Dany-Robert Dufour

[4] In the book L'art de réduire les têtes ("The Art of Shrinking Heads"[5]) Dufour considers the postmodern change which Lyotard refers to as "the end of the Grand Narrative".

This concept permitted the individual, before entering business life (Latin "neg-otium" = time not free), to create a mastering of mind not to be subject to uncontrolled passions, neither his own nor those of others.

More generally this book describes and analyses – one year before the big Financial crisis of 2007–08 – the potentially destructive effects of (neo)liberalism, not only on the market economy, but also and particularly on other fields of human expression such as politics, use of symbols, semiotics, psychology... And not to disregard what contains everything: how to handle one's own living.

Destructive for the notions of "being together" or "being your-self" it urges us to live in a perverted society: pornography, selfishness, contestation of every law whatsoever, acceptance of social darwinism.

De Sade had so well demonstrated how a world subject to the principle of absolute egoism would appear that he was to be imprisoned for 27 years and his books to be concealed in the archives of libraries for two centuries.

This produces a crisis in a hitherto unseen extension, the nature of which is political, economical, ecological, moral, subjective, esthetical, intellectual … Dufour, however, sees nothing fatal in this third historical dead end during a century.

Like all religions a promise makes it function: salvation by continual growth of riches – a precipitous fleeing ahead leading to global devastation according to Dufour.

What it is all about is the perspective of a new Renaissance, new dynamics like those during the Quattrocento when knowledge was attained how to retrieve the fundaments of Greek civilization and, supported by this, how to overcome the grip of obscure tenets dominating general thinking.

This marks a turn in human progress that has led to the gradual development of thinking in terms of machinery and productivity and the present boost of technology as supreme value.

On the other hand, because this madness in an obvious way changes the three basic spheres of human life, which are work, leisure and love, by voiding them of all substance.

Which could be transformed into a new madness of "fundamentalist" expression, like for instance jihadism, where the strife for a purity guaranteed by the original union with God, can alter into absolute ignominy of spectacular deranged massacres of "infidels".