The Ruin of Kasch traces the rise of what, after Baudelaire, we've come to call 'the Modern', and its fall. The descent into fragmentation, nihilism and mass slaughter follows an earlier collapse, of the archaic societies regulated by the stars and rituals of sacrifice. At the heart of this book is the legend of Kasch, an African kingdom whose destruction is an emblem of the ruin of ancient and modern worlds.
Calasso focuses on the French Revolution, but makes excursions back and forward in time, to Vedic India, Porphyry's Rome, Engels's Berlin, Pol Pot's Cambodia. A vast gallery of characters crosses his stage, including Laclos and Marx, Benjamin and Chateaubriand, Sainte-Beuve, Levi-Strauss, Stirner and de Maistre. Looming over them is the Master of Ceremonies, the statesman Charles-Maurice de Tallyrand-Perigord, who knew the secrets of the old and new regimes. As the modern age began, he gave new meaning to 'legitimacy' -- a word that still stalks the political jungle of our waning century.
In Talleyrand's unstable world -- our world -- absence of faith is necessary for survival. Calasso reveals our acts of destruction as rituals of sacrifice that have assumed non-sacred guises. The road through the French Revolution leads to the trenches of World War I and the mass graves the Khmer Rouge dug. The form of this tale of mutability -- blending anecdote, quotation, digression, dialogue, historical analysis, story-telling -- evokes the rich, protean spirit of Modernism itself.