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When Georg Kremnitz paid me the honour of inviting me to give this plenary lecture, I found myself, as usual, unable to specify a subject. Precisely because he gave me complete freedom to determine what I was going to speak on. As a result of discussions we had, and as the programme of this symposium evolved with its multiple questions concerning the future of theories of discourse and communication, on postmodernism, on the science of texts and cultural identities, I was stimulated into introducing a theme which could bring together my own research with all these. And as I am in the process of editing a work on the multiple metamorphoses of perversion, both word and concept, I decided, in homage to Adorno, a philosopher who has influenced me greatly and a profound reader of Freud, to deal with the question of the reversal of the ideals of the Enlightenment into their opposite. From whence my somewhat bizarre title: ‘The Enlightenment and its perversion in the West’.
I should have been more precise with this word ‘West’ and speak of the contemporary, that is to say, the mutations of the representations of good and evil in Western society in the twentieth century.
There is much talk today of these mutations. There is endless questioning why democracy, which remains the best form of government for human beings, has not managed to eliminate some of those derivatives which are