What is Enlightenment?

Yesterday a good friend and colleague of mine remarked,

I don’t understand people who valorize the Enlightenment, as if Cartesian rationality is the be all, end all of philosophy.

He then went on to wonder whether Jonathan Israel’s books are worth reading. The answer to the second question is an emphatic “yes!” I would especially recommend his book Radical Enlightenment. As for the first remark, Enlightenment, for me, does not mean Cartesian rationality, nor even necessarily a particular period in history, but something like a virtual tendency within human social collectives that exists, to use Badiou’s language in Logics of Worlds, with greater or lesser intensity or brightness at all times and places.

What, then, is the nature of this tendency and intensity? For me– and others will differ –Enlightenment is a synonym for immanence. This immanence unfolds along three axis and can develop unevenly, referring to…