Abstract
This chapter is divided into three major sections. The first presents a brief history of the profound ambiguities that constitute modern intellectual life. The second part of this chapter is “humanistic” in the sense that it reconstructs a critical paradigm based on the analysis of Cervantes’ comedy The Altarpiece of Marvels. Based on the fundamental structure of this drama (which involves art as spectacle, the intellectual as exile, and the enlightened critique of spectacle), this section advances a critique of European Fascism. The third section considers the debasement of the intellectual as “public man,” which occurs in direct proportion to the transformation of the journalist into a performer in and of the spectacle. The greater the journalist’s professional integrity, the more apparent does his complicitous position as a narrator become, revealing this would-be intellectual to be a betraying witness and an impotent onlooker.
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Notes
- 1.
The novel was published in the DDR in 1956 and banned in West Germany until 1981.
- 2.
The concept of the Christian ekklesia as a uniform “Third Race,” distinct from Judaism and paganism, was formulated in Patristic literature and was rooted in Paul’s political theology (Tomson 1990, 3). It was also the criticism that Hellenistic and Roman intellectuals directed at the Christian sect during the first two centuries of its history (Harnack 1902, 197 ff.).
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Subirats, E. (2021). Intellectuals & Exiles. In: Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73106-9_3
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