ABSTRACT
soul present is the tragedy of what was an iron-cast hope for a soul past. The alternation between farce and tragedy characterize this history of names, which as grammatical foundations of meaning have come to signify a historic, personal, and collective form of 'discontinuation', amounting to a virtual break from the idea of teleological continuation. The tragedy-farce of the nineties is that even the spectral images of fear have vanished, and Hades is a closed-shop, where Lotus-eating stupidity could not confide with Theresias. The farcification of our own tragedy—the tragedy which we now live and proclaim as a 'new world order' marked by the 'death' of the cold war—is the only indication of the factum of a history-made-epic. When Michel Foucault asks What is the Enlightenment? and questions what is modernity, his indulgence in the Telemachia of the twentieth century harks back to that most recent cycle of tragedy-made-farce, to whose ebb we seem to pertain.
