? Another power, one that hitherto has been forever denied its independence, forever obliged to serve society, but which now threatens to hoist anchor for good and set sail, sovereign and solitary, as the vessel that brings together all the simulacra and wanders about the ocean of the mind for the pure pleasure and play of the gesture: literature. Which in this mutation may also be called absolute literature.

“Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”