That drive

A dangerous demon lurking from dark recesses...

Still reading (for the second time) Isaiah Berlin's "The Roots of Romanticism", a book which seems to me crucial in understanding our times. Berlin argues that the Western world is still in a period of romanticism in its focus on the individual. And this romanticism is spreading through the world as culture abandon their group-oriented focus to turn to one's self. 

I wonder whether Glissant ever speaks about romanticism in his writings, would be curious to know what his take on it is. Of "The Roots of Romanticism" more later, but in the meantime here's an interesting excerpt:

This is the beginning of the vast drive forward on the part of inspired individuals, or inspired nations, constantly creating themselves afresh, constantly aspiring to purify themselves, and to reach some unheard-or height of endless self-transformation, endless self-creation, works of art, constantly engaged in creating themselves, forward, forward, like a kind of vast cosmic desing perpetually renewing itself. This half-metaphysical, half-religious notion, which emerges from the sober pages of Kant, and which Kant repudiated with the greatest possible vehemence and indignation, was destined to have an extremely violent effect upon both German politics and German morals, but also upon German art, German prose and German verse, and then by natural transference upon the French, and upon the English as well.

Contributed by - - Arabella Hutter