The closure of immanence

The epochal principle – the arché – of modernity that legitimates its fundamental projection can be indicated to be ‘immanence’ or ‘autonomy’. It is not for nothing that this projection is arrived at negatively: immanence as release from …, or autonomy as freedom from all that is heteronymous, whether we call that heteronymous ‘God’ or ‘nature’. The fundamental projection of modernity – its sovereign myth, if we can call it so – lies in its auto-nomos: the self-giving of the law, the self-grounding of its essential task and vocation which, in a famous essay on Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant calls ‘coming to maturity’ or ‘adulthood’ (Kant 1991: 54–60). If the language of ‘myth’ can be said to be basically ‘auto-poesis’, or ‘auto-saying’, then the epochal myth of modernity is nothing other than itself ‘mythic’ par excellence. The fundamental projection of modernity, its hegemonic fantasm, is the myth of autonomy – namely, the myth of ‘Reason’ – which is the myth par excellence.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their well-known book Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002) display the mythic constitution of the Enlightenment project which, negatively, determines itself as freedom from myth, replacing religion (which is confused with myth) with the purgative power of Reason. This paradox is the heart of the fundamental projection of modernity. The epochal condition of modernity, out of its fundamental mythic ground (which it calls ‘rational’ ground), attempts to liquidate the power of myth (what it considers as ‘myth’, namely, ‘religion’): Reason is ‘auto-nomos’, while religion (which it calls ‘myth’) is the nomosof the other (other than ‘human’, namely: God or nature). Reason (the self-giving of reason, the-why or the ground), in the immanence of its self-presence, releases us from the bondage of transcendence (God or nature), from the cages of the divine law and from the cages of the law of nature. The de-mythologising projection of Reason that grounds itself on its own law is, thus, the mythic constitution par excellence: it consists of a new mode of legitimacy of the ‘human’ as that being who, now released from cages of the divine law and from the nomos of nature, comes to understand him-/herself as the sovereign master of his or her own destinal becoming.