The Empire of Good
Publisher
:
Belles lettres
Parution date
:
EAN
:
9782251441351
Number of pages
:
172
Description
If you need to speak about modernity . . . begin with Philippe Muray’s works.
—Michel Houellebecq
We recommend the uninitiated take it in small doses to start with, so explosive is the impact, without pity, but also redemptive.
—Philosophie Magazine
Philippe Muray was an influential French essayist, novelist, and thinker. His books, always well-known in Europe, have not been available in the United States. Now, four years after his death, Les Belles Lettres has reissued nine of his most important books. The Empire of Good is one of his seminal works, calling into question the “good” that we attribute to our way of life.
The Empire of Good prevails: it urgently needs to be sabotaged.
Those values that we judge excellent today, and even indispensable to the common good, have for a long time seemed to me nefarious, grotesque, and what’s more, dangerous to the freedom of the individual.
—Philippe Muray
Over his lifetime, Philippe Muray earned and maintained a distinct place among the French intelligentsia. He was a cultural anti-modernist, laboring to cast doubt on the perceived benefits of our time and to help render us all critics of the currents through which we move. Muray developed the concept of The Empire of the Good when he was in California, teaching at Stanford University.
Muray believed that our era is characterized by a dreadful seriousness, an aggressive and vacuous certainty that our time is superior to prior times—times about which we have no curiosity. He also stressed our tendency to be determined that we are headed toward an inevitably blissful future, despite rough spots that might suggest the contrary.
He viewed this devotion to a good that cannot be called into question as the source of countless mistakes, and the shortest path to new forms of barbarism. In The Empire of Good, he wrote about the absurdities of our unthinking acceptance of the modern age in a style that is insistent, detailed, and very human.
Author
Philippe Muray : Philippe Muray (1945–2006) was an essayist, author of Le XIXème siècle à travers les âges (Denoël, 1984) and Après l’histoire, I and II (Les Belles Lettres, 1999 and 2000), among other works, and a novelist who authored Une arrière-saison (Flammarion, 1968) and Chantpluriel (Gallimard, 1973), to name just two. In 1983, he taught at Stanford University in California at the invitation of René Girard. In 2010, his works were read by the French actor Fabrice Luchini at the Théatre de l’Atelier, sparking renewed interest in his oeuvre.
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