The Time of the Assassins

Henry Miller through Rimbaud. The essay, published in 1946, is a diagnosis of modernity made from the figure of the poet who announced, and embodied, the spiritual collapse of the West. Apparently, the news of the decline of free Western societies has not been sufficiently exaggerated. Rimbaud as a symbol of the total failure of civilization, a body that language consumes and abandons. 

Miller reads Rimbaud as one who observes an open wound. Modernity transforms man into a commodity and art into noise. Sound familiar? The “time of the assassins” is the time of efficiency, profit, conformity. A time in which the spirit is devoured by technique. Rimbaud, who wanted to be a “seer”. He only managed to become the martyr of this failure. Only mission, resist: against the tyranny of progress, against the cynicism of the masses, against the dissolution of the soul.

Henry Miller (1891–1980), an American exiled in Paris. Unsubmissive. Radical. In works such as Tropic of Cancer, he made obscenity an ethic and confession a form of lucidity. In The Time of the Assassins, he recognizes in the French poet the premonition of catastrophe: the death of imagination.