The Ruin of Kasch

by Roberto Calasso, Richard Dixon (Translator)

Overview

A brilliant new translation of a classic work on violence and revolution as seen through mythology and art

The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects—“the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else,” wrote Italo Calvino when the book first appeared in 1983. Hailed as one of those rare books that persuade us to see our entire civilization in a new light, its guide is the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who knew the secrets of the ancien régime and all that came after, and was able to adapt the notion of “legitimacy” to the modern age. Roberto Calasso follows him through a vast gallery of scenes set immediately before and after the French Revolution, making occasional forays backward and forward in time, from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot, with appearances by Goethe and Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and Marx, Walter Benjamin and Chateaubriand. At the center stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary kingdom based on the ritual killing of the king and emblematic of the ruin of ancient and modern regimes.

Offered here in a new translation by Richard Dixon, The Ruin of Kasch is, as John Banville wrote, “a great fat jewel-box of a book, gleaming with obscure treasures.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374252106
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/02/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	1,072,440
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Roberto Calasso was the publisher of Adelphi Edizioni in Milan and the author of a decades-spanning, multi-volume work which up to now comprises The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka, K., Tiepolo Pink, La Folie Baudelaire, Ardor, The Unnamable Present, and The Celestial Hunter, many of which were published by FSG. FSG will published two more books in Calasso's magnum opus, The Book of All Books (November 2021) and his The Tablet of the Destinies in 2022. Roberto Calasso died on July 28, 2021.

Richard Dixon lives and works in Italy. His translations include Ardor and The Art of the Publisher by Roberto Calasso, and The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco. He is one of the translators of FSG’s edition of Leopardi’s Zibaldone.

Table of Contents

The Ruin of Kasch 1

Note for Lucien 29

Living in the Torrent 34

Exempla Voluptatis 38

The Grand Ball 40

Treacherous Trifles 45

Dismal Glory 49

"The Mysterious Force of Legitimacy" 60

Arcana Imperii 64

The Origins of Sweetness 64

Eulogius 70

L'Autrichienne 78

The Woodcutter and the Fisherman 82

Goethe in Venice 85

On Taste 96

Metamorphoses of Style 102

A Belated Nostalgia for Sorrow 110

The Languor of a Park in Berry 112

Around Port-Royal 116

The Ruin of Kasch 127

Among the Ruins of Kasch 136

Elements of Sacrifice 145

Law and Order 159

The Forest Doctrine 184

Archives and Will-o'-the-Wisps 195

Postcards from the Quaternary 200

The Demon of Repetition 201

Goethe's Birthday 221

Sacrificial Crumbs 222

The Antiromantic Child 235

Limits 239

Process 241

Glosses on Marx 242

Ricardo's Ruthlessness 257

Geldkristall 260

History Makes Experiments 267

The Artificial Barbarian 277

Un frisson nouveau 307

Behind the Glass 310

Bien-aimé 316

A Visit to Picpus 324

"The Organization Wouldn't Like That" 328

The Moscow Doorkeeper 334

Montaigne's Wake 337

The Wolf-Man Recalls 344

Voices from the Palais-Royal 353

Mundus Patet 360

Letter from Saint Petersburg 373

Notes 381

Index of Names, Places, and Works 405

Editorial Reviews

2017-09-13
A fragmented, meditative inquiry into sacrifice, revolution, and modernity.Published in Italy in 1983, and in English translation in 1994, this allusive compendium is the first book of a series by Adelphi Edizioni publisher Calasso (The Art of the Publisher, 2015, etc.), all published in the 1990s, that includes philosophical and literary excursions into Greek myth, Kafka, Indian religious texts, and Baudelaire, circling the same themes: the meaning of sacred ritual, the nature of authority, and the culture of modernity. A new translation by Dixon introduces Calasso to a generation possibly unfamiliar with the earlier volumes. The author takes his title from a legend of an African kingdom where kings were ritually sacrificed by order of the priests until one ruler finds a storyteller so mesmerizing that the priests fall under his spell. The end of the sacrificial ritual, though, proves the downfall of the kingdom. Sacrifice, Calasso concludes, "is the cause of ruin," but also, "the absence of sacrifice is the cause of ruin." Society itself "is the ruin because it reverberates the sound of the world, its incessant devouring whirr." Throughout the book, baffling expressions contrast with lucid judgments, such as the author's remark that history "can be summed up as follows: for a long time men killed other beings, dedicating them to an invisible object; and then, from a certain point they killed without dedicating this act to anyone." Only killing itself remains. Calasso is critical of modernity, peopled, he maintains, by nonbelievers who "deny the existence of anything supernatural. These include the harshest bigots." Karl Marx ("a prisoner of the Enemy he is attacking"), Nietzsche, Freud, Goethe, Pascal, Levi-Strauss, and assorted French modernists appear among a huge cast of literary and political figures whose writings and opinions Calasso juxtaposes and glosses. Serving as a guide through the thorny landscape of cultural transition is Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (1754-1838), the wily statesman and diplomat influential during and after the French Revolution.Challenging, erudite, and unsettling observations on civilization and its plethora of discontents.

Kirkus Reviews

Recounts the downfall of a legendary African kingdom whose annihilation is emblematic of the ruin of the ancient and modern worlds, with side trips back and forward in time to Vedic India, the French Revolution, and Cambodia. French statesman Charles-Maurice de Tallyrand-Perigord serves as the master of ceremonies of this synthesis of Western cultural history. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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