The Ruin of Kasch
| Author | Roberto Calasso; translated by William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli |
|---|---|
| Published | 1983 |
| Format | Book |
TL;DR — Calasso’s fragmentary meditation on legitimacy, sacrifice and modernity, built around Talleyrand and an African legend of a kingdom that ritually killed its kings.
The first volume of Roberto Calasso’s long cycle of books, first published in Italian as La rovina di Kasch (Adelphi, 1983) and in English by Harvard’s Belknap Press in 1994, translated by William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli.
It is a book of short essays, aphorisms, quotations and stories rather than a continuous argument. Two threads run through it: the career of Talleyrand, the French statesman who served every regime from the Old Regime to the July Monarchy, as a study in legitimacy and power; and the legend of Kasch, an ancient African kingdom whose kings were put to death when the priests read the stars, which Calasso uses to reflect on sacrifice and its disappearance in the modern world. Chapters range widely — Goethe, Port-Royal, Marx and Ricardo, the Wolf-Man, Montaigne, the Palais-Royal — around the theme of what happened when society stopped believing in sacrifice and ritual order.
What it is: A literary-philosophical work by a major Italian writer and publisher, in print and under copyright. This is an OCR scan of the Harvard edition.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
394 pages. A PDF copy is held in Kyle’s private archive; it is not linked or shared here.