“The Light of Reason”

This chapter stages an engagement between Thomas Hobbes’s canonical treatises-with most of the attention on his Leviathan-and Bela Tarr’s film The Werckmeister Harmonies (2000; along with the literary version on which it is based, a chapter with the same title in Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance). By showing the way Hobbesian thinking is reflected on and animated by Krasznahorkai’s and Tarr’s characters, who disport themselves in the novel and film versions, respectively, we are encouraged to pay close attention to Hobbes’s textual strategies to what is perhaps best termed his politics of aesthetics. It is shown that, ironically, it is the aesthetic Hobbes who supplies the figuration with which Krasznahorkai and Tarr’s story challenges his political vision, making it possible to think against the political Hobbes by thinking with (implementing and adapting to literary and cinematic genres) the aesthetic Hobbes. In the Werckmesiter story, Hobbes’s rhetoric is rendered as animated rhetorical motion, as his tropes of motion, darkness and light, and his biblical monsters, the leviathan and behemoth, become the operating figures with which Krasznahorkai and Tarr allegorize a slice of Hungarian political history (likely the Mátyás Rákosi and János Kádár eras, 1948–1989, in which their leadership “personated” the Soviet leviathan) that is recalcitrant to Hobbes’s solution to the “war of all against all.”