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In the science, aesthetics, and politics of modernity, the rational and the irrational often seem to oppose one another. Positivism wars with the hermeneutics of suspicion; functional design clashes with baroque decorative flourish; calls for pragmatic, well-informed policy contrast with the ever more bizarre, emotion-driven spectacle of political choice. A certain dialectical optimism may see such contradictions as the royal road to social progress. Yet a more cautious survey of our era suggests that rationality and irrationality are mutually imbricating, and that their tension will remain unresolved, continuing to shape our history in new and sometimes troubling ways.
Nathan Gorelick's The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature Between Ideology and the Unconscious is, among other things, a study of the place of rationality in our society, reaching back to the literary origins of the Enlightenment to explore the emergence of the modern individual as a “subject of reason” (p. 5). For the reader whose primary interest is psychoanalysis, the literary culture of the 18th century may seem daunting, or of questionable relevance. A thoughtful and lucid guide to the field, Gorelick demonstrates that the human individual that came into being with the
Enlightenment landed on Freud's couch a hundred years later, torn between an image of itself as rational on one hand and a confusing mass of unknown thoughts, repressed fantasies, and uncontrollable affects on the other.
The book's argument begins from the premise that the Enlightenment is modernity's major ideological project. From the 18th century onward, it offered new ways of making sense of the world and proposed radical horizons for human freedom. As a reflexive intellectual effort, the Enlightenment also offered accounts of its own origins and telos; it mythologized itself. Like all myths, these accounts must be iterated again and again, and this takes place within the texts under investigation: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Cru