ABSTRACT
Liberalism, states Dufour, means primarily a liberation of the passions. And this liberation has puritan roots. Sade made the perversion, that is to say the reversal, complete by staging, in literary space, the experiment of radicalizing certain basic elements of liberalism, which led to his notion of isolism, an utmost extreme combination of egoism and hedonism. Neo-liberalism and consumerism as terms to describe this late modern context are inadequate because they tell only a part of the story. It is producerism as well, in the sense that the modern professional is supposed to be a flexi-worker, a position which matches with the pliability of the trend-watching consumer. Attunement or distunement that takes place at a pre-intentional, pre-subjective, participative level. As emergency measures Dufour mentions for example: halting the businesslike changes of schools, hospitals, cultural institutions. In this way the tradition that was demolished by ultra-liberalism can be recovered and regained.
