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Abstract:

Ancient culture is the cradle of mechanics and machines of desire, organization of the external nature and the internal human nature. Aestheticization of reality originates from polytheism, which identified the sources of human desires with transcendent impulses, thereby representing a human being as an impulsive automaton producing affects and reactions. The highly reactive consciousness of both archaic and contemporary cultures tends to be guided by language stimuli. Language is understood here as a complex of unconscious perception, thinking and behavioral habits, in which Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and speech act theorists sought answers to the philosophical question about man. While ancient culture (Ovid) approached language as “faded mythology”, a harmonious unity of finite and infinite intuitions, the Enlightenment undertakes an experimental transfer, treating nature as an eternal evolution of forms. Goethe conceives the end of the Enlightenment project, one of his guiding principles being that the unconscious should be regarded as a symbol, an undiscovered unity in the instinctive development of reactive consciousness. Vitalism (perception of affective data) and the unconscious (anticipation of human nature perfection) guide the development of natural proclivities and specific personality traits in the process of sensory, reflexive and moral self-exploration. In post-Romantic culture, machines of desire (Charles Baudelaire, Jorge Luis Borges) have been increasingly transformed into instinctive programs of spontaneous perception and action, the symbolic aspect being removed from the writer’s vision. Postmodern literature (Borges), in particular, brings machines of desire to their own limit by contemplating the original infinity of numerical variations and combinations prior to and beyond any finite imaginary body.