Modernity begins after Renaissance (Pascal)

00:21:00 — Modernity begins after Renaissance (Pascal)

Žižek dates modernity not to the Renaissance but to its aftermath — to the hard cut that opens between a subjective interior full of fears and desires and an objective exterior stripped of magic. Renaissance thinkers still inhabited a reality animated by hidden powers. It takes Pascal’s gray, infinite universe to produce the modern subject as we still experience it: a mind facing a cosmos that has stopped speaking.