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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

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Benjamin asserts blithely that this modern concept of sovereignty began in the<br />

Renaissance because of its rich feeling for a life that it wished to protect at all cost. This<br />

change in the cultural sentiment surrounding the imperatives that defined a king placed<br />

new demands upon them. Kings were expected to guarantee the continuity and welfare of<br />

the community in which individual lives could grow. Failure to do so broached the<br />

prospect of natural justice to intervene and have them forcibly removed by an ethically<br />

ratified usurper.<br />

At the same time, Benjamin notes, anxieties over what might be lost during states<br />

of emergency emerged as both life expectancy and life chances grew. With the prospect<br />

of a mutable kingship, beholden to a wider principle of communitarian-humanitarian<br />

ends, the Baroque Restoration became haunted by general ideas about communal<br />

catastrophe. The prospect of an emergency meant facing the truth that total theocratic<br />

redemption and eschatology were no longer possible, inasmuch as they were once<br />

guaranteed in the figure of a divinely appointed, inalienable, kingship. The remnants of<br />

just such a concept of kingship demanded and endorsed an arbitrary tyrannical power that<br />

ought to be liberally wielded solely for the king‘s self-preservation; under the new moral<br />

imperatives of the Gallican Laws, the king‘s arbitrary self-protective and self-possessive<br />

individualism become atomized and dispersed. The principle of possessive individualism<br />

would come to belong to any man who legitimated himself through an apprehension of<br />

natural justice. Here Benjamin conjugates the theological/ aesthetic ramifications of this<br />

democratizing of kingship:<br />

The baroque knows no eschatology; and for that very reason it<br />

possesses no mechanism by which all earthly things are gathered in<br />

together and exalted before being consigned to their end. The<br />

hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest<br />

33

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