Brett STEVENS
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
Click here for more discussions of Archeofuturism
Click here for writings by Guillaume Faye, including an excerpt from Archeofuturism
Guillaume Faye
Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age
Arktos Media Ltd., 2010
As humans, we study our world to estimate the best responses to its demands. We then make a choice, and act on it, then observe the results to see if our estimations were correct. If they were not, we correct while trying to learn from the error. That is well and good, when buying a cement mixer — but what about a whole civilization?
Sometime 400 years ago, as our civilization prospered, the decision was made to modernize. This came about through a belief in the equality of all human beings and a drive toward external mechanisms, namely technology and political control systems. Guillaume Faye, the seasoned rising star of the New Right movement in Europe, explores our correction of this mistake in his landmark book Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age.
One of the more important things I’ve read this year, this book upholds an offhand feel throughout; an honest, end-of-the-night, when the wine and cigarettes are low and people are too tired to do anything but blurt out the big ideas that haunt them in their dreams feel. The content is dynamic, especially the first half, but the real force of power here is the style, an excitedly taboo-breaking, honest and hopeful look at re-creating ourselves so we have a future. This is not a book of resentment, but of joyful charging ahead.
A large influence on this stylistic breathlessness is the composition of the book, which is a collection of essays and a short sci-fi story to show us these ideas in practice. The second section, a thorough and high-energy explication of where Nouvelle Droite beliefs lead, the reasons for them and finally, how they can be better applied toward a theory of the future, will interest new right and deep ecologists the most as it joins the ideas of both into not a resistant/revolutionary culture but a remaking/revolutionary one.
Archeofuturism, Faye writes, escapes the boutique right-wing airy intellectualism of GRECE, which he critiques in the first book. Pointing out the failure of “ambiguous and incomprehensible ideological axes,” he proposes instead a transition from the rearward-looking “conservative” outlook to one that acknowledges what was lost, and the current state of disaster in the West, and plans for rebuilding afterward.
In his new theory of Archeofuturism, Faye proposes a “vitalist constructivism” that implements a quasi-feudal, national but not jingoistic, united Europe that applies the traditional spirit and learning to a future in which technology plays a central role. His unstated point is that the tool must again serve the man, after centuries of the reverse; he appeals to a sense of both the pragmatic in finding historically valid solutions through tradition, and the spirit of tradition, which is one of a constructive, upward society.
He proposes that we adopt this new outlook through a voluntaristic method, first changing our values, then our art, and then finally our political expectations at about the same time a “convergence of catastrophes” (environmental, political, economic) devastate Europe. Faye’s call is for Europeans to return to being “soldiers of the Idea” again, and for them to take up not a corrective action, but a constructive desire to rebuild and build it bigger, better and more exciting than before.
This fusion of both conservative and revolutionary thought takes the best of liberalism and the best of conservatism and takes them out of their handily domesticated roles as token opponents. He points out that our current ideological menu is carved from “soft ideology,” or that which passively deals with splitting up the wealth of an industrialization binge. He emphasizes a number of points all conservatives and pro-Europid readers can enjoy:
- Modernism is an attachment to the past. According to Faye, modernism is backward-looking as it tries to un-do conditions of nature that offend our egalitarian sentiment. What defines modernity is egalitarianism, or the idea that we’re all equal (in political power, in ability, in right to property). As a result, we’re constantly trying to force equality on nature while it resists us.
- Extreme leftism is a token act which reinforces the power of the modern nation-state. This point struck me as the most controversial, yet most sensible. If you are in power, and want to stay there, you need to give your citizens petty acts of rebellion that feel extreme but are in fact a repetition of the dominant philosophy. The state and its corruptors benefit from equality because it keeps smarter voices from rising above the herd.
- The modern world exists in a state of “soft totalitarianism” where those with unpopular opinions are simply ostracized, which in a liberal capitalist democracy effectively starves them into submission. He praises the American method of “soft imperialism” and shows how this is the future: indirect rule, with a reward/threat complex administered by social and business factors; the “1984″ vision is obsolete.
- Romanticism. Faye writes convincingly of his efforts to join “Cartesian classicism,” or a sense of space as being equal in all directions, with “Romanticism” which he expresses here as the idea that will or will to power can change the world radically even if small in stature. The joining of these two represents the expression of both ancient philosophy and a new type of “freedom” for humanity.
- Roots and method of modernity. Modern society consists of secularized evangelism, Anglo-Saxon mercantilism, and Enlightenment individualism, its methods are economic individualism, allegory of Progress, cult of quantitative development and abstract “human rights.” It is amazingly refreshing to see this spelled out so clearly and simply.
- Multiple factors doom modernism which was always unrealistic. “Europe is turning into a third world country,” he writes, summing up the disasters. If you see this book in a store, pick it up to read page 59 for an insightful list of modernity’s failings.
- Heterotelia. Following Nietzsche’s example, Faye needed a concept that explains how what we intend does not always result in a perpetuation of that state when put into practice. For example, political equality ends in inequality through social instability; multiculturalism ends in race war; letting economy lead ends in poverty because speculative finance is easier than generating real wealth. He explains our past failings and the need to be alert in the future through heterotelia, which means that “ideas do not necessarily yield the expected results.”
- Ethno-masochism. Faye illustrates how the West, in a suicidal bid to become morally/socially impressed with itself, has inflicted upon itself the unworkable scheme of multiculturalism and in doing so, has imported Islam, an “imperial theocratic totalitarianism.” Unlike many new right writers, he endorses the idea of European culture as superior in addition to being worth saving for its unique virtues.
- North versus South. History begins with anthropology, Faye writes, so we must see the conflict in humanity as one between Northern peoples who are prosperous, and the “third world” Southerners who are attempting to colonize the North on the back of its technology and liberal egalitarianism. He suggests a Eurosiberia stretching from the UK to the borders of China, and claims East-West conflict is less likely as a source of conflict.
Against this cataclysm Faye posits Archeofuturism, or a futurism equally balanced by the spirit of traditionalism, which is (a) learning from the past and (b) a type of reverence for life that emphasizes family, punishment being more important than prevention, duties coming before rights, solemn social rites, the aristocratic principle and a “freedom” defined not as the ability to act randomly, but as a sense of having a place and being freed from a chaotic society with excessive pointless competition. This synthesis of the best of capitalism, socialism and our monarchic past fully lives up to the title of this book.
Good luck finding a short review of this book. The first half of it is packed chock-full of interesting ideas that like new melodies can infect the head for days as it dissects them and their context. The second half both addresses common objections and provides background, and takes the form of a short science fiction story in the tradition of Asimov and Heinlein that explains how technology will help humans evolve. The concepts are mind-blowing and more daring than anything sci-fi has attempted since The Shockwave Rider
History is like a supertanker ship; it takes miles to begin to turn around and there are no brakes. The egalitarian experiment in Europe is only a few centuries old yet has wreaked utter havoc on all the subtler parts of existence, things that most people don’t notice because they are easily distracted by shiny objects. Faye brings these alive, shows us exactly why they are endangered, and then shows us a plausible and gradual (e.g. non apocalyptic, non-Utopian) solution toward which we can move if we believe life is worth saving. Clearly he does, and it infuses this book with a fervor and wisdom that few attain.
Source: http://www.amerika.org/books/archeofuturism-european-visi...
Another review of . . .
Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
Click here for more discussions of Archeofuturism
Click here for writings by Guillaume Faye, including an excerpt from Archeofuturism
Guillaume Faye
Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age
Arktos Media Ltd., 2010
In the 1980s Guillaume Faye was one of the best known member of GRECE and by far their most popular speaker. With humour, panache, invective and contempt thrown in at just the right moment-the dismissive “l’acteur Reagan” the contemptuous and venomous “monsieur Henri Levi surnommé le grand”, he had his audiences rolling in the aisles with delight. Every time I heard him speak at a GRECE conference he received a standing ovation.
GRECE was not only a school of thought, it was also a sort of social club, linking like-minded persons on a cultural, political and social level. However, its concentration on theory made the temptation in hard times great indeed to retreat from direct confrontation and reduce all issues to the level of academic debate. Faye explicates these and other criticisms in Archeofuturism (now available for the first time in English from the Arktos Press at the same time as it has become hard to obtain in the original French).
Structure
Archeofuturism suffers from coming from the pen of a man more at home before a gathering than a keyboard. It is unbalanced and paradoxically, given the content, in some respects extremely provincial and theoretical in its approach and design. At the same time, it owes nothing to the respectability and detachment from reality which can make cowards of many writers.
This is not to say that the book lacks structure. It has a very definite if unorthodox structure. It consists of three theses as Faye calls them: (1) the end of civilization as we know it owing to what Faye calls a “convergence of catastrophes”; (2) the necessity for revolution, notably in the European mindset, (3) propositions for the post-catastrophic world (and the title of his book expresses the essence of Faye’s solution).
The last chapter is a piece of science fiction, a story of a world in which the conflict of technics and tradition has been resolved by reconciling the two, and this is the underlying thread of Faye’s entire argumentation, that we must learn to reach back to our furthest yesterday and to the longest future.
Positions
One issue is the conflict between tradition and progress. On the one hand, technology is necessary as a tool of our will to power, something which Faye believes essential to the survival of the European. On the other hand, scientific and technical progress may prove and often does prove, destructive of tradition. Are religions just fables? It is hard to die for a fable. How is such belief possible in a world of scientific rationalism and progress?
Faye believes strongly that the world is hurtling towards multi-faceted disaster, less a clash of civilizations, although he seems to write at times in a similar vein to Huntington, with his view of Islam especially as a challenge in itself to the hegemony of European civilization, than what he terms a “convergence of catastrophes.” Like Huntington, Faye regards Islam as a single cultural, religious, political bloc with a an expansionist will.
On homosexuality :
. . . it is not a matter of advocating any repression of homosexuality, of banning homosexual couples or socially penalizing gay people; simply, the prospect of legalizing of a form of marriage for homosexuals would have a highly destructive symbolic value. Marriage and legal heterosexual unions enjoy forms of protection and public benefits that are accorded to couples capable of having children and hence of renewing the generations and thus of being of objective service to society. Legalising homosexual unions and awarding them financial privileges means protecting sterile unions. (pp. 106–107)
On demographics:
It is necessary to reflect on the issue of immigration, which represents a form of demographic colonization of Europe at the hands of mostly Afro-Asiatic peoples. . . . Three generations later, the colonization of Europe represents a form of revenge against European colonization . . . are we to accept or reject a substantial alteration oif the ethno-cultural substrate of Europe? The basis of intellectual honesty and the key to ideological success lie in the ability and courage to address the real problems, instead of attempting to avoid them. (p. 49)
On distraction:
The system only makes use of brutal censorship in very limited areas: it generally resorts to intellectual diversion, i.e. distraction, by constantly focusing people’s attention on side issues. What we are dealing with here is not simply the usual brutalization of the population via the increasingly specific mass-media apparatus of the society of spectacle — a veritable audiovisual Prozac-but rather a concealment of essential political problems (immigration, pollution, transportation policies, the aging of the population, the financial crisis of the social budgets expected to occur by 2010 etc. (p. 92)
Archeofuturism
It is a sad paradox, and one about which Faye is acutely aware in his book, that the European New Right in general has failed to make an impact at the very time that the march of events might have been expected to play into its hands: the end of the cold war, the decline of political Manicheanism (East versus West) , the decline of nationalism as a relevant political alternative to liberalism. Faye offers a number of explications for this failure. They can be summarized as a lack of media “savvy”, romantic isolationism, minimization of catastrophe, cultural relativism and a lack of understanding of and worse, interest in, economics (Faye alone among spokesmen of GRECE had written a treatise on economics).
Faye’s response is to deviate from the consensus among the new right and to insist on European exceptionalism. He returns to what might be called a traditional belief of the radical right when he claims, as he does here, that European civilization is superior to others and that as a superior civilization it has a duty to resist the challenge of immigration in general and Islam in particular. Cultural and racial superiority was the premise (sometimes asserted, sometimes unspoken) of all movements of the twentieth and nineteenth centuries which sought to preserve or halt a decline in the domination of the white man over the political destiny of the globe.
European radical right movements after the Second World War focused their propaganda very much on the restoration of national prestige and glory and a rejection of immigrants and outsiders. GRECE stressed from the beginning the importance of what it called “the right to be different” arguing less in terms of European superiority than in terms of European uniqueness, Europe’s right to the nurture of its own identity and destiny. The great enemy was seen not so much as military or political threats as such, as the forces which sought to attenuate, reduce, trivialize and ultimately abolish differences. The great enemy in this respect was neither Islam nor communism but “the American way of Life,” the manifest destiny to reduce all peoples to consumers, whose sole struggles were ones of economic competition.
This developed in the course of time within GRECE into a position of ethnopluralism, which Faye and others subsequently denounced as cultural relativism. Simply put, it is the argument that all cultures are worthy of respect within their own terms and no culture is inherently superior to another. The obvious critique of such a position is that it ultimately disarms all willingness to disallow, challenge or oppose other cultures. Opposition even in its politest non-military form, can only be conducted on the premise that in some way one is superior or equipped with superior arguments or in the area of culture and religion, possesses a truer, superior culture and religion and one thereby and therewith seeks an opponent’s defeat.
There is another aspect — that of economic survival. A major criticism which Faye has of GRECE is that it ignores or glosses over demographic and economic warfare against the European. Faye argues that at a time of emergency, when Europe is threatened with being overwhelmed by non-Europeans whose demographics are reducing the significance of the European by the hour, it is a form of suicide to indulge in culturally relativist reflections and debate.
Faye spends no time in fleshing out his arguments about superiority and in what respects the European is “superior.” This is a pity because it would provide the book with a stabilizing effect. As it is, Faye assures us that he believes the European is superior and rushes on the next point. What Faye implies although I did not find it in this book explicitly stated, is that when we talk about the right of a people not only to an identity but to a destiny, there is likely to be a conflict between the destiny of a people compelled to expand and conquer and the right of another (conquered) people to an identity.
The notion of a “right” be it to identity or destiny is problematic: where does our “right” come from? A Nietzschean, as Faye claims to be, can answer this question. It could be baldly stated as the right to survival — the impulse of nature which all beings have the “right” to practice. Rights to be different are likely to conflict with the rights of others to be different. The right to conflict is therefore the right to survival of identity and it is Faye’s point that such a right can only be preserved by those who actively engage in the politics (as all politics in Faye’s view must be) of conflict. A defense of the identity of the European necessitates entering into a state of conflict with the prevailing hegemony.
Faye candidly states that he made the same mistake as other GRECE members in the expression of cultural relativism and an accompanying primary and fundamental anti-Americanism which took precedence over the ethnic question and the challenge of non-white immigration to Europe, (and presumably, the decline in relative numbers and influence of the Caucasian in North America). The “ethnopluralist” approach is exemplified by Alain de Benoist’s Europe-Tiers Monde: Même Combat where de Benoist argues that Europe and the Third World (even the term seems a little outdated today) are natural allies against the American and Soviet ways of life. Faye stresses that GRECE (and he willingly includes himself here) ignored the reality of the Islamic threat and that ethnopluralism paved the way for an inactive, “head in the sand” response to the long term significance of massive Mohammedan immigration into Europe.
Faye’s stress on the superiority of Europe in place of the right of Europeans to be different indeed avoids the danger of degenerating into an ineffective and compromising inactive pluralism. On the other hand, it shifts the focus of intent significantly towards a provocative, inevitably conflict laden project which is dear to Faye: the Eurasian Imperium. Faye is for better or for worse an imperialist. His vision of the future as outlined in this book is one of a vast Eurasian bloc, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
The implied direction, never explicitly stated of the archeofuturist project, is combat and conquest in a world divided into major power blocs jockeying for position. “Like in the Middle Ages or Antiquity, the future requires us to envisage the Earth as structured in vast, quasi-imperial unity in mutual conflict or cooperation.” (p. 77). Seen in this light, Faye’s admiration for atomic power implied in this work (and more explicitly indicated elsewhere, dramatically in his comic book Notre avant guerre, where he gleefully depicts a degenerate Europe being destroyed in mushroom clouds ) and futuristic technology in general is the ghost in the machine of Faye’s project.
However, unlike most modernizers, Faye does not duck the dilemma of reconciling a world of modern technology with a world of tradition, be it racial, political or other. How does one reconcile advanced technology and its implications with the preservation of continuity with the past? Faye faces this problem head on and if his solution is seems questionable and Utopian, he deserves the credit of highlighting the dilemma. Practically all radical rightists of whatever hue, fail to address the issue at all. Faye’s solution is what he calls “archeofuturism” the title of his book and the project to which he believes European revolutionaries (and Faye believes we must be revolutionaries to save European civilization and not conservatives) the assimilation of the future with the past, building a future not as modern or post modern but archeo-modern, a modernism acutely aware of and with its roots in a deep and profound past.
There will be a small elite of rulers with access to the highest forms of modern technology while the majority of less gifted will make do with crude forms of technical accomplishment-a completely two tier society in fact. This may sound familiar and not perhaps pleasantly so. It is this reviewer’s belief, one shared by many, that the ultimate aim of the ruling elite is the same: the division of mankind into two groups-the elite and the great majority of outsiders who no longer have a say in how public affairs are administered. This seems difficult to reconcile with Faye’s expressed support for populist initiatives. Be that as it may, this writer’s strength is his ability to fire the right questions rather than provide well prepared answers.
The “post catastrophic” world will be one, Faye believes, divided between the futuristic achievements of an elite and the archaic conditions and status of the majority, it will be archeofuturistic. Before we examine this idea more closely, it is worth taking a moment to consider the notions of growth and progress which Faye dismisses as overhauled. His chapter revealingly entitled “For a Two-Tier World Economy” opens with the bald assertion: “Progress” is clearly a dying idea, even if economic growth may be continuing”.
Anti-Growth
Faye’s rejection of what he calls “the paradigm of economic development” is simple:
An intellectual revolution is taking place: people are starting to perceive, without daring to openly state it, that the old paradigm according to which the life of humanity on both an individual and collective level is getting better and better every day thanks to science, the spread of democracy and egalitarian emancipation is quite simply false. . . . Today, the perverse effects of mass technology are starting to make themselves felt: new resistant viruses, the contamination of industrially produced food, shortage of land and a downturn in world agricultural production, rapid and widespread environmental degradation, the development of weapons of mass destruction in addition to the atomic bomb-not to mention that technology is entering its Baroque age. (pp. 162–63).
The last comment excepted (which is pure Spengler), this writing must strike the impartial reader as familiar. It is a fairly good example of the pessimism of environmentalist writers in general and it has been said many times before. Faye knows or should know, that there are very many people who are deeply aware of the heavy price which we are paying for making Progress our Baal. Faye is entirely right in my opinion, as thousands of others before him have been right, to question the cost but anyone expecting Faye to so much as nod with respect in the direction of the many organizations, groups, campaigns and initiatives to reverse this trend, will be disappointed.
On the contrary, Faye contemptuously dismisses the French Green movement in these words, “the political platform of the Green movement contain no real environmentalist suggestions, such as the transport of lorries by train instead of on highways, the creation of non-polluting cars (electric cars, LPG, etc.) or the fight against urban sprawl into natural habitats, liquid manure leaks, ground water contamination, the depletion of European fish stocks, chemical food additives, the overuse of insecticides and pesticides, etc. Each time I have tried to bring these specific and concrete issues up with a representative of the Greens, I got the impression that he was not really interested in them or that he had not really studied them” (p. 145). It is not clear (possibly a fault of the translator’s) whether Faye is referring to one or several spokesmen. Be that as it may, it is not my experience at all that environmentalists are not interested in these issues.
Futurism
Faye gives the impression throughout the book less of someone proposing ideas in a book for a wide readership as enjoying a discussion with someone who was with him in the days of GRECE over a “ballon de rouge” in a Paris café. Despite his provincialism, Faye has a sound instinct for homing in on some of the genuinely important issues of our time and viewing them in a global perspective, even when (and this is often the case here) his global perspective is obscured by the incidental historical luggage which weighs his book down. The reader should not be deterred by the book’s incidental references from letting Faye lead to key issues of our time and demanding our response to core questions.
The greatest quality of this book is that it gives a voice to the growing sense of frustration that is felt among persons form all walks of life that we are living in a transitory period, that the “end of history” is an utter illusion and that old structures are insufficient to contain the force of history. Faye cites the unlikely figure of Peter Mandelson as an “archeofuturist without knowing it” as someone who has recognized that democracy as we know it from the Mother of Parliaments is tired and no longer able to cope with the challenges which European man and indeed humankind is facing.
Faye’s examination of the real issues behind the palaver of most contemporary politicians is refreshing. Here is a taste:
The new societies of the future will finally abolish the aberrant egalitarian mechanism we have now, whereby everyone aspires to become an officer or a cadre or a diplomat, even though all evidence suggests that most people do not have the skills to fulfill those roles. This model engenders widespread frustration, failure and resentment. The societies that will be vivified by increasingly sophisticated technologies, in contrast, will ask for a return to the archaic and inegalitarian and hierarchical norms, whereby a competent and meritocratic minority is rigorously selected to take on leading assignments.
Those who perform subordinate functions in these inegalitarian societies will not feel frustrated: their dignity will not be called into question, for they will accept their own condition as something useful within the organic community-finally freed from the individualistic hubris of modernity, which implicitly and deceptively states that each person can become a scientist or a price.
“Individualistic hubris” indeed sums up for this reviewer one of the great malaises of our time: the exaggerated importance which mediocre individuals attach to their own boring lives. Faye at his best is very good indeed.
For all its failings this book is a valuable contribution to the growing awareness of persons of European descent of their time of crisis. It provides a highly readable and often acute observations about what Faye stresses are the real issues of our time but the question nags steadily: to what extent has Faye provided a strategy for Europeans in the face of those issues? The answer is that there is no strategy, unless by “strategy” we mean a positioning (for example in favor of European federalism vis-à-vis reactionary nationalism or friendly competitiveness with the United States rather than blanket hostility to the American way of life).
Perhaps someone much younger than either Faye or this reviewer will read this book and know that they are able to provide that response. In that case, this book will have shown itself to be of the past and the future, in a word archeofuturistic.
Source: http://www.amerika.org/texts/archeofuturism-by-guillaume-...
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El sitio (electrónico) WikiLeaks ha hecho un trabajo de salubridad pública al desvelar una gran cantidad de las vilezas de nuestros “grandísimos amigos americanos”. Quienes, por ejemplo, explotan a fondo –cuestión de juego limpio– el servilismo sarkozyano en beneficio propio (véase la página 4) (2).
Le numéro 45 de notre revue TERRE & PEUPLE Magazine est construit autour d’un dossier sur le thème ‘Croire et combattre’. En tête de ce dossier Pierre Vial, qui dans son éditorial a souligné l’insécurité grandissante, prévient que ‘l’arbre Rom ne doit pas dissimuler la forêt africaine’. Il nous avertit que ne survivront que ceux qui sont déterminés à combattre, ceux qui ont la foi en eux-mêmes, alors qu’on nous invite à nous résigner. Il dénonce, dans cette démission, le poison de la ‘modernité’, pensée issue de la renaissance, qui méprisant les traditions et les valeurs médiévales donnera naissance aux prétentions cartésiennes. Et, bientôt, au rationalisme matérialiste, aux Lumières et au scientisme du XIXe siècle, ce positivisme sur lequel la bourgeoisie va asseoir un économisme forcené, qui conduit la désacralisation du monde. Dans cette inversion des valeurs, les frères jumeaux libéralisme et marxisme se donnent mission de réordonner l’humanité. En réaction à cette agression du capitalisme bourgeois, un socialisme français est né, produit par de hautes figures : Proudhon, Blanqui, Sorel. La vision de ceux-ci est la nôtre : refus de l’exploitation de l’homme par l’homme, de la dictature de l’argent et de la prévalence d’intérêts individuels sur l’intérêt communautaire. Nous épousons la cause des Communards, prêts à combattre jusqu’au sacrifice. Pour offrir sa vie, il faut avoir la foi. La foi en quoi ? La croyance en notre communauté. La croyance de notre communauté, car comme le disait encore Alain de Benoist en 2009 : « Il n’y a pas de communautés d’hommes sans relation concrète formelle (…) ». La religion romaine reposait sur l’accomplissement scrupuleux des rites et le sénat avait dans ses fonctions d’y veiller. Chez les Celtes et les Germains comme en Grèce, c’est également avec le ciel qu’on tisse les liens qui resserrent la communauté. Voilà
Chacun s’interroge aujourd’hui sur le « sens de l’histoire », c’est-à-dire à la fois sur le but et sur la signication des phénomènes historiques. L’objet de cet article est d’examiner les réponses que notre époque donne à cette double interrogation, en tentant de les ramener, en dépit de leur multitude apparente, à 2 types fondamentaux, rigoureusement antagonistes et contradictoires.
Pour les Anciens, Homère était « le commencement, le milieu et la fin ». Une vision du monde et même une philosophie se déduisent implicitement de ses poèmes. Héraclite en a résumé le socle cosmique par une formulation bien à lui : « L’univers, le même pour tous les êtres, n’a été créé par aucun dieu ni par aucun homme ; mais il a toujours été, est et sera feu éternellement vivant… »
or 
. The first volume, for 2010, will go to press in March 2011.
is set in a future Northwest Republic, as are parts of 
.
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005). 
, which made him the theorist of economic liberalism. For Smith, the psychological engine of all economic activity is self-interest and the hedonist principle which drive men to seek maximum satisfaction with minimum effort. He believes in the spontaneity and beneficial character of economic activity (the “hidden hand” and “soft commerce”). It realizes the designs of Providence. The State must “laisser faire, laisser passer.” Adam Smith justifies international free trade which is appropriate for maritime powers like Great Britain and later the United States.
There is no question for him that the liberal project is doomed: although its proponents paint it as good and inevitable, egalitarian modernity is, in fact, a highly artificial condition, an unsustainable one, which will fall victim to the very processes it set in motion. Faye believes that we are currently facing a ‘convergence of catastrophes’. These include: the colonization of the North by Afro-Asian peoples from the South; an imminent economic and demographic crisis, caused by an aging population in the West, falling birthrates, and unfunded promises made by the democratic welfare state; chaos in the countries of the South, caused by absurd Western-sponsored development and development programs; a global economic crisis, much worse than the depression of the 1930s, led by the financial sector; ‘the surge of religious fundamentalist fanaticism, particularly in Islam;’ ‘the confrontation of North and South, on theological and ethnic grounds;’ unchecked environmental degradation; and the convergence of these catastrophes against a backdrop of nuclear proliferation, international mafias, and the reemergence of viral and microbial diseases, such as AIDS. For Faye, the way out is not through reform, because a system that is contrary to reality is beyond reform), but through collapse and revolution. As a catastrophic collapse is inevitable, revolutionary thought and action must today be post-catastrophic in outlook. He further suggests that inaction on our part will only open European civilization to conquest by Islam.
Thus the first priority was to keep these people as safe as possible from another slaughter. At the same time, Pétain hoped for a future renaissance through a “national revolution.” He has been attacked for that. Admittedly, all would be mortgaged by the Occupation. But really he had no choice. The “national revolution” was not premeditated. With all its ambiguities, it emerged spontaneously as a necessary remedy to the evils of the previous regime.
Robert STEUCKERS (1987):
Postmodern Challenges:
Between Faust & Narcissus, Part 1
In Oswald Spengler’s terms, our European culture is the product of a “pseudomorphosis,” i.e., of the grafting of an alien mentality upon our indigenous, original, and innate mentality. Spengler calls the innate mentality “the Faustian.”
The Confrontation of the Innate and the Acquired
The alien mentality is the theocentric, “magical” outlook born in the Near East. For the magical mind, the ego bows respectfully before the divine substance like a slave before his master. Within the framework of this religiosity, the individual lets himself be guided by the divine force that he absorbs through baptism or initiation.
There is nothing comparable for the old-European Faustian spirit, says Spengler. Homo europeanus, in spite of the magic/Christian varnish covering our thinking, has a voluntarist and anthropocentric religiosity. For us, the good is not to allow oneself to be guided passively by God, but rather to affirm and carry out our own will. “To be able to choose,” this is the ultimate basis of the indigenous European religiosity. In medieval Christianity, this voluntarist religiosity shows through, piercing the crust of the imported “magism” of the Middle East.
Around the year 1000, this dynamic voluntarism appears gradually in art and literary epics, coupled with a sense of infinite space within which the Faustian self would, and can, expand. Thus to the concept of a closed space, in which the self finds itself locked, is opposed the concept of an infinite space, into which an adventurous self sallies forth.
From the “Closed” World to the Infinite Universe
According to the American philosopher Benjamin Nelson,[1] the old Hellenic sense of physis (nature), with all the dynamism this implies, triumphed at the end of the 13th century, thanks to Averroism, which transmitted the empirical wisdom of the Greeks (and of Aristotle in particular) to the West. Gradually, Europe passed from the “closed world” to the infinite universe. Empiricism and nominalism supplanted a Scholasticism that had been entirely discursive, self-referential, and self-enclosed. The Renaissance, following Copernicus and Bruno (the tragic martyr of Campo dei Fiori), renounced geocentrism, making it safe to proclaim that the universe is infinite, an essentially Faustian intuition according to Spengler’s criteria.
In the second volume of his History of Western Thought, Jean-François Revel, who formerly officiated at Point and unfortunately illustrated the Americanocentric occidentalist ideology, writes quite pertinently: “It is easy to understand that the eternity and infinity of the universe announced by Bruno could have had, on the cultivated men of the time, the traumatizing effect of passing from life in the womb into the vast and cruel draft of an icy and unbounded vortex.”[2]
The “magic” fear, the anguish caused by the collapse of the comforting certitude of geocentrism, caused the cruel death of Bruno, that would become, all told, a terrifying apotheosis . . . Nothing could ever refute heliocentrism, or the theory of the infinitude of sidereal spaces. Pascal would say, in resignation, with the accent of regret: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
From Theocratic Logos to Fixed Reason
To replace magical thought’s “theocratic logos,” the growing and triumphant bourgeois thought would elaborate a thought centered on reason, an abstract reason before which it is necessary to bow, like the Near Easterner bows before his god. The “bourgeois” student of this “petty little reason,” virtuous and calculating, anxious to suppress the impulses of his soul or his spirit, thus finds a comfortable finitude, a closed off and secured space. The rationalism of this virtuous human type is not the adventurous, audacious, ascetic, and creative rationalism described by Max Weber[3] which educates the inner man precisely to face the infinitude affirmed by Giordano Bruno.[4]
From the end of the Renaissance, Two Modernities are Juxtaposed
The petty rationalism denounced by Sombart[5] dominates the cities by rigidifying political thought, by restricting constructive activist impulses. The genuinely Faustian and conquering rationalism described by Max Weber would propel European humanity outside its initial territorial limits, giving the main impulse to all sciences of the concrete.
From the end of the Renaissance, we thus discover, on the one hand, a rigid and moralistic modernity, without vitality, and, on the other hand, an adventurous, conquering, creative modernity, just as we are today on the threshold of a soft post-modernity or of a vibrant post-modernity, self-assured and potentially innovative. By recognizing the ambiguity of the terms “rationalism,” “rationality,” “modernity,” and “post-modernity,” we enter one level of the domain of political ideologies, even militant Weltanschauungen.
The rationalization glutted with moral arrogance described by Sombart in his famous portrait of the “bourgeois” generates the soft and sentimental messianisms, the great tranquillizing narratives of contemporary ideologies. The conquering rationalization described by Max Weber causes the great scientific discoveries and the methodical spirit, the ingenious refinement of the conduct of life and increasing mastery of the external world.
This conquering rationalization also has its dark side: It disenchants the world, drains it, excessively schematizes it. While specializing in one or another domain of technology, science, or the spirit, while being totally invested there, the “Faustians” of Europe and North America often lead to a leveling of values, a relativism that tends to mediocrity because it makes us lose the feeling of the sublime, of the telluric mystique, and increasingly isolates individuals. In our century, the rationality lauded by Weber, if positive at the beginning, collapsed into quantitativist and mechanized Americanism that instinctively led by way of compensation, to the spiritual supplement of religious charlatanism combining the most delirious proselytism and sniveling religiosity.
Such is the fate of “Faustianism” when severed from its mythic foundations, of its memory of the most ancient, of its deepest and most fertile soil. This caesura is unquestionably the result of pseudomorphosis, the “magian” graft on the Faustian/European trunk, a graft that failed. “Magianism” could not immobilize the perpetual Faustian drive; it has—and this is more dangerous—cut it off from its myths and memory, condemned it to sterility and dessication, as noted by Valéry, Rilke, Duhamel, Céline, Drieu, Morand, Maurois, Heidegger, or Abellio.
Conquering Rationality, Moralizing Rationality, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the “Grand Narratives” of Lyotard
Conquering rationality, if it is torn away from its founding myths, from its ethno-identitarian ground, its Indo-European matrix, falls—even after assaults that are impetuous, inert, emptied of substance—into the snares of calculating petty rationalism and into the callow ideology of the “Grand Narratives” of rationalism and the end of ideology. For Jean-François Lyotard, “modernity” in Europe is essentially the “Grand Narrative” of the Enlightenment, in which the heroes of knowledge work peacefully and morally toward an ethico-political happy ending: universal peace, where no antagonism will remain.[6] The “modernity” of Lyotard corresponds to the famous “Dialectic of the Enlightenment” of Horkheimer and Adorno, leaders of famous “Frankfurt School.”[7] In their optic, the work of the man of science or the action of the politician, must be submitted to a rational reason, an ethical corpus, a fixed and immutable moral authority, to a catechism that slows down their drive, that limits their Faustian ardor. For Lyotard, the end of modernity, thus the advent of “post-modernity,” is incredulity—progressive, cunning, fatalistic, ironic, mocking—with regard to this metanarrative.
Incredulity also means a possible return of the Dionysian, the irrational, the carnal, the turbid, and disconcerting areas of the human soul revealed by Bataille or Caillois, as envisaged and hoped by professor Maffesoli,[8] of the University of Strasbourg, and the German Bergfleth,[9] a young nonconformist philosopher; that is to say, it is equally possible that we will see a return of the Faustian spirit, a spirit comparable with that which bequeathed us the blazing Gothic, of a conquering rationality which has reconnected with its old European dynamic mythology, as Guillaume Faye explains in Europe and Modernity.[10]
Notes
1. Benjamin Nelson, Der Ursprung der Moderne, Vergleichende Studien zum Zivilisationsprozess [The Origin of Modernity: Comparative Studies of the Civilization Process] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).
2. Jean-François Revel, Histoire de la pensée occidentale [History of Western Thought], vol. 2, La philosophie pendant la science (XVe, XVIe et XVIIe siècles) [Philosophy and Science (Fifteenth-, Sixteenth-, and Seventeenth-Centuries)] (Paris: Stock, 1970). Cf. also the masterwork of Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957).
3. Cf. Julien Freund, Max Weber (Paris: P.U.F., 1969).
4. Paul-Henri Michel, La cosmologie de Giordano Bruno [The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno] (Paris: Hermann, 1962).
5. Cf. essentially: Werner Sombart, Le Bourgeois. Contribution à l’histoire morale et intellectuelle de l’homme économique moderne [The Bourgeois: Contribution to the Moral and Intellectual History of Modern Economic Man] (Paris: Payot, 1966).
6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
7. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adomo, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Cf. also Pierre Zima, L’École de Francfort. Dialectique de la particularité [The Frankfurt School: Dialectic of Particularity] (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1974). Michel Crozon, “Interroger Horkheimer” [“Interrogating Horkheimer”] and Arno Victor Nielsen, “Adorno, le travail artistique de la raison” [“Adorno: The Artistic Work of Reason”], Esprit, May 1978.
8. Cf. chiefly Michel Maffesoli, L’ombre de Dionysos: Contribution à une sociologie de l’orgie [The Shadow of Dionysus: Contribution to a Sociology of the Orgy] (Méridiens, 1982). Pierre Brader, “Michel Maffesoli: saluons le grand retour de Dionysos” [Michel Maffesoli: Let us Greet the Great return of Dionysos], Magazine-Hebdo no. 54 (September 21, 1984).
9. Cf. Gerd Bergfleth et al., Zur Kritik der Palavernden Aufklärung [Toward a Critique of Palavering Reason] (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1984). In this remarkable little anthology, Bergfleth published four texts deadly to the “moderno-Frankfurtist” routine: (1) “Zehn Thesen zur Vernunftkritik” [“Ten Theses on the Critique of Reason”]; (2) “Der geschundene Marsyas” [“The Abuse of Marsyas”]; (3) “Über linke Ironie” [“On Leftist Irony”]; (4) “Die zynische Aufklärung” [“The Cynical Enlightnement”]. Cf. also R. Steuckers, “G. Bergfleth: enfant terrible de la scène philosophique allemande” [“G. Bergfleth: enfant terrible of the German philosophical scene”], Vouloir no. 27 (March 1986). In the same issue, see also M. Kamp, “Bergfleth: critique de la raison palabrante” [“Bergfleth: Critique of Palavering Reason”] and “Une apologie de la révolte contre les programmes insipides de la révolution conformiste” [“An Apology for the Revolt against the Insipid Programs of the Conformist Revolution”]. See also M. Froissard, “Révolte, irrationnel, cosmicité et . . . pseudo-antisémitisme,” [“Revolt, irrationality, cosmicity and . . . pseudo-anti-semitism”], Vouloir nos. 40–42 (July–August 1987).
10. Guillaume Faye, Europe et Modernité [Europe and Modernity] (Méry/Liège: Eurograf, 1985).
Postmodern Challenges:
Between Faust & Narcissus, Part 2
Once the Enlightenment metanarrative was established—“encysted”—in the Western mind, the great secular ideologies progressively appeared: liberalism, with its idolatry of the “invisible hand,”[1] and Marxism, with its strong determinism and metaphysics of history, contested at the dawn of the 20th century by Georges Sorel, the most sublime figure of European militant socialism.[2] Following Giorgio Locchi[3]—who occasionally calls the metanarrative “ideology” or “science”—we think that this complex “metanarrative/ideology/science” no longer rules by consensus but by constraint, inasmuch as there is muted resistance (especially in art and music[4]) or a general disuse of the metanarrative as one of the tools of legitimation.
The liberal-Enlightenment metanarrative persists by dint of force and propaganda. But in the sphere of thought, poetry, music, art, or letters, this metanarrative says and inspires nothing. It has not moved a great mind for 100 or 150 years. Already at the end of the 19th century, literary modernism expressed a diversity of languages, a heterogeneity of elements, a kind of disordered chaos that the “physiologist” Nietzsche analyzed[5] and that Hugo von Hoffmannstahl called die Welt der Bezuge (the world of relations).
These omnipresent interrelations and overdeterminations show us that the world is not explained by a simple, neat and tidy story, nor does it submit itself to the rule of a disincarnated moral authority. Better: they show us that our cities, our people, cannot express all their vital potentialities within the framework of an ideology given and instituted once and for all for everyone, nor can we indefinitely preserve the resulting institutions (the doctrinal body derived from the “metanarrative of the Enlightenment”).
The anachronistic presence of the metanarrative constitutes a brake on the development of our continent in all fields: science (data-processing and biotechnology[6]), economics (the support of liberal dogmas within the EEC), military (the fetishism of a bipolar world and servility toward the United States, paradoxically an economic enemy), cultural (media bludgeoning in favor of a cosmopolitanism that eliminates Faustian specificity and aims at the advent of a large convivial global village, run on the principles of the “cold society” in the manner of the Bororos dear to Lévi-Strauss[7]).
The Rejection of Neo-Ruralism, Neo-Pastoralism . . .
The confused disorder of literary modernism at the end of the 19th century had a positive aspect: its role was to be the magma that, gradually, becomes the creator of a new Faustian assault.[8] It is Weimar—specifically, the Weimar-arena of the creative and fertile confrontation of expressionism,[9] neo-Marxism, and the “conservative revolution”[10]—that bequeathed us, with Ernst Jünger, an idea of “post-metanarrative” modernity (or post-modernity, if one calls “modernity” the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, subsequently theorized by the Frankfurt School). Modernism, with the confusion it inaugurates, due to the progressive abandonment the pseudo-science of the Enlightenment, corresponds somewhat to the nihilism observed by Nietzsche. Nihilism must be surmounted, exceeded, but not by a sentimental return, however denied, to a completed past. Nihilism is not surpassed by theatrical Wagnerism, Nietzsche fulminated, just as today the foundering of the Marxist “Grand Narrative” is not surpassed by a pseudo-rustic neoprimitivism.[11]
In Jünger—the Jünger of In Storms of Steel, The Worker, and Eumeswil—one finds no reference to the mysticism of the soil: only a sober admiration for the perennialness of the peasant, indifferent to historical upheavals. Jünger tells us of the need for balance: if there is a total refusal of the rural, of the soil, of the stabilizing dimension of Heimat, constructivist Faustian futurism will no longer have a base, a point of departure, a fallback option. On the other hand, if the accent is placed too much on the initial base, the launching point, on the ecological niche that gives rise to the Faustian people, then they are wrapped in a cocoon and deprived of universal influence, rendered blind to the call of the world, prevented from springing towards reality in all its plenitude, the “exotic” included. The timid return to the homeland robs Faustianism of its force of diffusion and relegates its “human vessels” to the level of the “eternal ahistoric peasants” described by Spengler and Eliade.[12] Balance consists in drawing in (from the depths of the original soil) and diffusing out (towards the outside world).
In spite of all nostalgia for the “organic,” rural, or pastoral—in spite of the serene, idyllic, aesthetic beauty that recommend Horace or Virgil—Technology and Work are from now on the essences of our post-nihilist world. Nothing escapes any longer from technology, technicality, mechanics, or the machine: neither the peasant who plows with his tractor nor the priest who plugs in a microphone to give more impact to his homily.
The era of “Technology”
Technology mobilizes totally (Total Mobilmachung) and thrusts the individual into an unsettling infinitude where we are nothing more than interchangeable cogs. The machine gun, notes the warrior Jünger, mows down the brave and the cowardly with perfect equality, as in the total material war inaugurated in 1917 in the tank battles of the French front. The Faustian “Ego” loses its intraversion and drowns in a ceaseless vortex of activity. This Ego, having fashioned the stone lacework and spires of the flamboyant Gothic, has fallen into American quantitativism or, confused and hesitant, has embraced the 20th century’s flood of information, its avalanche of concrete facts. It was our nihilism, our frozen indecision due to an exacerbated subjectivism, that mired us in the messy mud of facts.
By crossing the “line,” as Heidegger and Jünger say,[13] the Faustian monad (about which Leibniz[14] spoke) cancels its subjectivism and finds pure power, pure dynamism, in the universe of Technology. With the Jüngerian approach, the circle is closed again: as the closed universe of “magism” was replaced by the inauthentic little world of the bourgeois—sedentary, timid, embalmed in his utilitarian sphere—so the dynamic “Faustian” universe is replaced with a Technological arena, stripped this time of all subjectivism.
Jüngerian Technology sweeps away the false modernity of the Enlightenment metanarrative, the hesitation of late 19th century literary modernism, and the trompe-l’oeil of Wagnerism and neo-pastoralism. But this Jüngerian modernity, perpetually misunderstood since the publication of Der Arbeiter [The Worker] in 1932, remains a dead letter.
Notes
1. On the theological foundation of the doctrine of the “invisible hand” see Hans Albert, “Modell-Platonismus. Der neoklassische Stil des ökonomischen Denkens in kritischer Beleuchtung” [“Model Platonism: The Neoclassical Style of Economic Thought in Critical Elucidation”], in Ernst Topitsch, ed., Logik der Sozialwissenschaften [Logic of Social Science] (Köln/Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1971).
2. There is abundant French literature on Georges Sorel. Nevertheless, it is deplorable that a biography and analysis as valuable as Michael Freund’s has not been translated: Michael Freund, Georges Sorel, Der revolutionäre Konservatismus [Georges Sorel: Revolutionary Conservatism] (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972).
3. Cf. G. Locchi, “Histoire et société: critique de Lévi-Strauss” [“History and Society: Critique of Lévi-Strauss”], Nouvelle Ecole, no. 17 (March 1972) and “L’histoire” [“History”], Nouvelle Ecole, nos. 27–28 (January 1976).
4. Cf. G. Locchi, “L’idée de la musique’ et le temps de l’histoire” [“The ‘Idea of Music’ and the Times of History”], Nouvelle Ecole, no. 30 (November 1978) and Vincent Samson, “Musique, métaphysique et destin” [“Music, Metaphysics, and Destiny”], Orientations, no. 9 (September 1987).
5. Cf. Helmut Pfotenhauer, Die Kunst als Physiologie: Nietzsches äesthetische Theorie und literarische Produktion [Art as Physiology: Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Theory and Literary Production] (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1985). Cf. on Pfotenhauer’s book: Robert Steuckers, “Regards nouveaux sur Nietzsche” [“New Views of Nietzsche”], Orientations, no. 9.
6. Biotechnology and the most recent biocybernetic innovations, when applied to the operation of human society, fundamentally call into question the mechanistic theoretical foundations of the “Grand Narrative” of the Enlightenment. Less rigid, more flexible laws, because adapted to the deep drives of human psychology and physiology, would restore a dynamism to our societies and put them in tune with technological innovations. The Grand Narrative—which is always around, in spite of its anachronism—blocks the evolution of our societies; Habermas’ thought, which categorically refuses to fall in step with the epistemological discoveries of Konrad Lorenz, for example, illustrates perfectly the genuinely reactionary rigidity of the neo-Enlightenment in its Frankfurtist and current neo-liberal derivations. To understand the shift that is taking place regardless of the liberal-Frankfurtist reaction, see the work of the German bio-cybernetician Frederic Vester: (1) Unsere Welt—ein vernetztes System, dtv, no. l0,118, 2nd ed. (München, 1983) and (2) Neuland des Denkens. Vom technokratischen zum kybernetischen Zeitalter (Stuttgart: DVA, 1980). The restoration of holist (ganzheitlich) social thought by modern biology is discussed, most notably, in Gilbert Probst, Selbst-Organisation, Ordnungsprozesse in sozialen Systemen aus ganzheitlicher Sicht (Berlin: Paul Parey, 1987).
7. G. Locchi, “L’idée de la musique’ et le temps de l’histoire.”
8. To tackle the question of the literary modernism in the 19th century, see: M. Bradbury, J. McFarlane, eds., Modernism 1890–1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
9. Cf. Paul Raabe, ed., Expressionismus. Der Kampf um eine literarische Bewegung (Zürich: Arche, 1987)—A useful anthology of the principal expressionist manifestos.
10. Armin Mohler, La Révolution Conservatrice en Allemagne, 1918–1932 (Puiseaux: Pardès, 1993). See mainly text A3 entitled “Leitbilder” (“Guiding Ideas”).
11. Cf. Gérard Raulet, “Mantism and the Post-Modern Conditions” and Claude Karnoouh, “The Lost Paradise of Regionalism: The Crisis of Post-Modernity in France,” Telos, no. 67 (March 1986).
12. Cf. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols., trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1926) for the definition of the “ahistorical peasant” see vol. 2. Cf. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt, 1959). For the place of this vision of the “peasant” in the contemporary controversy regarding neo-paganism, see: Richard Faber, “Einleitung: ‘Pagan’ und Neo-Paganismus. Versuch einer Begriffsklärung,” in Richard Faber and Renate Schlesier, Die Restauration der Götter: Antike Religion und Neo-Paganismus [The Restoration of the Gods: Ancient Religion and Neo-Paganism] (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986), 10–25. This text was reviewed in French by Robert Steuckers, “Le paganisme vu de Berlin” [“Paganism as Seen in Berlin”], Vouloir no. 28–29, April 1986, pp. 5–7.
13. On the question of the “line” in Jünger and Heidegger, cf. W. Kaempfer, Ernst Jünger, Sammlung Metzler, Band 20l (Stuttgart, Metzler, 1981), pp. 119–29. Cf also J. Evola, “Devant le ‘mur du temps’” [“Before the ‘Wall of Time’”] in Explorations: Hommes et problems [Explorations: Men and Problems], trans. Philippe Baillet (Puiseaux: Pardès, 1989), pp. 183–94. Let us take this opportunity to recall that, contrary to the generally accepted idea, Heidegger does not reject technology in a reactionary manner, nor does he regard it as dangerous in itself. The danger is due to the failure to think of the mystery of its essence, preventing man from returning to a more originary unconcealment and from hearing the call of a more primordial truth. If the age of technology seems to be the final form of the Oblivion of Being, where the anxiety suitable to thought appears as an absence of anxiety in the securing and the objectification of being, it is also from this extreme danger that the possibility of another beginning is thinkable once the metaphysics of subjectivity is completed.
14. To assess the importance of Leibniz in the development of German organic thought, cf. F. M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 10–12.
Postmodern Challenges:
Between Faust & Narcissus, Part 3
In 1945, the tone of ideological debate was set by the victorious ideologies. We could choose American liberalism (the ideology of Mr. Babbitt) or Marxism, an allegedly de-bourgeoisfied version of the metanarrative. The Grand Narrative took charge, hunted down any “irrationalist” philosophy or movement,[1] set up a thought police, and finally, by brandishing the bogeyman of rampant barbarism, inaugurated an utterly vacuous era.
Sartre and his fashionable Parisian existentialism must be analyzed in the light of this restoration. Sartre, faithful to his “atheism,” his refusal to privilege one value, did not believe in the foundations of liberalism or Marxism. Ultimately, he did not set up the metanarrative (in its most recent version, the vulgar Marxism of the Communist parties[2]) as a truth but as an “inescapable”categorical imperative for which one must militate if one does not want to be a “bastard,” i.e., one of these contemptible beings who venerate “petrified orders.”[3] It is the whole paradox of Sartreanism: on the one hand, it exhorts us not to adore “petrified orders,” which is properly Faustian, and, on another side, it orders us to “magically” adore a “petrified order” of vulgar Marxism, already unhorsed by Sombart or De Man. Thus in the Fifties, the golden age of Sartreanism, the consensus is indeed a moral constraint, an obligation dictated by increasingly mediatized thought. But a consensus achieved by constraint, by an obligation to believe without discussion, is not an eternal consensus. Hence the contemporary oblivion of Sartreanism, with its excesses and its exaggerations.
The Revolutionary Anti-Humanism of May 1968
With May ’68, the phenomenon of a generation, “humanism,” the current label of the metanarrative, was battered and broken by French interpretations of Nietzsche, Marx, and Heidegger.[4] In the wake of the student revolt, academics and popularizers alike proclaimed humanism a “petite-bourgeois” illusion. Against the West, the geopolitical vessel of the Enlightenment metanarrative, the rebels of ’68 played at mounting the barricades, taking sides, sometimes with a naive romanticism, in all the fights of the 1970s: Spartan Vietnam against American imperialism, Latin-American guerillas (“Ché”), the Basque separatists, the patriotic Irish, or the Palestinians.
Their Faustian feistiness, unable to be expressed though autochthonous models, was transposed toward the exotic: Asia, Arabia, Africa, or India. May ’68, in itself, by its resolute anchorage in Grand Politics, by its guerilla ethos, by its fighting option, in spite of everything took on a far more important dimension than the strained blockage of Sartreanism or the great regression of contemporary neo-liberalism. On the right, Jean Cau, in writing his beautiful book on Che Guevara[5] understood this issue perfectly, whereas the right, which is as fixated on its dogmas and memories as the left, had not wanted to see.
With the generation of ’68—combative and politicized, conscious of the planet’s great economic geopolitical issues—the last historical fires burned in the French public spirit before the great rise of post-history and post-politics represented by the narcissism of contemporary neoliberalism.
The Translation of the Writings of the “Frankfurt School” announces the Advent of Neo-Liberal Narcissism
The first phase of the neo-liberal attack against the political anti-humanism of May ’68 was the rediscovery of the writings of the Frankfurt School: born in Germany before the advent of National Socialism, matured during the California exile of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, and set up as an object of veneration in post-war West Germany. In Dialektik der Aufklärung, a small and concise book that is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of our time, Horkheimer and Adorno claim that there are two “reasons” in Western thought that, in the wake of Spengler and Sombart, we are tempted to name “Faustian reason” and “magical reason.” The former, for the two old exiles in California, is the negative pole of the “reason complex” in Western civilization: this reason is purely “instrumental”; it is used to increase the personal power of those who use it. It is scientific reason, the reason that tames the forces of the universe and puts them in the service of a leader or a people, a party or state. Thus, according to Herbert Marcuse, it is Promethean, not Narcissistic/Orphic.[6] For Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, this is the kind of rationality that Max Weber theorized.
On the other hand, “magical reason,” according to our Spenglerian genealogical terminology, is, broadly speaking, the reason of Lyotard’s metanarrative. It is a moral authority that dictates ethical conduct, allergic to any expression of power, and thus to any manifestation of the essence of politics.[7] In France, the rediscovery of the Horkheimer-Adorno theory of reason near the end of the 1970s inaugurated the era of depoliticization, which, by substituting generalized disconnection for concrete and tangible history, led to the “era of the vacuum” described so well by Grenoble Professor Gilles Lipovetsky.[8] Following the militant effervescence of May ’68 came a generation whose mental attitudes are characterized quite justly by Lipovetsky as apathy, indifference (also to the metanarrative in its crude form), desertion (of the political parties, especially of the Communist Party), desyndicalisation, narcissism, etc. For Lipovetsky, this generalized resignation and abdication constitutes a golden opportunity. It is the guarantee, he says, that violence will recede, and thus no “totalitarianism,” red, black, or brown, will be able to seize power. This psychological easy-goingness, together with a narcissistic indifference to others, constitutes the true “post-modern” age.
There are Various Possible Definitions of “Post-Modernity”
On the other hand, if we perceive—contrary to Lipovetsky’s usage—“modernity” or “modernism” as expressions of the metanarrative, thus as brakes on Faustian energy, post-modernity will necessarily be a return to the political, a rejection of para-magical creationism and anti-political suspicion that emerged after May 68, in the wake of speculations on “instrumental reason” and “objective reason” described by Horkheimer and Adorno.
The complexity of the “post-modern” situation makes it impossible to give one and only one definition of “post-modernity.” There is not one post-modernity that can lay claim to exclusivity. On the threshold of the 21st century, various post-modernities lie fallow, side by side, diverse potential post-modern social models, each based on fundamentally antagonistic values fundamentally antagonistic, primed to clash. These post-modernities differ—in their language or their “look”—from the ideologies that preceded them; they are nevertheless united with the eternal, immemorial, values that lie beneath them. As politics enters the historical sphere through binary confrontations, clashes of opposing clans and the exclusion of minorities, dare to evoke the possible dichotomy of the future: a neo-liberal, Western, American and American-like post-modernity versus a shining Faustian and Nietzschean post-modernity.
The “Moral Generation” & the “Era of the Vacuum”
This neo-liberal post-modernity was proclaimed triumphantly, with Messianic delirium, by Laurent Joffrin in his assessment of the student revolt of December 1986 (Un coup de jeune [A Coup of Youth], Arlea, 1987). For Joffrin, who predicted[9] the death of the hard left, of militant proletarianism, December ’86 is the harbinger of a “moral generation,” combining in one mentality soft leftism, lazy-minded collectivism, and neo-liberal, narcissistic, and post-political selfishness: the social model of this hedonistic society centered on commercial praxis, that Lipovetsky described as the era of the vacuum. A political vacuum, an intellectual vacuum, and a post-historical desert: these are the characteristics of the blocked space, the closed horizon characteristic of contemporary neo-liberalism. This post-modernity constitutes a troubling impediment to the greater Europe that must emerge so that we have a viable future and arrest the slow decay announced by massive unemployment and declining demographics spreading devastation under the wan light of consumerist illusions, the big lies of advertisers, and the neon signs praising the merits of a Japanese photocopier or an American airline.
On the other hand, the post-modernity that rejects the old anti-political metanarrative of the Enlightenment, with its metamorphoses and metastases; that affirms the insolence of a Nietzsche or the metallic ideal of a Jünger; that crosses the “line,” as Heidegger exhorts, leaving behind the sterile dandyism of nihilistic times; the post-modernity that rallies the adventurous to a daring political program concretely implying the rejection of the existing power blocs, the construction of an autarkic Eurocentric economy, while fighting savagely and without concessions against all old-fashioned religions and ideologies, by developing the main axis of a diplomacy independent of Washington; the post-modernity that will carry out this voluntary program and negate the negations of post-history—this post-modernity will have our full adherence.
In this brief essay, I wanted to prove that there is a continuity in the confrontation of the “Faustian” and “magian” mentalities, and that this antagonistic continuity is reflected in the current debate on post-modernities. The American-centered West is the realm of “magianisms,” with its cosmopolitanism and authoritarian sects.[10] Europe, the heiress of a Faustianism much abused by “magian” thought, will reassert herself with a post-modernity that will recapitulate the inexpressible themes, recurring but always new, of the Faustianness intrinsic to the European soul.
Notes
1. The classic among classics in the condemnation of “irrationalism” is the summa of György Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 2 vols. (1954). This book aims to be a kind of Discourse on Method for the dialectic of Enlightenment-Counter-Enlightenment, rationalism-irrationalism. Through a technique of amalgamation that bears a passing resemblance to a Stalinist pamphlet, broad sectors of German and European culture, from Schelling to neo-Thomism, are blamed for having prepared and supported the Nazi phenomenon. It is a paranoiac vision of culture.
2. To understand the fundamental irrationality of Sartre’s Communism, one should read Thomas Molnar, Sartre, philosophie de la contestation (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1969). In English: Sartre: Ideologue of Our Time (New York : Funk & Wagnalls, 1968).
3. Cf. R.-M. Alberes, Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1964), 54–71.
4. In France, the polemic aiming at a final rejection of the anti-humanism of ’68 and its Nietzschean, Marxist, and Heideggerian philosophical foundations is found in Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Anti-Humanism, trans. Mary H. S. Cattani (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990) and its appendix ’68–’86. Itinéraires de l’individu [’68-’86: Routes of the Individual] (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). Contrary to the theses defended in first of these two works, Guy Hocquenghem in Lettre ouverte à ceux qui sont passés du col Mao au Rotary Club [Open Letter to those Went from Mao Jackets to the Rotary Club] (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986) deplored the assimilation of the hyper-politicism of the generation of 1968 into the contemporary neo-liberal wave. From a definitely polemical point of view and with the aim of restoring debate, such as it is, in the field of philosophical abstraction, one should read Eddy Borms, Humanisme—kritiek in het hedendaagse Franse denken [Humanism: Critique in Contemporary French Thought (Nijmegen: SUN, 1986).
5. Jean Cau, the former secretary of Jean-Paul Sartre, now classified as a polemist of the “right,” who delights in challenging the manias and obsessions of intellectual conformists, did not hesitate to pay homage to Che Guevara and to devote a book to him. The “radicals” of the bourgeois accused him of “body snatching”! Cau’s rigid right-wing admirers did not appreciate his message either. For them, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who nevertheless admired Abel Bonnard and the American “fascist” Lawrence Dennis, are emanations of the Evil One.
6. Cf. A. Vergez, Marcuse (Paris: P.U.F., 1970).
7. Julien Freund, Qu’est-ce que la politique? [What is Politics?] (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Cf Guillaume Faye, “La problématique moderne de la raison ou la querelle de la rationalité” [“The Modern Problem of Reason or the Quarrel of Rationality”] Nouvelle Ecole no. 41, November 1984.
8. G. Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain [The Era of the Vacuum: Essays on contemporary individualism] (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). Shortly after this essay was written, Gilles Lipovetsky published a second book that reinforced its viewpoint: L’Empire de l’éphémère: La mode et son destin dans les sociétés modernes [Empire of the Ephemeral: Fashion and its Destiny in Modern Societies] (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). Almost simultaneously François-Bernard Huyghe and Pierre Barbès protested against this “narcissistic” option in La soft-idéologie [The Soft Ideology] (Paris: Laffont, 1987). Needless to say, my views are close to those of the last two writers.
9. Cf. Laurent Joffrin, La gauche en voie de disparition: Comment changer sans trahir? [The Left in the Process of Disappearance: How to Change without Betrayal?] (Paris: Seuil, 1984).
10. Cf. Furio Colombo, Il dio d’America: Religione, ribellione e nuova destra [The God of America: Religion, Rebellion, and the New Right] (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1983).