Spectacle of Enlightenment: The Bulgaria Essays, 2016

Rather than liberate humanity from tyranny, modern enlightenment has wound up subjecting us to a new servitude imposed by systems of mass manipulation, electronic vigilance, compulsive consumerism, and the horrors of a seemingly unending global war on terror. Our national democracies are an imperial farce and the most that intellectuals either know or dare to do in the face of all this destruction is to blithely recommend resistance. In this pamphlet, which we publish in anticipation of the book Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction, we challenge the self-defeating notion that intellectuals should settle for resistance and urge them to accomplish much more. With this aim in mind, we construct a cosmology of enlightenment that regards it as an unstable epiphenomenon, we critique the limits of the enlightenment of Pax Americana, and we provide an epistemological theory and demonstration of intellectual participation in civil society. As such, we promote a reflexive challenge to the spectacle that defines our reality today. Spectacle assigns to the intellectual the role of the critic, on the one hand, and on the other, that of the soothsayer of princes. In opposition to both and on the basis of this radical critique, we propose a trespassive tradition of cultural leadership.