> powers (despite its origins). Here's an excerpt from Coleridge's
> "Religious Musings" (1794):
>
> Tremble far-off -- for lo! the Giant Frenzy
> Uprooting empires with his whirlwind arm
> Mocketh high Heaven; burst hideous from the cell
> Where the old Hag, unconquerable, huge,
> Creation's eyeless drudge, black Ruin, sits
> Nursing the impatient earthquake.... *****
An interesting gender ideology, the Jacobin revolutionary still tumbling empires, and not yet creating new ones a la Napoleon (that would be, what, 1800 or so?), and Milton's Mother of Chaos (chaos always gets a bad rap among bourgie thinkers, who were always system-builders, would-be architects of the totality) redone as the literally and figuratively bewitching Ruins (cf. Goethe's witches cauldron in Faust: the semiperipheral outsider looking in on the English factory).
Seems nowadays our collective fantasies of revolutionary praxis are being cosmologized, or, well, hmm, that's not the way to put it. I mean, where you get this secularization of theological motifs in the post-1789 period, today there's this micropoliticization of cosmological categories: ecologies, space travel, aliens, etc. Progressive nationalism then, progressive multinationalism now.
-- Dennis