ABSTRACT
But like the statues of Hermes castrated by Alcibiades, these factishes are all broken, shattered by the hammers of critical thought whose long history takes us back: to the Greeks who abandoned the idols of the Cave but put Ideas on pedestals; to the Jews who broke the Golden Calf but built the Temple; to the Christians who burned pagan statues but painted icons; to the Protestants who whitewashed frescos but brandished the true text of the Bible from the pulpit; to the revolutionaries who overthrew the old regimes but founded a cult devoted to the goddess Reason; to the hammer-wielding philosophers who put a stethoscope to the cavernous emptiness of the statues of every cult but put the ancient pagan gods of the will to power back in place. 1
