ABSTRACT
Roberto Calasso’s project, going back to his 1983 book The Ruins of Kasch, offering an unprecedented new vision of the French Revolution, is simply one of the most important intellectual projects of the past half-century. This chapter will discuss some of the main ideas of The Ruins of Kasch, a book that is organised around a series of pitiless character studies on key founding figures of modernity. It starts, in contrast, with presenting Talleyrand, a main enemy of standard accounts, in a positive light, starting with his precocious realisation that he was not simply living through a revolution, but at the start of a new age, ‘the age of revolutions’, which implied a moving towards an unknown world, with only one thing being certain, that this will end in a shipwreck. The chapter then reviews Calasso’s character studies of central figures of modern intelligentsia, including Bentham, Stirner, Marx, Freud and Durkheim.
