Tag: The Illusion of Light

L’Illusion de la lumière

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1–2 minutes

Un court message aujourd’hui.

Je travaille à la traduction de The Illusion of Light : Thinking After the Enlightenment (L’Illusion de la lumière : Penser après les Lumières) en français, avec l’aide de quelques outils linguistiques et d’un peu d’intelligence artificielle. J’ai bon espoir que le processus sera fructueux. Souhaitez-moi bonne chance.

Je dois beaucoup aux penseurs français, d’hier comme d’aujourd’hui. Traduire ce texte est donc, à ma manière, une forme de reconnaissance. Mon plus grand défi sera de préserver un français à la fois contemporain et fidèle à ma voix – moins prosaïque que poétique.
Mes excuses d’avance aux Québécois.

Image: “We have confused the act of exposure with the act of understanding.”

In English, I am translating The Illusion of Light into French, so I’m leaving just this short note today.

I don’t know any other languages well enough to attempt a translation myself, but with a few capable software partners, I’m confident the process will end well.

For the record, I’m using these tools:

  • Reverso — I’ve used it for years and still find it helpful. It provides plenty of contextual examples, which helps ensure I’ve captured the right nuance.
  • ChatGPT — My go-to AI partner; it gets the second pass.
  • Claude — I’m consistently impressed with its suggested amendments. Where Reverso is precise, Claude tends to catch idiomatic usage better.
  • Mistral — It’s French, after all. What can I say? A bit pedantic, perhaps, but another set of virtual eyes can’t hurt—can they?

Whilst I’m sure these tools could manage other languages, I want to be able to evaluate what they’re doing. In French, even if I don’t know a particular word, I can verify it, and I understand the grammar. With other languages, I’d simply be trusting a black box.

Besides, French culture and philosophy have influenced me so deeply that the least I can do is offer something back. As this translation is an overview of my English-language essays, I hope it provides some in-language context.

I know how difficult translated works can be to read, so if I’m overseeing the process, at least there’s one fewer filter between my thoughts and the reader.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Book Announcement: Illusion of Light

Posted in fiction, identity, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, power, religionTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

I’ve just released a new book, The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment, now available in paperback through KDP and distributed via Amazon. In November, a clothbound edition will follow through IngramSpark, extending availability to libraries and independent bookstores worldwide, including Barnes & Noble in the United States.

The Illusion of Light introduces the Anti-Enlightenment Essays series, which includes Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, The Myth of Homo Normalis, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration. Together, these works explore how the Enlightenment’s promise of illumination became the architecture of modern control – and how to think, live, and care in the half-light it left behind.

Image: Front cover of The Illusion of Light. Links to Amazon for purchase.
The ‘Free Preview’ claim is untrue, as there is no Kindle version available. An ebook will be available presently.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

About the Book

The Illusion of Light opens where the Enlightenment’s glare begins to fade. It asks what happens after reason exhausts itself – after the promise of illumination gives way to overexposure. These essays trace how modernity’s metaphors of light and progress became instruments of management: how objectivity hardened into ritual, agency into alibi, normality into control.

Rather than rejecting the Enlightenment outright, the book lingers in its afterimage. It argues for a philosophy practiced in the half-light – a mode of thought that values nuance over certainty, care over mastery, and maintenance over redemption. To read by residual light, as the preface suggests, is to learn to see again when the world stops pretending to be illuminated.

The preface is available on this prior post, written and audio versions.

The Broader Project

The Illusion of Light forms the threshold of the Anti-Enlightenment Project, a series examining the afterlives of modern reason – how its ideals of progress, agency, objectivity, and normality continue to govern our politics, sciences, and selves long after their foundations have cracked. Each volume approaches the same question from a different room in the old House of Reason: Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, The Myth of Homo Normalis, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration.

Taken together, they offer not a manifesto but a practice: philosophy as maintenance work, care as critique, and composure as the only honest response to the ruins of certainty. More to follow.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics