Saturn and Eros. Joy as a Form of Self-knowledge
The text attempts to show joy in the modern dialectic of knowledge and reification. Both components of this dialectic lead deeper into current problems with the legitimization of science. Melancholic knowledge, personified by such figures as Walter Benjamin or Theodor W. Adorno, is an extension of this primary tension in the instrumentalization of joy as an autarkic affect on the one hand, and a nominalist utopia and fetishism of immediacy on the other. In the article, “melancholic knowledge” is accompanied by two other types of joy: Kant’s ethics of the heart and Nietzsche’s “joyful knowledge”, both seemingly phenomenological, reaching the edge of joy as a condition of possibility or impossibility of life and knowledge. In this way, one can understand the tension that truly radicalizes joyful modernity – stretched between Saturn and Eros, between cognitive theory criticism and fairy tale.