The Shadows of Totalization, Part XLVIII

"Why do I date the Enlightenment, as a historical phenomenon, as beginning in 1648 and ending in 1789? 1648 marked the end of the Thirty Year's War and the Peace of Westphalia. This was the beginning of the secularization of the political; from this point onwards, religious claims were progressively withdrawn from the political and public spheres of society. This made possible the freethinking attitude of Thomas Jefferson, who said, ‘It does me no harm for my neighbor to say that there are many gods or that there are none.’”--Carlos, The Importance of History.

If I deny secularization as an activation of thought, I take a period of history commonly regarded as philosophically active and reframe it,

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Macbeth Quote (Act V, Scene V).

The Peace of Westphalia was an idiot’s gasp for breath, taken between long hate-filled rants. The idiots’ lives are but shifting shadows cast by the bars of the cage the idiots created for themselves, having mistaken this creative project of self-imprisonment for one of movement and emancipation.

We won’t hear noise or music if we must know our freedom and our knowledge derives from practices of confinement or control, processes of totalization, a will to fixation.