I am tired of reading about the Enlightenment. In recent years, it has been accused of being racist, championed as the foundation of contemporary western civilisation and become the pivot around which discussions of identity rotate. Ever since Adorno threw his toys out of the pram (The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944), it's become, like, this symbol or something. And now I am researching it, because it's the era which gave birth to dramaturgy.
As much fun as it might be to be researching something that is right at the centre of contemporary controversy, it just depresses me. Reducing a period of dynamic philosophical argument into a slogan is hardly expanding human knowledge, and poking at the past for its sins strikes me... oh... as exactly the kind of thing that Enlightenment philosophers might do. So, yeah, there is a point to both sides.
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