What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.

Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.