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jeudi, 24 mars 2011

Céline sous la faucheuse situationniste

Céline sous la faucheuse situationniste

par Eric Mazet

Ex: http://lepetitcelinien.blogspot.com/

Tous les lâches sont romanesques et romantiques, ils s’inventent des vies à reculons...”
Féerie pour une autre fois.

Je pensais ne plus écrire sur Céline avant quelque temps, mais un éditeur m’envoie un livre avec ses compliments: L’Art de Céline et son temps, d’un certain Michel Bounan que je ne connais pas. Dans la même collection, dont la qualité de finition m’avait séduit, M. Bounan a déjà publié Incitation à l’autodéfense, titre quelque peu inquiétant par sa brutalité paranoïaque. N’étant pas un de ces céliniens médiatiques, mais plutôt un chercheur de dates pour notules, la courtoisie de l’envoi me flatte. Je me dois d’y répondre. Et puis la couverture, avec la lame XIII du tarot de Marseille, celle de la mort en marche, éveille mon attention. La première lame, celle du Bateleur, moins morbide, plus célinienne, aurait aussi bien présenté ce livre, puisqu’elle évoque autant Bagatelles que Mort à crédit, comme la lame nommée “Le Mat”, avec son fou en marche, canne à la main et baluchon sur l’épaule, accompagné d’un chat ou d’un chien, peut aussi bien illustrer Voyage, D’un château l’autre ou Rigodon.
La quatrième de couverture aguiche le lecteur ignorant: “La bonne question n’est pas de savoir comment un libertaire en vient à s’acoquiner avec des nazis, mais pourquoi ce genre de personnage croit bon de se déguiser en libertaire”. Je suis d’accord avec M. Bounan: si Céline était un nazi, alors, à la poubelle ! Qu’on n’en parle plus. Et M. Bounan le premier. J’ai autant de répulsion que lui, j’imagine, quand on me montre le visage du nazisme ou du racisme au cinéma. La vie quotidienne, fort heureusement, m’en préserve. Je me suis toujours méfié des majorités; sinon je ne serais pas venu à Céline. Mais je n’ai jamais cessé de prêcher les vertus de la tolérance, du respect des plus faibles, par simple souci d’équité. Nous sommes sans doute, M. Bounan et moi, d’accord là-dessus. Ce n’est déjà pas mal.
Pour le reste, je vais paraître à M. Bounan bien désuet, décevant, arriéré. Tous les prêcheurs politiques m’ennuient. D’où qu’ils viennent, les politiciens sont des charlatans, attachés à gamelle. Mais écoutons M. Bounan. Sa thèse est simple. Céline n’est qu’un prétexte, un appât, à peine un exemple. M. Bounan est un “situationniste” qui explique les origines de la Seconde guerre mondiale par le financement d’une secte, les nazis, par des entreprises capitalistes. Des provocateurs, nervis de ces banquiers, ont désigné les Juifs comme fauteurs de guerre, à seule fin de faire diversion. Céline est de ceux-là. Après-guerre, les mêmes responsables ont gardé le pouvoir, sont devenus les juges de leurs anciens nervis, et financent derechef des courants antisémites pour occulter leurs nouveaux crimes contre l’humanité. Céline ne fut qu’un agent provocateur à leur solde, par appât du gain, et les céliniens d’aujourd’hui sont tous suspects d’antisémitisme ou de révisionnisme. C’est un résumé de notre sombre XXe siècle, ficelé par un “situationniste” qui a choisi Céline comme marque commerciale, afin d’attirer le chaland.
Plus inspiré par la musique, la peinture et la poésie que par la politique, je trouve ce discours bien mécanique, abstrait, fallacieux. La logique paranoïaque est toujours impeccable, aussi attrayante que les poupées russes qui s’emboîtent. Je ne sais si M. Bounan est infirmier psychiatrique ou psychanalyste situationniste. Il est surtout du genre homo politicus. Dès lors, en littérature nos goûts et nos lectures divergent . Pour moi, Céline n’est pas plus libertaire qu’il n’est nazi. Son apport à la littérature, son défi, sa gageure, ne se situent pas à ce niveau. Donc, la question initiale, de mon point de vue, est caduque. Et comme M. Bounan l’a écrit page 61: “Une question fausse ne peut recevoir que des réponses absurdes”. Pour lui, Céline n’est qu’un provocateur antisémite, du début à la fin. Un écrivain politique, un menteur, un tricheur, obnubilé par l’argent. La thèse n’est pas nouvelle. On y retrouve Alméras, Bellosta, Dauphin, lus comme nouveaux évangélistes. Citations non contrôlées, lectures de seconde main, diffamations répétées.
M. Bounan croit-il vraiment qu’on quitte la sinécure d’une clinique à Rennes, et puis d’un poste international à la SDN, pour faire fortune dans un dispensaire de banlieue en se lançant dans un énorme roman? Le risque était grand... M. Bounan ne voit que recettes à la mode dans Voyage et dans Mort à crédit. Croit-il qu’un écrivain, uniquement motivé par l’appât du gain, passerait quatre années à écrire un premier roman, puis quatre années encore pour écrire le second, en offrant une révolution esthétique digne des plus grandes révolutions littéraires des siècles passés? On ne devient pas l’égal de Rabelais ou de Victor Hugo avec des recettes de bistrot.
M. Bounan s’encolère, congestionne, du fait que le docteur Destouches, dans son étude sur “L’Organisation sanitaire aux usines Ford” , recommande en 1929 aux mutilés ou aux malades de ne pas s’exclure de la société, de refuser d’être des chômeurs, de ne pas devenir des assistés, mais de continuer à travailler dans la mesure de leurs possibilités, aidés par une médecine préventive, sociale, adaptée, et non intimidante, sanctionnante, mandarine. M. Bounan s’oppose-t-il aujourd’hui à la réinsertion des handicapés dans le monde du travail? Cela le révolte encore quand Louis Destouches demande la création d’une “vaste police médicale”. Sans doute le mot “police” n’évoque-t-il pour M. Bounan que le slogan “CRS-SS”, slogan que Cohn-Bendit lui-même trouve aujourd’hui ridicule. M. Bounan qui a écrit un livre sur Le Temps du sida doit savoir que les plus menacés ont dû créer leur propre “police”, changer d’habitudes, de mentalité et d’attitude vis-à-vis de la sexualité. Lorsque Céline affirme dans Les Assurances sociales que “l’assuré doit travailler le plus possible, avec le moins d’interruption possible pour cause de maladie” , M. Bounan oublie de mentionner que Céline n’envisage cette phase qu’après une lutte plus efficace contre les maladies par une refonte de la médecine. Céline devançait par là les thèses de “l’anti-psychiatrie” qui choisit d’insérer le “malade” dans la société au lieu de l’exclure. Avec M. Bounan, on croirait lire le petit catéchisme d’un homéopathe fanatique vitupérant les généralistes ou les chirurgiens ayant parcouru l’Afrique comme le fit le Dr Destouches. Notre situationniste oublie que Clichy, à l’époque, c’était le tiers-monde. Que pour sortir du fatalisme de la maladie et de la misère, de l’alcoolisme et de la syphilis, il fallait se livrer à une “entreprise patiente de correction et de rectification intellectuelle”. Médicale, humaniste, sociale, évidemment, comme le souhaitait le docteur Destouches, et non pas répressive, policière, punitive, comme l’insinue M. Bounan. Ce texte a d’ailleurs été approuvé et défendu en 1928 devant la Société de médecine de Paris - et M. Bounan passe ce fait sous silence - par le Dr Georges Rosenthal qu’on a du mal à imaginer nazi.
Il faut se rappeler qu’en 1918 les Américains avaient envoyé en Bretagne la Mission Rockefeller pour lutter contre la tuberculose qui faisait cent cinquante mille morts par jour dans le monde. C’est là que Louis Destouches, embrigadé dans cette croisade, cette “éducation populaire”, apprit, devant un public d’ouvriers, à condamner l’alcoolisme, “principal pourvoyeur de la tuberculose”, et non chez on ne sait quel folliculaire antisémite dont les attaques seront tantôt dirigées contre l’alcool, tantôt contre les Juifs. Était-ce vouloir enrégimenter les poilus de 14 dans un monde totalitaire que de vouloir leur épargner un deuxième fléau mortel en 1918 en appelant à la création d’écoles d’ infirmières visiteuses qui se rendraient chez les malades? Tous ces projets avaient été formés outre-atlantique par les professeurs Alexander Bruno et Selskar Gunn, médecins de la mission Rockefeller. Était-ce tenir des discours policiers ou nazis que de demander la construction de dispensaires anti-tuberculeux, et de parler en 1919 “au nom de la Patrie si réprouvée, au nom de l’Avenir de notre race” comme le faisait alors le comité de la mission? C’était le langage d’une génération formée aux études latines. Ni dans les tranchées de Verdun ni dans les livres d’histoire, on n’usait des codes “politiquement correct”qui pallient l’inculture de nos critiques.

La suite très prochainement...

Eric MAZET
Le Bulletin célinien, n° 175, avril 1997, pp. 15-22.

Michel Bounan, L’art de Céline et son temps, Éd. Allia.
 
Céline sous la faucheuse situationniste (II)

 

 

vendredi, 18 mars 2011

Bonald's Theory of the Nobility

Bonald’s Theory of the Nobility

F. Roger Devlin

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

bonald.jpgUnlike Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald devoted little space to analyzing the French Revolution itself. His focus instead was on understanding the traditional society which had been swept away. His review of Mme. de Staël’s Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, e.g., ends up turning into a theory of the nobility and its function. Bonald scholar Christopher Olaf Blum calls this “his most original contribution to the theory of the counter-revolution.”

Any advanced society requires men who devote themselves to the public good in preference to the private good of their families. This is particularly so in the professions of law and war: Bonald calls judges and warriors “merely the internal and external means of society’s conservation,” and hence the two fundamentally political or public professions.

To entice men into public service, two things are required. First, such men must be economically independent. They cannot rely on the changeable will of an employer who pays them a salary, however generous. Nor would their public duties allow them leisure to busy themselves with commerce. Therefore they must be landholders.

Second, men must be socialized to see public service as an honor and a distinction:

The [pre-revolutionary] constitution said to every private family: “when you have fulfilled your destination in domestic society, which is to acquire an independent property through work, order and thrift—when, that is, you have acquired enough that you have no need of others and are able to serve the state at your own expense, from your own income and, if necessary, with your capital—the greatest honor to which you can aspire will be to pass into the order particularly devoted to the service of the state.

In reality, this is a kind of noble fiction: the service nobility’s “distinction, by a strange reversal of conceptions, has seemed, even to them, to be a prerogative, while it is in fact nothing but servitude.” Their own interest would dictate their continued devotion to their families and the concerns of private life.

Pre-revolutionary France had a remarkable way of filling public offices: they were sold. Known as the “venality of offices,” the system is most often cited as an example of the irrationality of the ancien régime’s finances. Liberal historians especially have criticized the system for delaying the onset of large-scale capitalism in France: instead of expanding their commercial operations indefinitely, successful merchants would convert their fortunes into land in order to purchase more ‘honorable’ offices for themselves or their sons. Bonald warmly defends the custom:

There could be no more moral institution than one which, by the most honorable motive, gave an example of disinterestedness to men devoured by a thirst for money in a society in which the passion was a fertile source of injustice and crime. There could be no better policy than to stop, by a powerful yet voluntary means, and by the motive of honor, the immoderate accumulation of wealth in the same hands.

A large payment for occupying offices of public trust, he says, functioned as proof of a candidate’s independence and disinterestedness. The ‘opening of careers  to talents’ (which the Revolution made such a fuss over) merely encouraged bribery and endless strife over who was talented. Open venality was, strange to say, the more objective procedure.

Bonald contrasts the service nobility of France favorably with what he calls the political nobility of England: the English peers were “no body of nobles destined to serve political power but a senate destined to exercise it.” Nor were they wholly devoted to public duties: “The peer who makes laws for three months of the year sells linens for the other nine.”

The liberal might respond that “private” linen merchants are serving the public just as much as judges or military men: they provide merchandise to the “general public.” Contemporary libertarians have effectively satirized the notion of “public servants” who consume half our incomes, while “selfish businessmen” labor so that we may feed, clothe, and house ourselves more cheaply than any people in history.

Bonald mentions someone’s suggestion that actors be considered “public servants” since they perform for the public: this notion was universally and deservedly ridiculed, even by many who could not explain why actors were not “public men.”

The case with merchants is similar: “the merchant who arranges for a whole fleet of sugar and coffee serves individuals no less than the shopkeeper who sells them to me.” But the soldier who sacrifices his life for his country does not act merely for the benefit of the particular persons who make up the country at a particular moment. Justice has a similar irreducibly impersonal or universal intention: it is ideally “blind” or without regard for persons. Economic thinking cannot account for these types of human action.

(The philosophically inclined may wish to consult my discussion of the essential difference between universalist vs. particularist action in Alexandre Kojeve and the Outcome of Modern Thought, p. 92ff. Bonald’s views on this matter are quite similar to Hegel’s.)

It should be acknowledged that Bonald’s theory of the nobility is an idealizing interpretation. Since the time of Louis XIV, the grande noblesse at Versailles had not performed much of any function, and well before the Revolution, many noblemen bore a closer resemblance to the dissolute characters in Les liaisons dangereuses than to the ideal type described by Bonald. As Blum says, “in making [his] argument, [Bonald] was a reformer, for the French nobility had shown itself willing to jettison its duties in favor of the kind of freedom that would enable them, the wealthy, to dominate more effectively and without the hindrance of traditional strictures.”

Recommended reading:

Louis de Bonald
The True & Only Wealth of Nations: Essays on Family, Economy, & Society
Translated by Christopher Olaf Blum
Naples, Fla.: Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, 2006

Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition
Edited and translated by Christopher Olaf Blum
Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2004

Louis de Bonald
On Divorce
Translated and edited by Nicholas Davidson
New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992

TOQ Online, Dec. 4, 2009

jeudi, 17 mars 2011

The Art of Manliness

Brett and Kate McKay
The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man
Cincinnati: How Books, 2009

It’s hard not to like this book. However, it’s really the idea of the book that I like, rather than the book itself. In fact, I almost hesitate to write this review (which will not be wholly positive) because I think the authors have their hearts in the right place, and because I like their website http://artofmanliness.com/

When I showed this book to a young friend of mine he was incredulous: “Do we really need a manual on being a man?” he asked. Well, yes it appears we do. As the authors say in their introduction “something happened in the last fifty years to cause . . . positive manly virtues and skills to disappear from the current generations of men.” They don’t really tell us what they think that something is, but two paragraphs later they remark: “Many people have argued that we need to reinvent what manliness means in the twenty-first century. Usually this means stripping manliness of its masculinity and replacing it with more sensitive feminine qualities. We argue that masculinity doesn’t need to be reinvented.”

I wanted to let out a cheer at this point, but I was sitting in the American Film Academy Café in Greenwich Village, surrounded by young white male geldings and their Asian girlfriends. So I kept my mouth shut and noted to myself that the McKays are clearly not PC, though there are minor nods to political correctness here are there. One gets the feeling that they know more than they are letting on in this book. And one gets the feeling they are employing a simple and sound strategy: to seduce male readers with the natural appeal of traditional manliness – while revealing just-so-much of their political incorrectness so as not to completely alienate their over-socialized readers.

Still, the McKays are pretty socialized themselves, and one sees this immediately on opening the book and finding that it is dedicated to two members of “the greatest generation.” Ugh. Yes, I do think there’s much to admire about my grandfather’s generation, but I long ago came to detest the conventional-minded romanticism about America’s great crusade in WWII. And the very use of the phrase “greatest generation” has become a cliché.

However, the real trouble begins after the introduction, when one finds that the first section of the book is devoted to how to get fitted for a suit. Then we are instructed in how to tie a tie. For some unaccountable reason the tying of the Windsor knot is included here. (Like Ian Fleming, I have always regarded the Windsor knot as a mark of a vain and unserious man.) This is followed by sections on how to select a hat, how to iron a shirt, how to shave, and how not to be a slob at the dinner table. So far so good: I know all this stuff, so I guess I’m pretty manly. Of course, the problem here is that this is all in the realm of appearance. To be fair, the McKays do go on to include much in their book about character, but one must wade through a lot of inessential stuff to get there.

At one point we are instructed in how to deliver a baby. The McKays’ core piece of advice here is “get professional help!” Curiously, this is also the central tenet of their brief lectures on dealing with a snakebite and landing a plane. The baby having been delivered, the reader will find further instructions on how to change a diaper and how to braid your daughter’s hair. (This is what happens when you co-author a book with your wife.) The McKays’ advice on raising children is sound. They advise us not to try and be our child’s best friend.

Once you have tended to your daughter’s snakebite and braided her hair (in that order, please), you can turn to manlier things like how to win a fight, how to break down a door, how to change a flat tire, how to jump start a car, how to go camping, how to navigate by the stars, and how to tie knots. Then it will be Miller time, and you will want some manly friends to hang out with.

The section on male friendship, in fact, is one of the best parts of the book. The McKays remind us that in ancient times “men viewed male friendship as the most fulfilling relationship a person [i.e., a man] could have.” They attribute this, however, to the fact that men saw women as inferior. This is at best a half-truth. The real reason men saw male friendship as more fulfilling than relations with women is because it is. There are vast differences between men and women, and while they may be able to have close, loving relationships they never really understand each other, and their values clash.

Women are primarily concerned with the perpetuation of the species. They are the peacemakers, who just want us all to get along, because their main concern is what Bill Clinton called “the children.” By contrast, men find their greatest fulfillment in achieving something outside the home: they are only fully alive when they are fighting for some kind of value. A man can only be truly understood by another man.

Thus was born what the McKays refer to as “the heroic friendship”: “The heroic friendship was a friendship between two men that was intense on an emotional and intellectual level. Heroic friends felt bound to protect one another from danger.” The McKays devote some discussion to the decline of close male friendships, and they have a lot to say about the disappearance of affection among male friends.

A while back I found myself in a bookstore flipping through a book of photographs from WWII. Many of them depicted soldiers, sailors, and marines relaxing or goofing around. What was remarkable about many of these pictures was the affection the men displayed for one another. There was one photo, for example, of a sailor asleep with his head in another sailor’s lap. This is the sort of thing that would be impossible today, because of fear of being thought “gay.” The McKays mention this problem. As George Will once said, the love that dare not speak its name just can’t seem to shut up lately. And it has ruined male bonding. Thus was born the “man hug” with the three slaps on the back that say I’M (THUMP) NOT (THUMP) GAY (THUMP). (Yes, the McKays instruct us on how to perform the man hug in both its American and international versions.)

Another thing that has ruined male friendships is women, but in a number of different ways. First of all, as every man knows, women have now invaded countless previously all-male areas in life. This usually results in ruining them for men. Second, many women resent it when their husbands or partners want to spend time with their male friends. In earlier times, men would spend a significant amount of time away from their wives working or playing with male peers. But no longer. Now women expect to be their husband’s “best friend,” and men today passively go along with this. The result is that they often become completely isolated from their male friends. It is quite common today, in fact, for men to expect that marriage means the end of their friendship with another man. Please note that all of the above problems have only been made possible by the cooperation of men – by their not being manly enough to say “no” to women.

Eventually, one finds the McKays dealing with matters having to do with manly character, such as their discussion of the characteristics of good leadership. A lot of what they have to say is sound advice, but it is not without its problems. At one point they invoke old Ben Franklin and his homey list of virtues. Anyone interested in this topic should read D. H. Lawrence’s hilarious demolition of Franklin in Studies in Classic American Literature. Franklin is the archetypal American, extolling (among other things) temperance, frugality, industry, and cleanliness. This is setting our sights very low, and it’s not the least bit manly. If I’m going to take lessons in manliness from an American I’d much rather get them from Charles Manson.

There are other problems I could go on about, such as the McKays advising us to give up porn because it “objectifies women” (“But that’s the whole point!” a friend of mine responded when I told him this). However, as I said earlier, their heart is in the right place. Whatever its flaws, this book is a celebration of traditional manhood and an honest, well-intentioned attempt to improve men.

Still, there is something undeniably creepy and postmodern about this book. If you follow all of its instructions you won’t be a traditional manly man, you’ll be an incredible, life-like simulation of one. The reason is that everything they talk about came naturally to our forebears. It flowed from their characters, and their characters flowed from their life experience. But their life experience was quite different from ours. They were not constantly shielded from danger and from risk taking. They had myriad ways open to them to express and refine their manly spirit. They had manly rites of passage. Their spirits were not crushed by decades of PC propagandizing. They had been tested by wars, famines, depressions. They were tough sons of bitches, and nobody needed to tell them how to win a fight. And if you tried to tell them how to braid their daughters’ hair you’d better be ready for a fight.

True manliness is not the result of acquiring the sort of “how to” knowledge the McKays try to provide us with. Manliness is not an art, not a techne – but it’s inevitable that we moderns, even good moderns like the McKays, would think that it is. Manliness is a way of being forged through trials and tribulations. In a world without trials and tribulations, in the “safe” and “nice” modern, industrial, liberal, democratic world it’s not at all clear that true manliness is possible anymore. Except, perhaps, through rejecting that world. The subtext to The Art of Manliness is anti-modern. But the achievement (or resurrection) of manliness has to raise that anti-modernism out from between the lines and make it the central point.

At its root, modernity is the suppression of manly virtues and manly values. This is the key to understanding the nature of the modern world and our dissatisfaction with it. Manliness today can only be truly asserted through revolt against all the forces arrayed against manliness – through revolt against the modern world.

mercredi, 16 mars 2011

La genèse de la postmodernité

La genèse de la postmodernité

Robert STEUCKERS

Conférence prononcée à l'école des cadres du GRECE ("Cercle Héraclite"), juin 1989

Ex: http://vouloir.hautetfort.com/

global10.jpgLa post-modernité. On en parle beaucoup sans trop savoir ce que c'est. Le mot fascine et mobi­lise quantité de curiosités, tant dans notre micro­cosme “néo-droitiste/ gréciste” (le néologisme est d'Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol) (1) que dans d'autres.

Le fait de nous être nommés “Nouvelle Droite” ou d'avoir accepté cette étiquette qu'on nous collait sur le dos, signale au moins une chose : le terme “nouveau” indique une volonté de réno­vation, donc un rejet radical du vieux monde, des idéologies dominantes et, partant, des modes de gestion pratiques, économiques et juridiques qu'elles ont produits. Dans ces idéologies domi­nantes, nous avons répété et dénoncé les linéa­ments d'universalisme, la prétention à déployer une rationalité qui serait unique et exclusive, ses implications pratiques de facture jacobine et cen­tralisatrice, les stratégies homogénéisantes de tous ordres, les ratés dus aux impossibilités physiques et psychologiques de construire pour l'éternité, pour les siècles des siècles, une cité rationnelle et mécanique, d'asseoir sans heurts et sans violence un droit individualiste, etc.

Les avatars récents de la philosophie universi­taire, éloignés — à cause de leur jargon obscur au premier abord — des bricolages idéologiques usuels, du tam-tam médiatique et des équilibrismes politiciens, nous suggèrent précisément des stratégies de défense contre cette essence univer­saliste des idéologies dominantes, contre le mo­nothéisme des valeurs qui caractérise l'Occident tant dans son illustration conservatrice et reli­gieuse — la New Right fondamentaliste l'a montré aux États-Unis — que dans son illustra­tion illuministe, rationaliste et laïque. L'erreur du mouvement néo-droitiste, dans son ensemble, c'est de ne pas s'être mis plus tôt à l'écoute de ces nouveaux discours, de ne pas en avoir vul­garisé le noyau profond et d'avoir ainsi, dans une certaine mesure, raté une bonne opportunité dans la bataille métapolitique.

“Konservative Revolution” et École de Francfort

Il nous faut confesser cette erreur tactique, sans pour autant sombrer dans l'amertume et le pessimisme et brûler ce que nous avons adoré. En effet, notre recours direct à Nietzsche — sans passer par les interprétations modernes de son œuvre — au monde allemand de la tradition ro­mantique, aux philosophies et sociologies orga­nicistes/vitalistes et à la Konservative Revolu­tion du temps de Weimar, a fait vibrer une cor­de sensible : celle de l'intérêt pour l'histoire, la narration, l'esthétique, la nostalgie fructueuse des origines et des archétypes (ici, en l'occur­rence, les origines immédiates d'une nouvelle tradition philosophique). L'effort n'a pas été vain : en se dégageant du carcan rationaliste/po­sitiviste, l'espace linguistique francophone s'est enrichi d'apports germaniques — organicistes et vitalistes — considérables, tout comme, dans la sphère même des idéologies dominantes, il apprenait à maîtriser simultanément les textes de base de l'École de Francfort (Adorno, Hork­heimer) et les démonstrations audacieuses de Habermas, parce qu'il a parfois fallu 40 ou 50 ans pour trouver des traductions françaises sur le marché du livre.

Explorer les univers de Wagner, de Jünger, de Thomas Mann, de Moeller van den Bruck, de Heidegger, de Carl Schmitt (2), a donné, à notre courant de pensée, des assises historiques soli­dissimes et, à terme, une maîtrise sans a priori des origines philosophiques de toutes les pen­sées identitaires, maîtrise que ne pourront jamais détenir ceux qui ont amorcé leurs démarches dans le cadre des universalismes/rationalismes occidentaux ou ceux qui restent paralysés par la crainte d'égratigner, d'une façon ou d'une autre, les vaches sacrées de ces universalismes/rationa­lismes. Une plus ou moins bonne maîtrise des origines, découlant de notre méthode archéolo­gique, nous assure une position de force. Mais cette position est corollaire d'une faiblesse : celle de ne pas être plongé dans la systématique con­temporaine, de ne pas être sur la même longueur d'onde que les pionniers de l'exploration philo­sophique, de ne pas être en même temps qu'eux à l'avant-garde des innovations conceptuelles. D'où notre flanc se prête assez facilement à la critique de nos adversaires qui disent, sans avoir tout à fait tort : “vous êtes des passéistes, germa­nolâtres de surcroît”.

Comment éviter cette critique et, surtout, com­ment dépasser les blocages, les facilités, les pa­resses qui suscitent ce type de critique ? Se réfé­rer à la tradition romantique, avec son recours aux identités, opérer une quête du Graal entre les arabesques de la Konservative Revolution (KR), sont des atouts majeurs autant qu'enri­chissants dans notre démarche. Si enrichissants qu'on ne peut en faire l'économie. Les prémisses du romantisme/vitalisme philosophique (mis en exergue par Gusdorf) (3), les fulgurances litté­raires de leur trajectoire, la carrière inépuisable qu'est la KR, avec son esthétisme et sa radica­lité, s'avèrent indispensables — sans pour au­tant être suffisants — afin de marquer l'étape suivante dans le développement de notre vision du monde. Jettons maintenant un coup d'œil sur le fond-de-monde où s'opèrent ce glissement, cette rénovation du substrat philosophique ro­mantique/vitaliste, cette rénovation de l'héritage de la KR. En Allemagne, matrice initiale de ce substrat, l'après-guerre a imposé un oubli obli­gatoire de tout romantisme/vitalisme et conforté une vénération officielle, quasiment imposée, de la tradition adverse, celle de l'Aufklärung, revue et corrigée par l'École de Francfort. Hors de cette tradition, toute pensée est désormais sus­pecte en Allemagne aujourd'hui.

Devant la mise au pas de la philosophie en RFA, la bouée de sauvetage est française

Mais le perpétuel rabâchage des idéologèmes francfortistes et des traditions hégéliennes, mar­xistes et freudiennes a conduit la pensée alle­mande à une impasse. On assiste depuis peu à un retour à Nietzsche, à Schopenhauer (notamment à l'occasion du 200ème anniversaire de sa nais­sance en 1988), aux divers vitalismes. Mais ce simple retour, malgré la bouffée d'air qu'il ap­porte, demeure intellectuellement insuffisant. Les défis contemporains exigent un aggiornamento, pas seulement un approfondissement. Mais, si tout aggiornamento d'un tel ordre postule une réinterprétation de l'œuvre de Nietzsche et une nouvelle exploration de “l'irrationalisme” pré­nietzschéen, il postule aussi et surtout un nou­veau plongeon dans les eaux tumultueuses de la KR. Or un tel geste rencontrerait des interdits dans la RFA d'aujourd'hui. Les philosophes rénovateurs allemands, pour sortir de l'impasse et contourner ces interdits, ces Denkverbote francfortistes, font le détour par Paris. Ainsi, les animateurs des éditions Merve de Berlin, Gerd Bergfleth, à qui l'on doit de splendides exégèses de Bataille, Bernd Mattheus et Axel Matthes (4) sollicitent les critiques de Baudrillard, la démar­che de Lyotard, les audaces de Virilio, le nietz­schéisme particulier de Deleuze, etc. La bouée de sauvetage, dans l'océan soft du (post-)franc­fortisme, dans cette mer de bigoterie rationalis­te/illuministe, est de fabrication française. Et l'on rencontre ici un curieux paradoxe : les Français, qui sont fatigués des platitudes néo-illuministes, recherchent des médicaments dans la vieille pharmacie fermée qu'est la KR ; les Allemands, qui ne peuvent plus respirer dans l'atmosphère poussiéreuse de l'Aufklärung revue et corrigée, trouvent leurs potions thérapeutiques dans les officines parisiennes d'avant-garde.

Dès lors, pourquoi ceux qui veulent rénover le débat en France, ne conjugueraient-ils pas Nietzsche, la KR, la “droite révolutionnaire” française (révélée par Sternhell, stigmatisée par Bernard-Henri Lévy dans L'idéologie française, Grasset, 1981), Péguy, l'héritage des non-con­formistes des années 30 (5), Heidegger, leurs philosophes contemporains (Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Baudrillard, Maffesoli, Vi­rilio), pour en faire une synthèse révolution­naire ?

La présence de ces recherches nouvelles désa­morcerait ipso facto les critiques qui mettent en avant le “passéisme” et la “germanolâtrie” de ceux et celles qui refusent d'adorer encore et toujours les vieilles lunes de l'âge des Lumiè­res. De plus, cette présence autorise d'emblée une participation active et directe dans le débat philosophique contemporain, auquel une inter­vention néo-droitiste, portée par le souci péda­gogique qui lui est propre, aurait sans doute conféré un langage moins hermétique. L'her­métisme du langage a été, de toute évidence, l'obstacle à l'incorporation des philosophes français contemporains dans un projet de nature métapolitique.

Dépasser l'humanisme, penser le pluriel

Il conviendrait donc, pour reprendre pleinement pied dans l'arène philosophique contemporaine ; de concilier 2 langages : d'une part, celui, didactique, narratif et historique qu'avait fait sien la ND dans les colonnes du Figaro Magazine, de Magazine-Hebdo ou d'Éléments et, d'autre part, un langage pionnier, prospectif, innova­teur, celui des corpus deleuzien, foucaldien, etc. J'entends déjà les objections : Deleuze et Foucault s'inscrivent dans le cadre de la gauche intellec­tuelle, militent dans les réseaux “anti-racistes”, se font les apologistes des marginalités les plus bizarres, etc. Entre les opinions personnelles amplifiées par les médias, les engouements légi­times pour telle ou telle marginalité, et une épis­témologie, exprimée dans un vocabulaire spécia­lisé et ardu, il faut savoir faire la distinction.

L'idée du dépassement de l'humanisme mécani­ciste/rationaliste et la vision du surhumanisme nietzschéen (6) ont pourtant plus d'un point commun, preuve que les intuitions et les apho­rismes de Nietzsche, les visions et les proclama­tions des autres auteurs de la tradition “surhu­maniste”, se sont capillarisées dans les circuits intellectuels européens et ne pourront plus jamais en être délogés, en dépit des efforts lancinants de leurs adversaires, accrochés déséspérément à leurs vieilles chimères. Si la ND a ouvertement démasqué les hypocrisies des discours domi­nants, signalé les simulacres et déchiré les voi­les, des philosophes comme Deleuze ont habile­ment camouflé leur travail de sape, si bien qu'il peut apparaître inattendu d'apprendre que, pour lui, le mouvement des droits de l'homme cherche naïvement à « reconstituer des transcendances ou des universaux ». Mais pour le philosophe de la “polytonalité” et des “multiplicités” — qui a pensé le pluriel de façon radicalement autre que la ND, mais a néanmoins aussi pensé le pluriel — est-ce si étonnant ?

Classer les courants post-modemes

Mais ces réflexions sur le destin de la ND et sur les philosophes français pourraient s'éterniser à l'infini, si l'on ne définit pas clairement un cadre historique et chronologique où elle s'inscriront, si l'on ne panoramise pas les faits post-modernes de philosophie et les virtualités qui en découlent. Il est en effet nécessaire de se doter d'un canevas didactique, afin de ne pas glosser dans le désor­dre et la confusion. Toutes les introductions à la pensée et aux philosophies postmodernes com­mencent par en souligner l'hétérogénéité, la di­versité, l'absence de dénominateur commun : toutes caractéristiques qui, de prime abord, inter­disent la clarté... Une chatte n'y retrouverait pas ses jeunes... Heureusement, un homme quasi providentiel est venu mettre de l'ordre dans ce désordre : Wolfgang Welsch, auteur d'un ouvrage “panoramique” sur la question, d'où ressort, limpide, une vision de l'histoire intellectuelle post-moderne (Unsere postmoderne Moderne, Acta Humaniora, Weinheim, 1987 ; en abrégé pour la suite du présent exposé : UPM).

Car c'est de cela qu'il s'agit : d'abord, montrer comment, progressivement, la philosophie s'est dégagée de la cangue rationaliste/moderniste/uni­versaliste pour aborder le réel de façon moins étriquée, et, ensuite, indiquer à quel stade ce long cheminement est parvenu aujourd'hui, à quelles résistances têtues ce dégagement se heurte encore. Conseillant vivement une lecture de l'ou­vrage de Welsch dans un article de Criticón, Ar­min Mohler, l'auteur de Die Konservative Re­volution in Deutschland 1919-1933, explique combien proche de notre anti-universalisme est l'interprétation welschienne de la post-modemité. De plus, la chronologie et la vision “panora­mique” de Welsch, dévoilent l'évolution des idées, un peu comme on montre un processus biologique ou chimique en accéléré dans les do­cumentaires scientifiques.

Posthistoire, postmodernité, société postindustrielle, une seule et même chose ?

Premier souci de Welsch : se débarrasser d'une confusion usuelle, celle qui dit que “posthistoi­re”, postmodernité et société postindustrielle sont une seule et même chose. Pour la posthistoire, décrite par Baudrillard, plus aucune innovation n'est possible et toutes les virtualités historiques ont été déjà jouées ; le diagnostic suggère la passivité, I'amertume, le cynisme et la grisaille.

Le mouvement du monde serait arrivé à un stade final, que Baudrillard nomme “l'hypertélie”, où les possibilités se neutraliseraient mutuellement dans “l'indifférence”, transformant notre civilisation en une gigantesque machinerie (la “mégamachine” de Rudolf Bahro ?) à ho­mogénéiser toutes les “différences” produites par la vie. De ce fait, la texture du monde, qui consiste à produire des “différences”, se mue en un mode de production d'indifférence. En d'au­tres mots, la dialectique de la différenciation ren­verse ses potentialités en produisant de l'indiffé­rence. Tout s'est déjà passé : inutile de rêver à une utopie, un monde meilleur, des lendemains qui chantent. Il ne se produit plus qu'une chose : le clonage infini et/ou la prolifération cancériforme du même, sans nouveauté, dans une “obésité obscène”. Notre époque, celle du “transpo­litique”, ne travaille plus ses contradictions inter­nes (ne cherche ni ne crée plus de solutions), mais s'engloutit dans l'extase de son propre nar­cissisme.

Le bilan de Baudrillard est sombre, noir. Son amertume, pense Welsch, est le signe de son hy­permodernisme et non celui d'une éventuelle postmodernité. La faillite des utopies désole Baudrillard, alors qu'elle fait sourire les post­modernes. Baudrillard déplore l'évanouissement des utopies et accuse la postmodernité de ne plus avoir de dimension utopique. La postmodernité, elle, est active, optimiste, bigarrée, offensive ; elle n'est pas utopique, mais elle n'est pas non plus résignée et ne se lamente pas. Toute lamentation quant à la disparition des projets utopi­ques/modernes est la preuve d'un attachement sentimental et désillusionné aux affects qui sous­tendent la modernité.

Postmodemité et société postindustrielle

Pour réfuter les arguments de ceux qui posent l'équation “postmodernité = société postindus­trielle”, Welsch commence par rappeler le mo­ment où, en sociologie, le terme “postmoderne” est apparu pour la première fois. C'était en 1968, dans un ouvrage d'Amitai Etzioni : The Active Society : A Theory of Societal and Political Pro­cesses (New York). Pour Etzioni, la postmoder­nité ne signifie ni résignation devant l'effondre­ment des grandes utopies sociales, ni répétition du même à l'infini, sur le mode de la “mégama­chine”. La postmodernité, au contraire, signifie dynamisme, créativité et action. Sur bon nombre de plans, l'analyse d'Etzioni rejoint les diagnos­tics de David Riesman (La foule solitaire, Ar­thaud, 1964 ; l'éd. am. date de 1958), d'Alain Touraine et surtout de Daniel Bell (Les con­tradictions culturelles du capitalisme, PUF, 1979 ; éd. am.: 1976). Mais, en dernière instance, les conclusions d'Etzioni et de Bell sont fon­cièrement différentes. Pour Bell, théoricien ma­jeur de la société postindustrielle, le grand projet technocratique — faire le bonheur des masses par quantitativisme — demeure en place, même si l'on observe un passage des technologies machinistes aux technologies intellectuelles (informatique, p.ex.). Pour Etzioni, en revanche, les technologies les plus récentes relativisent le vieux projet technocratique. Pour Bell, nous sommes entrés dans un “stade final”, où il s'agit de mettre de l'ordre dans la société de masse, issue du “grand projet” technocratique. Pour Etzioni, nous glissons hors de la passivité technocratique pour entrer dans un âge “actif”, dans une société qui s'auto-définit et se trans­forme sans cesse.

Affronter efficacement le monde contemporain, pour Etzioni et Welsch, c'est savoir manier une pluralité de rationalités, de systèmes de valeurs, de projets sociaux et non se contenter d'une ra­tionalité unique, d'un monothéisme des valeurs stérilisant et d'ériger en fétiche un et un seul mo­dèle social. C'est face à cette offensive silencieu­se d'un néo-pluralisme que Bell se trouve con­fronté à un dilemme qu'il ne peut résoudre : il sait que le projet technocratique, monolitihique dans son essence, ne peut satisfaire à long terme les aspirations démocratiques humaines, puisque celles-ci sont diverses ; mais, par ailleurs, on ne peut raisonnablement se débarrasser des acquis de l'ère technocratique, pense Bell, inquiet de­vant les nouveautés qui s'annoncent. Et face à ce complexe technocratique, composé de linéaments positifs et négatifs, indissociables et totalement imbriqués les uns dans les autres, s'est instaurée une sphère culturelle que Bell qualifie de “sub­versive”, car elle est hostile au projet technocra­tique et le sape. Le conflit majeur, qui risque de détruire la société capitaliste selon Bell, est celui qui oppose la sphère technique à la sphère cul­turelle. Cette opposition est, somme toute, assez manichéenne et ne perçoit pas qu'innovations sicentifiques/techniques et innovations culturel­les/artistiques/littéraires surgissent d'un même fond de monde, d'une même révolution qui s'o­père dans les mentalités. Arnold Gehlen, lui, avait bien vu que la culture (au sens où l'entend Bell), même hyper-critique à l'endroit de la mé­gamachine, n'était qu'épiphénomène et créatrice de gadgets, d'opportunités marchandes. La so­ciété marchande, la mégamachine bancaire et in­dustrielle, récupèrent les velléités contestatrices et les transforment en marchandises consommables.

La postmodernité n'est ni le schéma catastro­phiste de Bell ni le pessimisme de Gehlen et Baudrillard. Elle admet le caractère “radicalement disjonctif” des sociétés contemporaines. Elle ad­met, en d'autres mots, que les rationalités éco­nomiques, industrielles, politiques, culturelles et sociales sont différentes, parfois divergentes, et peuvent, très logiquement, mener à des conflits épineux. Mais la postmodernité, contrairement à la posthistoire ou à la société postindustrielle de Bell, n'évacue pas le conflit ni ne le déplore et accepte sa présence dans le monde, sans mora­lisme inutile.

Quelle modernité réfute la postmodernité ?

Si la postmodernité (PM) n'est ni la posthistoire ni la société postindustrielle, qu'est-elle et quelle modernité remplace-t-elle ? Les textes aussi nom­breux que divers qui tentent de cerner l'essence de la PM, ne sont pas unanimes à désigner et définir cette modernité, qui, en toute logique, est chronologiquement antérieure à la PM. Plusieurs “modernités” sont concernées, nous explique Welsch ; d'abord celle de la Neuzeit (l'âge mo­derne, les Lumières, la “dialectique de la Raison”, etc.) ; Habermas s'insurge contre la PM, précisément parce qu'elle s'oppose au “grand projet de l'Aufklärung”, dans ses di­mensions scientifiques comme dans ses dimen­sions morales. Karl Heinz Bohrer (7), pour sa part, estime que la PM réagit contre la modernité esthétique du XIXe. Pour Charles Jencks, le grand historien américain des mouvements en ar­chitecture (8), la PM (architecturale) est une réaction au rationalisme utilitariste et fonctionnaliste (Mies van der Rohe, École de Chicago) de l'architecture du XXe siècle. Mais Welsch préfère s'en tenir aux définitions de Jean-François Lyotard : la modernité, que dépasse la PM, a commencé avec le programme cartésien visant à soumettre la nature (les faits organiques) à un “projet géométrique”, pour se poursuivre, à un niveau philosophique et moral, dans les “grands récits” du XVIIIe et du XIXe (l'émancipation de l'Homme, la téléologie hégélienne de l'Esprit, etc.).

La définition de Lyotard

Cette perspective de Lyotard, qui enferme dans le concept “moderne” le cartésianisme, le newto­nisme, les mécanicismes des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, les Lumières, l'hégélianisme et le marxisme, a été fructueuse ; on lui a donné des ancêtres, notamment l'augustinisme politi­que, cherchant à “construire” une Cité parfaite et attribué un dénominateur commun : le projet d'élaborer une mathesis universalis, de dissé­quer la nature (Bacon) et d'épouser le “pathos du renouveau radical”. Chez Descartes, la métapho­re de la ville illustre parfaitement l'enjeu du projet de mathesis universalis et du pathos du re­nouveau ; les villes anciennes, dit Descartes, sont des enchevêtrements non coordonnés ; l'architecte moderne doit tout détruire, même les éléments qui, isolés, sont beaux, pour reconstruire tout selon un plan rationnel, afin de créer une cohé­rence rationnelle parfaite et à biffer les imperfec­tions organiques. Résultat : l'uniformité atone des villes de béton contemporaines. La modernité à évacuer, dans les perspectives de Lyotard, de Welsch et des architectes postmodernes, c'est celle qui a prétendu, jadis, gommer toutes les particularités au bénéfice d'une méthode, d'un projet, d'une histoire (récapitulative de touteS les histoireS locales et particulières).

Une opposition deux fois centenaire au projet de “mathesis universalis”

Le cartésianisme universaliste a eu ses adversai­res dès le XVIIIe siècle. Vico rejette l'image mobilisatrice du progrès au profit d'une concep­tion cyclique de l'histoire ; vers 1750, année-clef, Rousseau, dans son Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts, critique le programme scientifique du cartésianisme et Baumgarten, dans son Aesthe­tica, réclame une « compensation esthétique » à la sécheresse rationaliste. Depuis, les critiques se sont succédé : Schlegel en appelle à une révolu­tion esthétique ; Baudelaire, Nietzsche et Gottfried Benn, chacun à leur manière, célèbrent l'art comme « espace de survie dans des conditions invivables », comme réponse à l'aridité cartésienne/rationaliste/technocratique. Mais, les réponses de la Gegen-Neuzeit, de la contre-­modernité qui se déploie de 1750 à nos jours, se veulent également exclusives, radicales et universelles. Le schéma unitaire et monolithique, sous-jacent à la modernité cartésienne n'est pas éliminé. Au contraire, les courants de la Gegen­-Neuzeit ne font qu'ajouter un zeste d'esthétique à un monde qui ne cesse d'amplifier, d'accroître et de dynamiser les forces relevant de la Neuzeit cartésienne. Chez Vico et Rousseau, le salut ne peut provenir que d'un et un seul renversement radical de perspective ; ils ne comprennent pas que leur solution de rechange n'est qu'une possibilité parmi plusieurs possibilités et ils affirment détenir la clef de la seule voie de salut.

Le “saut qualitatif” de la physique du XXe siècle

La nécessité qui s'impose est donc de procéder à un “saut qualitatif”, de ne pas répondre au pro­gramme de la modernité par un programme aussi global et aussi fermé sur lui-même. Vico, Rous­seau, les Romantiques, ont certes deviné intuiti­vement les pistes qu'il s'agissait d'emprunter pour échapper à l'enfermement de la moderni­té/Neuzeit, mais ils n'ont pas su exprimer leur volonté par un programme aussi radical et com­plet, aussi scientifique et concret, aussi clair et pragmatique, que celui de la dite modernité.

Leurs revendications apparaissaient trop littérai­res, pas assez scientifiques (malgré l'impact des médecines romantiques, des recherches sur les maladies psychosomatiques, etc.). La réaction contre la Neuzeit semblait n'être qu'une réaction passionnelle et émotive contre les sciences prati­ques et physiques, déterminées par les méthodes mécanicistes de Newton et de Descartes. Cela changera dès le début du XXe siècle. Grâce aux travaux des plus éminents phycisiens, les concepts de pluralité et de particularité ne sont plus catalogués comme des manies littéraires mais deviennent, dans le champ scientifique lui­même, des valeurs dominantes et incontourna­bles. Partant des domaines des sciences physi­ques et biologiques, ces concepts glisseront petit à petit dans les domaines des sciences humaines, de la sociologie et de la philosophie.

La Neuzeit s'était prétendue scientifique : or voilà que le domaine scientifique, impulsé au départ par la modernité cartésienne, révise radicalement les a priori de la Neuzeit et adopte d'autres as­sises épistémologiques. Plus question de raison­ner à partir de totalités fermées sur elle-mêmes, homogènes et universelles. Ouvertures, hétéro­généités et particularités expliquent désormais la trame complexe et multiple de l'univers. La théo­rie restreinte de la relativité chez Einstein induit les philosophes à admettre qu'il n'y a plus aucun concept de totalité qui soit acceptable ; il ne reste plus que des relations entre des systèmes indé­pendants les uns des autres dans la simultanéité ; l'action du temps, de surcroît, rend ces simulta­néités caduques et éphémères. Heisenberg dé­montre, par sa théorie de la Unschärferelation (relation d'incertitude), que les grandeurs défi­nies dans un même système de relations ne peu­vent jamais être déterminées de façon figée et si­multanée. Finalement, Gödel, par son axiome d'incomplétude, ruine définitivement le rêve de la modernité et des universalismes, celui de cons­truire une mathesis universalis, puisque toute connaissance est limitée, par définition.

Une pluralité de modèles et de paradigmes

Cette révolution dans les sciences physiques se poursuit toujours actuellement : la théorie des fractales de Mandelbrot (fonctions discontinues en tous points), la théorie des catastrophes chez Thom, la théorie des structures dissipatives chez Prigogine, la théorie du chaos synergétique de Haken, etc., confirment que déterminisme et continuité n'ont de validité que dans des domai­nes limités, lesquels n'ont entre eux que des rap­ports de discontinuité et d'antagonisme. D'où le réel n'est pas agencé selon un modèle unique mais selon des modèles différents ; il est structuré de manière conflictuelle et dramatique ; nous di­rions “tragique”, parce qu'il ne laisse plus de place désormais aux visions iréniques, bonheuri­santes et paradisiaques que nous avaient propo­sées les sotériologies religieuses et laïques.

Il n'est plus possible de proposer sérieusement un programme valable pour tous les hommes en tous les lieux de la planète, puisque nous nous acheminons, sous l'impulsion de l'épistémologie physique en marche depuis le début du siècle, vers l'acception d'une pluralité de modèles et de paradigmes, en concurrence les uns avec les au­tres : les solutions simples, univoques, monopo­listiques, universalistes, figées et exclusives re­lèvent dorénavant du rêve, non plus du possible. La philosophie postmoderne prend donc le relais des sciences physiques contemporaines et tente de transposer dans les consciences et dans le quotidien ce pluralisme méthodologique.

Postmodernité anonyme et postmodernité diffuse

Comme les “méta-récits”, critiqués par Lyotard, étaient monopolistiques et universalistes dans leur essence et dans leur projet, la physique du XXe siècle leur ôte le socle sur lequel ils re­posaient. Mais, tout comme les réactions du XVIIIe et du XIXe, les réactions contem­poraines à l'encontre des reliquats des méta-récits sont diverses et souvent imprécises. Pour Welsch, la stratégie postmoderne qui prend le re­lais de l'épistémologie scientifique est précise et solide. Face à cette précision et cette solidité, se positionnent d'autres stratégies postmodernes, nous explique Welsch, qui n'en ont ni la rigueur ni la force ; celle de la postmodernité anonyme qui englobe les théories et travaux qui ne se dé­finissent pas proprement comme postmodernes mais se moulent, consciemment ou inconsciem­ment, sur l'épistémologie pluraliste induite par les sciences physiques ; la palette est large : on peut y inclure Wittgenstein, Kuhn (9), Feyer­abend (10), l'herméneutique de Gadamer, le “post-structuralisme” de Derrida et de Deleuze, etc. Ensuite, il y a la postmodernité diffuse ; c'est celle que vulgarisent la grande presse et les “feuilletonistes”, qui profitent de l'effondrement de la modernité rigide pour parler de postmoder­nité sans avoir trop conscience de ses enjeux épistémologiques réels. C'est la postmodernité du pot-pourri, d'un Disneyland intellectuel ; c'est un irrationalisme contemporain qui ne va pas à l'essentiel comme n'allait pas à l'essentiel une quantité de romantiques réagissant contre le car­tésianisme.

Pour Welsch, la postmodernité précise, scientifi­que, consciente de la rupture signalée par les sciences physiques, s'avérera efficiente, tandis que la PM anonyme demeurera imprécise et la PM diffuse, contre-productive. Seule la PM pré­cise emporte son adhésion, car elle est systéma­tique, cohérente, porteuse d'avenir. Pour Welsch, la “modernité du XXe siècle”, c'est la scientificité qui annonce la postmodernité, qui consomme la rupture avec la rigidité monopo­listique et universaliste de la modernité/Neuzeit. La postmodernité qui prend le relais de la “mo­dernité du XXe siècle” est ouverte à l'inno­vation, n'est pas strictement réactive à la mode rousseauiste ou romantique.

Or, on pourrait formuler une objection : les technologies modernes, phénomènes du XXe siècle, contribuent à uniformiser la planète , restant du coup dans la même logique que celle de la Neuzeit. Face à cet état de choses, il convient d'adopter le langage suivant, dit Welsch : quand les technologies s'avèrent uniformisantes, elles sont au service d'une logique politique issue de la Neuzeit et sont ipso facto contestées par les postmodernes conséquents ; quand, en revanche, elles fonctionnent dans le sens d'une pluralité, elles participent à la dissolution des pesanteurs modernes et sont dès lors acceptées par les postmodernes. Ce n'est pas une technologie en soi qui est bonne ou mauvaise, c'est la logique au service de laquelle elle fonctionne qui est soit obsolète soit grosse d'avenir. Welsch expose cette problématique de sang froid, sans dire — même si c'est implicite — qu'il est grand temps de se débarrasser des logiques politiques issues de la Neuzeit... La logique de la discontinuité, du tragique et de la dissipativité prigoginienne, etc., est passée de la science à la philosophie ; il faut maintenant qu'elle passe de la philosophie à la politique et au quotidien. Pour cela, il y aura bien des résistances à briser.

Un parallèle évident avec la “Nouvelle Droite”

Ce que propose Welsch dans son livre (UPM), et qui enchante Armin Mohler, c'est une chro­nologie de l'histoire intellectuelle occidentale et européenne, dans laquelle notre mouvement de pensée peut tout entier s'imbriquer. Dans divers articles de Nouvelle École, Giorgio Locchi a suggéré, lui aussi, une chronologie, marquée de « périodes axiales » (Jaspers, Mohler, etc.) (11), où les grandes idées motrices, dont le christia­nisme, passent par le stade initial du mythe, pour aboutir, via un stade idéologique, à un stade scientifique. L'incapacité du christianisme à ac­céder à un stade scientifique cohérent annonce l'avènement d'un autre mythe, incarné par de multiples linéaments diffusés et véhiculés par la musique européenne, par le romantisme et par Wagner, mythe qui devra se muer en idéologie et en science.

L'effondrement des fascismes quiritaires, au cœur aventureux, a provoqué, explique Locchi (12), la disparition du stade “idéologique”, tandis que la percée de nature scientifique pour­suivait son chemin de Heisenberg à Prigogine, Haken, etc. Le surhumanisme — Locchi utilise ce vocable pour désigner les réactions idéologi­ques et littéraires contre la modernité — a donc son mythe, wagnérien et nietzschéen, et sa science, la physique contemporaine, mais pas son articulation politique. Si l'on procède à la fusion des chronologies suggérées par Locchi et par Welsch, on obtient un instrument critique d'orientation, qui est de grande valeur pour com­prendre la dynamique de notre siècle, sans devoir retomber dans une paraphrase stérile des fascismes.

Or, pour les derniers défenseurs de la modernité, dont Habermas (chez qui Welsch perçoit tout de même d'importantes concessions à la postmo­dernité, parce que Habermas ne peut renoncer aux acquis de la science physique moderne, née pendant la Neuzeit, et parce que sa théorie de “l'agir communicationnel” implique tout de même un relâchement des rigidités monopolistiques), est “fascisme” ou “fascistoïde” tout ce qui critique la modernité et ses avatars ou s'en distancie. Georg Lukacs, dans Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, stigmatise comme “irrationalismes” toutes les philosophies, sociologies et nouveautés littéraires qui s'opposent au déterminisme rationaliste et matérialiste du grand récit marxiste (né des grands récits hégélien et anglo-libéral).

Notre vision du monde doit s'asseoir dans l'a­venir sur 2 chronologies : celle de Locchi et celle de Welsch, tout en maîtrisant correctement celles, adverses, de l'École de Francfort et d'Ha­bermas (cf. Horkheimer et Adorno, La dialec­tique de la Raison), ainsi que celle du marxisme particulier de Lukacs. Une attention spéciale doit également être réservée aux chronologies néo­libérales (cf. Alain Laurent, L'individu et ses ennemis, LP/Pluriel, 1987), hostiles aux dimen­sions holistes de tous ordres. Le débat idéologi­que est certes la confrontation d'idées et de thé­matiques idéologiques différentes ; il est aussi et surtout confrontation entre des chronologies dif­férentes, des visions de l'histoire où sont mises en exergue des valeurs précises, au moment où elles font irruption dans l'histoire : dans le cas de l'historiographie libérale/néo-marxiste, c'est le triomphe des stratégies de mathesis universalis, assorties d'un déterminisme physicaliste ; pour les néo-libéraux, c'est l'avènement de l'individu et des méthodologies individualistes en sociologie et en économie. Pour nous, ce sont les étapes d'une pensée plurielle, où l'ouverture d'esprit est due à la reconnaissance des innombrables possibilités en jachère dans la nature et dans l'histoire ; autant de différences, d'ordre soma­tique ou d'ordre culturel, autant de virtualités.

De l'épistémologie mécaniciste à l'épistémologie botaniciste

Si nous récapitulons l'histoire intellectuelle de l'Europe occidentale et germanique, nous consta­tons, entre 1750 et le milieu du XIXe siècle, l'émergence d'une quantité de réactions dans le désordre, contre les projets de mathesis univer­salis, contre la “volonté géométrique” de la mo­dernité. À la logique mécanique et géométrique, le Sturm und Drang allemand, le romantisme, le Kant de la Critique de la faculté de juger, Schiller, Burke, les doctrinaires allemands de la vision or­ganique de la politique et de l'histoire opposent une autre logique, une logique botaniciste, qui pose une analogie entre l'arbre (ou la plante vivante) et l'État (ou la Nation) au lieu de poser l'analogie carté­sienne/newtonienne entre l'État et un système d'horlogerie, entre les lois du politique et les lois régissant les mouvements de la matière morte (13). La rupture épistémologique de la fin du XVIIIe, qui enclenche l'émergence de la pensée organiciste et vitaliste, amorce une pluralité, dans le sens où, désormais, 2 logiques, l'une organiciste/vita­liste, l'autre rationaliste/ mécaniciste, vont se jux­taposer. Mais la physique, perçue comme socle ultime du réel, demeure ancrée dans ses présup­posés newtoniens ; aucune alternative sérieuse ne peut encore remplacer, sur le plan scientifique, les assises newtoniennes et cartésiennes de la phy­sique. Georges Gusdorf, dans ses études sur le “savoir romantique”, montre comment le passage à une pensée “glandulaire” après l'impasse d'une pensée “cérébro-spinale”, a suscité un intérêt pour la biologie, la cénesthésie (14), la psychologie et les maladies psycho-somatiques, l'anthropocos­momorphisme de Carus et Oken (15), etc. Déno­minateur commun de cette démarche : tout être vivant, homme, animal ou plante, possède un no­yau identitaire propre, non interchangeable, unique ; au départ des noyaux identitaires, lieux d'irra­diation du monde, un pluriversum, un monde plu­riel, surgit, qui ne se laisse plus violenter par des schémas géométriques.

L'irruption de Nietzsche

À la fin du XIXe siècle, la scène philosophique européenne connaît l'irruption de Nietzsche. Celui-ci, se situant à la charnière entre la rupture épis­témologique romantique/organiciste/vitaliste, ma­gistralement étudiée par Gusdorf, et la rupture épistémologique provoquée par les découvertes de la physique au début du XXe, rejette les grands récits de l'Aufklärung et se moque, en stigmatisant le wagnérisme, des insuffisances des réponses ro­mantiques. Mais son œuvre ne brise pas encore totalement le semblant d'évidence que revêtent les positivismes/rationalismes, détenteurs de la seule théorie physique qui tienne à l'époque. D'où, de la part des chrétiens et des positivistes, le reproche d'incohérence et de contradiction adressé à l'œuvre de Nietzsche ; pour ces perspectives, Nietzsche est fou ou Nietzsche est un philosophe incomplet ; il nous lègue une logique anarchique qui permet de tout casser (au marteau, pour reprendre son ex­pression). Ce sont notamment les interprétations de Deleuze et de Kaulbach (16). Pour Reinhard Löw, cette interprétation du message nietzschéen est insuffisante, car s'il est vrai que Nietzsche souhaite “casser” au marteau certaines idoles philoso­phiques, son entreprise de démolition vise essen­tiellement les «psittacismes», c'est-à-dire les dis­cours qui répètent le schéma eschatologique et pro­videntialiste chrétien, en lui conférant des oripeaux idéalistes (chez Hegel) ou matérialistes (chez les marxistes et quelques darwiniens). L'avènement de l'esprit, du prolétariat, d'un homme moins “sin­ge”, ne sont que des novismes calqués sur un mê­me schéma. Schéma qu'il s'agit de dissoudre, afin qu'il ne puisse plus produire de “récits” aliénants parce que répétitifs et non innovateurs. La positi­vité de Nietzsche, différente de sa négativité de philosophe au marteau, consiste, écrit Löw (17), à nous éduquer, afin que nous ne continuions pas, à l'infini, à ajouter des psittacismes aux psittacismes qui nous ont précédés.

La logique du XIXe a donc été, dans une première phase, de rompre le psittacisme more geometrico du projet cartésien de mathesis uni­versalis, puis, avec Nietzsche, de signaler le dan­ger permanent du psittacisme pour, enfin, décou­vrir, avec les physiciens du début du XXe, que la trame la plus profonde du réel n'autorise, en fin de compte, aucune forme de psittacisme et que le mythe de la continuité linéaire est une illusion humaine. La post-modernité (la “précise” selon la classification de Welsch) prend acte de cette évo­lution et veut en être l'héritière. Mais franchir le cap d'une telle prise de conscience est dur : entre les fulgurances aphoristiques de Nietzsche et la révo­lution intellectuelle impulsée par la physique du XXe siècle, la littérature et la poésie de la fin du XIXe siècle a effectué un travail de deuil, le deuil des “totalités perdues”, des référentiels éva­nouis, sur fond d'angoisse et de nostalgie. Chez Musil, représentant emblématique de cette angois­se, on découvre le constat que la modernité, arrivée à terme au moment de la “Belle époque”, n'est pas le paradis escompté ; c'est, au contraire, le règne de la mort froide, de la rigidité cadavérique, laquelle s'abat sur une humanité victime d'une “épidémie géométrique”.

L'apport de Lyotard

Revenons à Welsch, disciple de Lyotard, phi­losophe français contemporain qui, en 1979, publie aux éditions de Minuit La condition postmoderne. Que pense Welsch de cet ouvrage qui indique clairement la thématique philosophique qu'il entend cerner ? Il en pense du bien, mais non exagérément. Le livre pose les bonnes questions, dit-il, mais ne les explicite guère. Pour Welsch, il faut “savoir faire quelque chose du livre”, en tirer l'essentiel, profiter de la perspective qu'il nous ouvre. Quant au reste de l'œuvre de Lyotard, il abonde dans le sens d'une postmodernité précise, héritière de la physique du XXe siècle. Chez Lyotard, la postmodernité n'apparaît pas comme un irratio­nalisme mais comme une rupture par rapport à la modernité qui critique la raison de la modernité avec les armes de la raison ; comme une rupture qui ne rejette pas la raison pour la remplacer par des instances diverses, posées arbitrairement comme moteur du monde et des choses. C'est ici que les démarches de Lyotard et de Welsch se distinguent de celle d'un Bergfleth, qui remplace la raison et la rationalité moderne/francfortiste par l'éros, la cruauté, la passion, l'amour, etc. tels que les envisagent Artaud, Bataille, Klages, etc.

Du point de vue plus directement (méta)politique, Lyotard nous enseigne que les totalités, et, partant, les universalismes, sont toujours les produits absoluisés de sentiments ou d'intérêts particuliers ; que ce que le groupe ou l'individu x proclame comme universel est l'absoluisation de ses intérêts particuliers. D'où être démocrate et tolérant, c'est refuser cette logique d'absoluisation, porté par un prosélytisme sourd aux particularités des autres. Refuser les totalités et les universalismes, c'est aller davantage au fond des choses, c'est respecter les particularités des peuples, des classes, des individus. Penser le pluriel, c'est être davantage “démocrate” que ceux qui uniformisent à outrance. Le monde est plurivers ; il est un pluriversum et ne saurait être saisi dans toute son amplitude par une et une seule logique.

L'apport de Gianni Vattimo

Gianni Vattimo, dans La fin de la modernité (Seuil, 1987), nous explique que la modernité, c'est le “novisme”, démarche dont s'était moqué Nietzsche, père de l'ère postmoderne. Le “no­visme” est produit de l'historicisme ; il est répétition du même vieux schéma linéaire métaphysique et chrétien sous un travestissement tantôt idéaliste, tantôt matérialiste. À ces novismes d'essence pro­videntialiste. Nietzsche a successivement répondu par 2 stratégies ; d'abord, celle qui consistait à affirmer des valeurs éternelles transcendant l'histoire, transcendant les prétentions des histo­ricismes qui croyaient pouvoir les dépasser ou les contourner ; ensuite, en affirmant l'éternel retour, démenti définitif aux providentialismes. La post­modernité est donc l'absence de providentialisme, la disparition des réflexes mentaux et idéologiques dérivés des providentialismes métaphysiques et chrétiens. Après Nietzsche, Heidegger prend le relais, explique Vattimo, et nous enseigne de ne pas dépasser (überwinden) la modernité laïque/ métaphysique/providentialiste, mais de la contour­ner (verwinden) ; en effet, l'idée d'un dépassement garde quelque chose d'eschatologique, donc de métaphysique/chrétien/moderne. L'idée d'un con­tournement suggère au contraire le passage tran­quille à une autre perspective, qui est plurielle et non plus monolithique, herméneutique (dans le sens où elle “interprète” le réel au départ de données diverses, dont les logiques intrinsèques sont hétérogènes sinon contradictoires) et non plus dogmatique. Le futurisme, en dépit de ses appa­rences “novistes”, est un phénomène postmoder­ne, affirme Vattimo, parce qu'il entremêle diffé­rents langages et codes, permettant ainsi une ou­verture sur plusieurs univers culturels, développe une multiplicité de perspectives sans chercher à les synthétiser, à les soumettre à un idéal (violent ?) de conciliation. La modernité, chez Vattimo, n'est pas rejetée, elle est absorbée comme composante d'une postmodemité marquée du signe du pluriel.

L'apport de Michel Foucault

foucau11.jpgL'apport de Foucault à la pensée contemporaine, c'est surtout la suggestion d'une histoire intel­lectuelle nouvelle, d'une chronologie de la pensée qui bouleverse les conformismes. Foucault voit la succession de diverses ruptures dans l'histoire intellectuelle européenne depuis la Renaissance ; au XVIIe, l'Europe passe de la tradition au clas­sicisme ; au XIXe, du classicisme au moder­nisme (et ici le terme “moderne” prend une autre acception que chez Welsch et Lyotard, où la notion de “modernité” recouvre plus ou moins la notion foucaldienne de “classicisme”). Il est très intéres­sant de noter, dit Welsch, que Foucault oppose la “doctrine des ordres” de Pascal au projet de ma­thesis universalis de Descartes. Chez Pascal, en effet, l'ordre de l'Amour, l'ordre de l'Esprit et l'ordre de la Chair ont chacun leur propre “ra­tionalité” ; la logique de la foi n'est pas la logique de la raison ni la logique de l'action. D'où la pen­sée de Pascal postule des “différences” et non une unique mathesis universalis ; elle est donc fonciè­rement différente de la tradition monolithique de Descartes qui a eu le dessus en France. Foucault nous indique que Pascal représente une potentialité de la pensée française qui est demeurée inexploitée.

Outre Pascal, Gaston Bachelard influence Foucault dans son élaboration d'une histoire intellectuelle de l'Occident. Pour Bachelard, l'évolution des scien­ces et du savoir ne procède pas de façon continue (linéaire), mais plutôt par crises et par “coupures épistémologiques”, par fulgurances. Chacune de ces coupures ou fulgurances provoque un renver­sement du système du savoir ; elles induisent de brèves “périodes axiales”, où les institutions, les coutumes, les pratiques politiques doivent (ou devraient) s'adapter aux innovations scientifiques. Foucault a retenu cette vision rupturaliste de Bachelard, où des “différences” fulgurent dans l'histoire, et sa pensée est ainsi passée d'une phase structuraliste à une phase potentialiste (18). Le structural structuralisme, avec Lévy-Strauss, avait tenté de trouver Le Code universel, l'invariant immuable (lui se cachait quelque part derrière la prolixité des faits et des phénomènes. En cela, le structuralisme était en quelque sorte le couronnement de la modernité. Foucault, dans la première partie de son œuvre, a souscrit à ce projet structuraliste, pour découvrir, finalement, que rien ne peut biffer, sup­planter, régir ou surplomber l'hétérogénéité fon­damentale des choses. Aucune “différence” ne se laisse reconduire à une unité quelconque qui serait LA dernière instance. Une telle unité, hypothétique, baptisée tantôt mathesis universalis, tantôt “Co­de”, participe d'une logique de l'en l'enfermement, re­fus têtu et obstiné du divers et du pluriel.

L'apport de Gilles Deleuze

[Ci-contre : dessin de Béatrice Cleeve, montrant bien la complicité qui unit les co-auteurs de L'Anti-Œdipe et de Mille plateaux]

deleuze-guattariGilles Deleuze entend affirmer une philosophie de la “libre différence”. Son interprétation de Nietzsche (19) révèle clairement cette intention : « ... car il appartient essentiellement à l'affirmation d'ê­tre elle-même multiple, pluraliste, et à la négation d'être une, ou lourdement moniste » (p. 21). « Et dans l'affirmation du multiple, il y a la joie pratique du divers. La joie surgit, comme le seul mobile à philosopher. La valorisation des sentiments né­gatifs ou des passions tristes, voilà la mystification sur laquelle le nihilisme fonde son pouvoir » (p. 30). Affirmer, c'est donc démolir gaillardement les rigidités lourdement monistes au marteau, c'est briser à jamais la prétention des unités, des totalités, des instances décrétées immuables par les “faibles”. Une “différence” n'indique pas une unité sous-jacente mais au contraire des autres dif­férences. D'où, pour Deleuze comme pour Fou­cault, il n'y a pas de Code mais bien un chaos in­formel, qu'il s'agit d'accepter joyeusement. Ce chaos prend, chez Deleuze, le visage du rhizome. Métaphore organiciste, le rhizome [filament racinaire en réseau] se distingue de l'arbre des traditions romantiques, dans le sens où il ne constitue pas une sorte d'unité séparée d'au­tres unités semblables ; le rhizome est un grouille­ment en croissance ou en décroissance perpétuelle, qui s'empare des chaînes évolutives étrangères et suscite des liaisons transversales entre des lignes de développement divergentes ; c'est un fondu en­chaîné, un dégradé de couleur qui se mixe à un au­tre dégradé. Deleuze, bon connaisseur de Leibniz, prend congé ici de la philosophie des monades pour affirmer une philosophie nomade ; une philo­sophie des rhizomes nomades qui produisent des différences non systématiques et inattendues, qui fragmentent et ouvrent, abandonnent et relient, dif­férencient et synthétisent simultanément (UPM, p. 142).

L'apport de Jacques Derrida

L'apport de Derrida démarre avec un texte de 1968, « La fin de l'Homme », repris dans une anthologie intitulée Marges de la philosophie. Derrida y ex­plique que la pluralité est la clef de l'au-delà de la métaphysique. La pluralité, c'est savoir parler plu­sieurs langages à la fois, solliciter conjointement plusieurs textes. Le parallèle est aisé à tracer avec la “physiologie” de Nietzsche, qui prend acte des multiplicités du monde sans vouloir les réduire à un dénominateur commun mutilant (20). Le réel, ce sont des pistes qui traversent des champs diffé­rents, ce sont des enchevêtrements. Différentiste et non rupturaliste, Derrida voit la trame du monde comme un processus de différAnce, de dissémina­tion, producteur de différEnces. Derrida nous im­pose cette subtilité lexicographique (le A et le E) non sans raison. La différAnce implique un prin­cipe actif de différentiation par dissémination, tan­dis que parler de différEnce(s) peut laisser suggérer que le monde, le réel, soit une juxtaposition sans dynamisme et sans interaction de différEnces non enchevêtrées. Derrida veut ainsi échapper à une pensée musa musaïque où les différEnces seraient ex­posées les unes à côté des autres comme des pièces dans une vitrine de musée. Mais le souci de mon­trer l'enchevêtrement de toutes choses — avec, pour corollaire leur non-réductibilité à quelqu'unum que ce soit — conduit Derrida à affirmer que la différAnce productrice de différEnces finit par produire une panade d'indifférEnce, compa­rable à l'hypertélie obèse de Baudrillard. Dans cette panade peuvent s'engouffrer les vulgarisateurs de la “PM diffuse”, critiquée par Welsch (cf. supra).

Mais même si Derrida se rétracte quelque peu avec sa théorie de la « panade d'indifférEnce » (qui a forcément des relents d'universalisme, puisque les différEnces y sont malaxées), même si, par ail­leurs, il évoque la “mystique juive” pour se mettre au diapason de la farce qu'est le “réarmement théologique” du “nouveau philosophe” BHL, nous n'oublions pas qu'il a dit un jour qu'« est chimère tout projet de langage universel ». Mieux : il a posé l'équation Apocalypse = mort = vérité. L'Apocalypse, prélude à un monde meil­leur, est la mort parce qu'elle prétend être la vérité et que la vérité n'est qu'un euphémisme pour dé­signer la mort. La vérité, c'est le vœu, l'utopie, de la présence accomplie, du présentisme où tout devenir est enrayé, stoppé, où la différAnce cesse d'être productrice de différEnces. Pour Derrida, comme pour Pierre Chassard, analyste néo-droi­tiste de la pensée nietzschéenne (21), il faut dé­construire le complexe “apocalypse”, le providen­tialisme producteur de psittacismes, dérivé des vulgates platonicienne et chrétienne.

Postmodernité “soft” et postmodernité “hard”

On peut dire que Lyotard et Derrida partagent une conception commune : pour l'un comme pour l'autre, la postmodernité n'est pas une époque nouvelle, ce n'est pas l'avènement d'une espèce de parousie de nouvelle mouture, survenue après une rupture/catastrophe, mais le passage, le contour­nement (Heidegger/Vattimo) inéluctable qui nous mène vers une attitude de l'esprit et des sentiments, qui a toujours déjà été là, qui a toujours été virtua­lité, mais qui, aujourd'hui, se généralise, malgré les tentatives “réactionnaires” que sont le “réarme­ment théologique”, assorti de son culte de la “Loi” et corroboré par les démarches anti-68 de Ferry et Renaut. La postmodernité, ce sont des ouvertures aux pluralités, aux diversifications.

Peut-on parler de postmodernité soft et de post­modernité hard ? La distinction peut paraître oi­seuse voire mutilante mais, par commodité, on pourrait qualifier de soft la PM différentiste de Deleuze et de Derrida, avec sa pensée nomade et son indifférence finale, et de hard la PM rupturiste de Lyotard. Dans ce cas, cette double qualification désignerait, d'une part, un différentialisme qui s'enliserait dans l'indifférence, dans la purée, la panade du “tout vaut tout” et retournerait sub­repticement au Code, un Code non plus intégra­teur, rassembleur et totalisant, mais un Code né­gatif, discret, non intégrant et non agonal. Pour un Lyotard, une rupture signale toujours l'incommen­surabilité d'une différEnce, même si cette diffé­rEnce n'est pas éternelle, immuable. Les ruptures signalent toujours une densité particulière, laquelle se recompose sans cesse par télescopage avec des faits nouveaux. L'hypertélie de Baudrillard n'est­elle pas analogue, sur certains points, avec la chute dans l'indifférence (Derrida) et la nomadisation de­leuzienne ? La fin est là, nous explique Baudrillard dans Amérique (Grasset, 1986), comme quand la différAnce, à être trop féconde, ne produit plus que de l'indifférEnce, de la métastabilité.

Une dynamique de la transgression

[Leibniz, philosophe des monades, a été réinterprété récemment par G. Deleuze. Celui-ci voit en lui le philosophe des “plis” et des “replis”, lesquels recèleraient des potentialités en jachère, prêtes à intervenir sur la trame du réel puis à se retirer ou se disperser]

leibnitzContre l'ennui sécrété par la juxtaposition de métastabilités ou par le règne d'une grande et unique métastabilité, il faut instrumentaliser une logique transversale, qui brise les homogénéités fermées et force leurs séquelles à se recomposer de manières diverses et infinies. Sur le plan idéo­logique et politique, c'est pour une logique de la transgression qu'il faut opter, une logique qui refuse de tenir compte des enfermements imposés par les idéologies dominantes et par les pratiques politiciennes ; Marco Tarchi, leader de la ND ita­lienne, a théorisé la « dynamique de la transgres­sion » (22), laquelle part du constat de l'hétéro­généité fondamentale des discours politiques ; en effet, existe-t-il une gauche et une droite ou des gauches et des droites ? Toutes ces strates ne se combinent-elles pas à l'infini et n'est-on pas alors en droit de constater que la seule réalité qui soit en dernière instance, c'est un magma de desiderata complexes. La logique de la transgression va droit à ce magma et contourne les facilités dogmatiques, les totems idéologiques et partisans qui résument quelques bribes de ce magma et érigent leurs ré­sumés en vérités intangibles et pérennes. La logi­que et la dynamique de la transgression postulent de ne rejeter aucun fait de monde, de combiner sans cesse des logiques décrétées antagonistes, d'agir en conciliant des desiderata divergents, sans pour autant mutiler et déforcer ces desiderata. La dynamique de la transgression prend le relais de la vision de la coincidentia oppositorum de Maître Eckhardt et de Nicolas de Cues.

Des traductions politiques du défi postmodeme sont-elles possibles ?

Notre mouvement de pensée, en constatant que le chaos synergétique des physiciens modernes s'est transposé du domaine des sciences naturelles au domaine de la philosophie, doit se donner pour tâche de faire passer le message de la physique moderne dans l'opinion puis dans la sphère du politique. Ce serait répondre à sa vocation méta­politique. Passer dans le domaine du politique et de la politique, c'est travailler à substituer au droit individualiste moderne un droit adapté aux diffé­rences humaines, que celles-ci soient d'ordre so­cial, ethnique, régional, etc. ; c'est travailler à ruiner les idéologies économiques modernes et à leur substituer une économie basée sur la « dynamique des structures » (François Perroux) ; c'est travailler à l'avènement de nouvelles formes de représenta­tion politique, où les multiples facettes de l'agir humain seront mieux représentées (modèles : le Sénat des régions et des professions de De Gaulle ; les projets analogues du Professeur Willms, etc.).

Le travail à accomplir est énorme, mais lorsque l'on constate que les linéaments de notre vision tragique du monde et de l'univers sont présents partout, il n'y a nulle raison de désespérer...

♦ Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne, VCH – Acta Humantora, Weinheim, 1987, 344 p.

► Robert Steuckeurs, Vouloir n°54/55, 1989.

Notes :

  • (1) Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle Droite : Le G.R.E.C.E. et son histoire, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des sciences politiques, Paris, 1988.
  • (2) Cf. Nouvelle École n°30, 31-32 (Wagner), n°40 (Jünger), n°41 (Thomas Mann), n°35 (Moeller van den Bruck), n°37 (Heidegger), n°44 (Carl Schmitt). Cf. Éléments n°40 (Jünger).
  • (3) Georges Gusdorf, Fondements du savoir romantique, Payot, 1982. G.G., L'homme romantique, Payot, 1984. G.G., Le savoir romantique de la nature, Payot 1985.
  • (4) Éditions Mme, Crellestrasse 22, Postfach 327, D­1000 Berlin 62.  
  • Parmi les livres du trio non-conformiste Matthes, Mattheus et Berglleth, citons : Gerd Bergfleth et alii, Zur Kri­tik der palavernden Aufklärung, 1984 (cf. recension in Vouloir n°27) ; Gerd Bergfleth, Theorie der Verschwen­dung : Einführung in Georges Batailles Antiökonomie, 1985, 2ème éd. Bernd Mattheus & Axel Matthes (Hrsg.), Ich gestatte mir die Revolte, 1985. Bernd Mattheus, hef­tige stille, andere notizen, 1986. La somme de Mattheus sur Bataille est en 2 volumes : 1) Georges Bataille : Eine Thanatographie, Band I : Chronik 1897-1939 ; 2) Band II : Chronik 1940-1951. Tous ces volumes sont disponibles chez Matthes u. Seitz Verlag, Mauerkircher Strasse 10, Postfach 860528, D-8000 München 86.
  • (5) J.-L. Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des an­nées 30 : Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée po­litique française, Seuil, 1969.
  • (6) Pour Nietzsche, il faut aller au-delà de l'homme (moyen) ; cette quête, cette transgression de la moyenne, c'est le propre du “surhomme” et, partant, de ce que l'on pourrait appeler le “surhumanisme”. Dans les circuits néo-droitistes, chez Giorgio Locchi et Guillaume Faye, le terme “surhumanisme” a été utilisé dans ce sens, dans cette volonté de dégager l'homme de sa définition rationa­liste/illuministe trop étriquée eu égard à l'abondante diver­sité du réel.
  • (7) Kart Heinz Bohrer, Die Ästhetik des Schreckens : Die pessimistische Romantik und Ernst Jüngers Frühwerk, Ullstein, Frankfurt a.M., 1983 (2° éd.). Les linéaments de la PM se dessinent déjà, pour l’auteur, dans les visions littéraires de Jünger et dans son refus de l'anthropologie modeme/bourgeoise.
  • (8) Pour saisir toute la diversité de la PM architecturale, on se référera au livre de Charles Jencks, Die Postmo­derne : Der nette Klassizismus in Kunst und Architektur, Klett-Cotta, 1987. La version anglaise de cette ouvrage est parue simultanément : Post-Modernism, Academy Editions, London, 1987 (adresse : ACADEMY GROUP Ltd, 7/8 Holland Street, London W8 4NA).
  • (9) Pour comprendre l'importance de Thomas S. Kuhn sur le plan de l'épistémologie scientifique et de la probléma­tique qui nous intéresse ici, on se référera utilement aux explications que nous donne le philosophe Walter Falk dans 2 de ses livres : 1) Vom Strukturalismus zum Po­tentialismus : Ein Versuch zur Geschichts- und Literaturtheorie (Alber, Freiburg i.B., 1976, pp. 111 à 120 ; re­cension dans Vouloir, n°15/16, 1985) et 2) Die Ordnung in der Geschichte : Eine alternative Deutung des Fort­schritts (Burg Verlag, Sachsenheim, 1985 ; pp. 111 à 114).
  • (10) Outre les ouvrages de Feyerabend lui-même, on consultera Angelo Capecci, La scienza tra fede e anarchia : L'epistemologia di P. Feyerabend, La goliardica editrice, Roma, 1977.
  • (11) Pour Mohler, la Konservative Revolution fonde de nouvelles valeurs, qui transcendent les frayeurs et les dé­ceptions du nihilisme occidental ; l'Umschlag de la KR n'affronte plus la décadence avec une volonté de la stopper mais, au contraire, en accélérant au maximum ces ten­dances de façon à ce qu'elles puissent atteindre le plus ra­pidement possible leur phase terminale. La KR est en ce sens fondatrice de valeurs nouvelles, tout comme la pé­riode autour de – 500 l'était pour les Grecs selon Jaspers qui utilise, lui, le terme Achsenzeit, période axiale (cf. Karl Jaspers, Introduction à la philosophie, UGE/10-18, 1965 ; cf. aussi l'interprétation pertinente qu'en donne John Macquarrie, in Existentialism, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973).
  • (12) cf. Giorgio Locchi, L'Essenza del Fascismo : Un sag­gio e un intervista a cura di Marco Tarchi, Edizioni del Tridente, s.l., 1981.
  • (13) cf. Barbara Stolberg-Rilinger, Der Staat als Ma­schine : Zur politischen Metaphorik des absoluten Fürs­tenstaats, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 1986 (recension in Vouloir n°37-38-39, 1987).
  • (14) Cf. George Gusdorf, L'homme romantique, op. cit., pp. 243 à 245.
  • (15) Georges Gusdorf, lbid., pp. 159 à 173.
  • Pour davantage de précision quant à la personnalité de Ca­rus, lire : Ekkchard Meffert, Carl Gustav Carus, Sein Le­ben - seine Anschauung von der Ende, Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart, 1986 ; Carl Gustav Carus, Zwölf Briefe über das Erdleben, Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart, 1986.
  • (16) Friedrich Kaulbach, Sprachen der ewigen Wiederkunft : Die Denksituation des Philosophen Nietzsche und ihre Sprachstile, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, 1985. À propos de ce livre, cf. R. Steuckers, « Regards nouveaux sur Nietzsche », in Orientations n°9, 1987.
  • (17) Reinhard Löw, Nietzsche, Sophist und Erzieher : Philosophische Untersuchungen zum systematischen Ort von Friedrich Nietzsches Denken, Acta Humaniora, Weinheim, 1984. À propos de ce livre, cf. R. Steuckers, art. cit. in nota (16).
  • (18) À propos du potentialisme de Foucault, cf. Walter Falk, Vom Strukruralismus zum..., op. cit. in nota (9), pp. 120 à 130 ; cf. aussi Walter Falk, Die Ordnung..., op. cit. in nota (9), pp. 114 à 116.
  • (19) Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche, PUF, 1968.
  • (20) Helmut Pfotenhauer, Die Kunst als Physiologie : Nietzsches ästhetische Theorie und literarische Produk­tion, J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart, 1985. À propos de ce livre, cf. R. Steuckers, art. cit. in nota (16).
  • (21) Pierre Chassard, La philosophie de l'histoire dans la philosophie de Nietzsche, GRECE, Paris, 1975.
  • (22) cf. Marco Tarchi, « Dinamica della trasgressione : dal "Né destra né sinistra" all "Se destra e sinistra" », in Trasgressioni n°1, 1986.

mardi, 15 mars 2011

Future Conservatism

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Future Conservatism

Brett STEVENS

Ex: http://counter-currents.com/

This article seemed to fly under the radar at first, just a few months after three European heads of state admitted multiculturalism is failing:

A Populus poll found that 48% of the population would consider supporting a new anti-immigration party committed to challenging Islamist extremism, and would support policies to make it statutory for all public buildings to fly the flag of St George or the union flag.

Anti-racism campaigners said the findings suggested Britain’s mainstream parties were losing touch with public opinion on issues of identity and race.

The poll suggests that the level of backing for a far-right party could equal or even outstrip that in countries such as France, the Netherlands and Austria. France’s National Front party hopes to secure 20% in the first round of the presidential vote next year. The Dutch anti-Islam party led by Geert Wilders attracted 15.5% of the vote in last year’s parliamentary elections. – The Guardian

Interestingly, this is the voters telling the conservative right what it needs to do in order to succeed. It should listen, because if you have a goal, the methods needed to accomplish that goal are negotiable, but the goal itself is not.

It would be a shame for the right to insist on methods, not goals, and thus repeat its past failures without achieving its possible future successes. Conservatism is an outlook and with that, an ideal which represents an ongoing goal, and we should be open to any method of achieving it.

Specifically:

  • End the violence. Citizens do not want to endorse any party whose primary method is fighting, or who looks to start wars. They are looking for diplomatic solutions within our legal system. This does not mean they oppose strong acts, like deportation or ending welfare, only that they fear the heavy hand that tends toward violence. The far right suffers for its support of shaven-headed young men who drink too much and listen to angry toneless music while beating up foreigners; in addition, these young men suffer from the same lifestyle. It can change and it should.
  • Have a comprehensive plan. We get it; nationalism means that each country is centered on one culture, one ethnic group and one values system. However, that concept is a starting point, not a solution. The ideas of the right regarding the environment, overpopulation, nuclear proliferation, education and other concepts need to be fleshed out in a direct form, or the only people it will attract are single-issue voters.
  • Affirm general rules; do not attack specific groups. We know that Muslim integration in Europe has failed. It has failed because diversity has always failed. We should stay focused on that idea: diversity doesn’t work. Whether the ingredients of that diversity are Muslims, Africans, Jews, Scientologists, Cylons or hypermilers is irrelevant. We also know liberalism fails. We don’t need to bash specific liberals.
  • Make your vision clear and clearly different. It’s one thing to say what you don’t like, and another to suggest what you do like. We live in ugly utilitarian cities wracked by dishonesty, crime and corruption. We have dedicated our lives to tolerance of individuals instead of finding values we share. We need a clear vision of what a society that has gotten beyond these problems looks like.
  • Be responsible. A number of far-right parties seem entrenched in the methods of old, and seem to run their finances like low-rent crime syndicates. You have to be kidding. If you want us to trust you with a nation, you need to be on the up-and-up all the way. No exceptions.

The media image of the far right is skinheads who like to hurt people, sadistic toothless rednecks, and investment bankers who grinningly endorse Social Darwinism. They profit from selling this fear — and that’s what it is, repackaged fear of inferiority — at the expense of the far right, who have not been able to effectively combat it. That needs to change.

It is also worth noting that conservative parties succeed when they tune their various parts according to a common note, which should be as literal as race, but an organic vision like unity of culture and purpose.

Modern society is *soft* in precisely this fashion – its rulers have lost the ability take tough decisions: to seek long term benefits when these come at the price the cost of short term costs to themselves.

The ultimate reason is, I believe, that humans can only make tough decisions when these are supported by *transcendental aims*, in the sense that humans do not want to forgo short term gratification in this world unless life is about something *more* than gratification – and where non-worldly realities (God, heaven, truth, beauty etc.) are seen as more real and more enduring than immediate gratification – and therefore more important. – Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany

He’s right: we need some transcendental unity here or we’ll lose sight of the big picture and focus on what is immediate, including the material, the personal and the convenient.

Whether that vision is old school religion, a new religious hybrid (most likely a Vedic-Christian hybrid like Scientology and the New Age religions) or a simple agreement on transcendence itself, as enumerated by some powerful thinkers, will be decided in the future. For now, let’s recognize we need something higher than the material to unite us.

The right was thrown into disarray by World War II, which led to it abandoning many of its core principles, to our mutual failing as European-derived civilizations. A kind of bitterness set in, by which conservatives adopted public “neoconservative” and “neoliberal” (same thing) views, but in private smirked with an I-told-you-so grimace. Conservatives no longer believed they could be heard, so they let the disaster unfold, getting ready for that moment of bittersweet victory.

That outlook, and the kind of defensive reactionary paranoia that begets street violence where none is needed, holds the right back. At this point, liberalism has failed; it had a century and change to fix our problems, and it made them exponentially worse. The only people who are endorsing liberalism these days are the hopeful social climbers who want to mask perceived low origins with what they hope are aristocratic opinions.

But for the right to succeed, however, it needs to return to its principles and goals — and move on from its failed methods.

Source: http://www.amerika.org/politics/future-conservatism/

lundi, 14 mars 2011

Ce qu'il subsiste du rire dans notre hypermodernité

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Ce qu’il subsiste du rire dans notre hypermodernité

par Pierre LE VIGAN

L’humour n’est pas le rire. C’est parfois même son contraire. Explications. Nous avons complètement perdu le sens de l’humour. Celui-ci suppose de l’intelligence, de la fine connivence, et aussi de la distance.  Ces ingrédients de base sont soit perdus soit n’entrent plus en relation les uns avec les autres. L’humour est menacé par les agelastes (François Rabelais), à savoir « ceux qui ne savent pas rire », mais aussi et surtout il est menacé par le rire contemporain. Car ce rire « à tout bout de champ », ce ricanement plus qu’il n’est un rire est le rire du satisfait de lui-même. C’est le rire du gros contentement de soi.

L’humour a mis longtemps à s’imposer à coté du rire originel, celui de la bonne santé un peu vulgaire qui ricane devant la maladie. Nous assistons à ce retour du « gros rire » originel, il est évidement néo-originel donc plus vulgaire. Il porte la marque du néo-primitivisme contemporain. Et à nouveau, il éclipse l’humour avec ce que ce dernier comporte de distance mais aussi de sollicitude vis-à-vis de l’autre. L’humour est caustique, il n’est pas cruel. Le rire contemporain a beaucoup plus à voir avec le rire cruel de la cour de récréation qui se moque de l’handicapé, du mal habillé, du pauvre, de l’étranger qui s’exprime mal, etc.

La première modernité volontariste mais aussi relativiste, et « humaniste » au sens renaissant du terme, avait permis l’émergence de l’humour.  La seconde modernité, notre hyper-modernité nihiliste tue l’humour. Alain Finkielkraut remarque (entretien dans Le Spectacle du monde, septembre 2009) : « Si “ le rire est le propre de l’homme ’’, pas l’humour. Lui n’est le propre que de l’homme civilisé, ou de l’homme moderne, au sens noble du terme, celui qui met en doute ses propres certitudes. Car la modernité, c’est aussi cela. C’est certes Descartes affirmant sa prétention à la maîtrise, mais c’est aussi Cervantès découvrant la relativité des opinions humaines et la sagesse du principe d’incertitude. À cet égard, l’humour marque une rupture avec le rire originel, lequel n’est que l’expression effrayante de la suffisance barbare de l’homme en bonne santé face à l’homme disgracié, à l’homme différent, à l’homme malade. Nous assistons aujourd’hui, sous couleur de plaisanterie, à un retour à ce rire originel. C’est l’époque d’un réensauvagement du monde par le rire. Ou, pour le dire autrement, c’est une mensongère homonymie que d’évoquer l’humour à propos du rire contemporain. L’humour a disparu dans un gigantesque éclat de rire. Le bouffon du roi est devenu le roi. » Une nouvelle fois, Alain Finkielkraut nous aide à comprendre ce que nous percevons souvent déjà confusément, et il nous le révèle à nous même. Un travail de maïeutique.

Pierre Le Vigan


Article printed from Europe Maxima: http://www.europemaxima.com

URL to article: http://www.europemaxima.com/?p=1735

 

11:40 Publié dans Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, rire, humour, réflexions personnelles | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

vendredi, 11 mars 2011

Il soldato di Jünger è l'uomo-massa in rivolta contro la massificazione, cioè contro se stesso

Il soldato di Jünger è l’uomo-massa in rivolta contro la massificazione, cioè contro se stesso

di Francesco Lamendola

Fonte: Arianna Editrice [scheda fonte]



È altamente significativo il fatto che un evento epocale e lacerante come la prima guerra mondiale abbia trovato, nell’ambito della letteratura, solo pochi scrittori capaci di penetrare l’essenza di ciò che essa aveva in se stessa di nuovo, di tragicamente nuovo, rispetto a tutte le guerre precedenti: vale a dire la massificazione e l’industrializzazione del massacro.
Fra i non molti che se ne resero conto, spicca il nome di Ernst Jünger, uno dei maggiori nella pleiade della cosiddetta “rivoluzione conservatrice” fiorita nei primi decenni del Novecento, che ha rappresentato tale carattere di novità in alcuni libri divenuti giustamente famosi, da «In Stahlgewittern», del 1920 («Nelle tempeste d’acciaio», Parma, Guanda, 1995), a  «Der Kampf als inneres», del 1922 (La lotta come esperienza interiore»); da «Sturm», del 1923 («Il tenente Sturm», Parma, Guanda, 2000), a «Das Waldchen 125», del 1925 («Boschetto 125. Una cronaca delle battaglie in trincea nel 1918», Parma, Guanda, 1999).
Da questi romanzi e saggi emerge con lucidità e prepotenza una nuova figura antropologica, quella del “soldato”, peraltro con caratteristiche radicalmente diverse da quelle “classiche”: più un pirata e un avventuriero, che un disciplinato esecutore di ordini superiori; più un anarca che un borghese, anzi, decisamente un anti-borghese, forgiato dal ferro e dal fuoco e darwinianamente sopravvissuto alle “tempeste d’acciaio” proprio per accendere la fiaccola della rivoluzione nella stagnante società del cosiddetto ordine costituito.
Jünger delinea questa nuova figura con l’entusiasmo e con la compartecipazione di chi ne ha fatto l‘esperienza diretta (fu ufficiale di complemento nelle trincee a partire dal 1915, dopo essersi arruolato romanticamente nella Legione Straniera francese) e, al tempo stesso, con il tono profetico che lo contraddistinguerà, poco dopo - negli anni del primo dopoguerra - quando sposterà le sue simpatie su di una nuova figura antropologica, quella dell’”operaio”; per poi approdare, definitivamente, a quella del “ribelle”, di colui che “passa al bosco” e rifiuta radicalmente le tranquille certezze del mondo borghese, per “vivere pericolosamente” in una sorta di guerra privata contro ogni tentativo di ingabbiarlo, di ammaestrarlo, di ammansirlo e, in ultima analisi, di manipolarlo.
Nemmeno Jünger, però, riesce a sottrarsi alle premesse irrazionalistiche, vitalistiche, confusamente nietzschiane, che fanno velo alla rigorosa imparzialità della sua analisi e finisce per caricare la figura del “soldato” di valenze romantiche, nel senso più ampio del termine, che poco o niente hanno a che fare con la realtà storica della prima guerra mondiale; e, soprattutto, per cercare una scorciatoia ideologica che gli consenta di sottrarre quella figura, a lui così cara, al destino della massificazione e della nullificazione della sua volontà individuale, per restituirle - ma, ahimé, solo in maniera astratta e velleitaria - quella capacità decisionale che contrassegna, per definizione, qualsiasi “eroe” letterario: categoria - quest’ultima - alla quale anche il “soldato” appartiene.
In altre parole, Jünger tenta di delineare la figura di un combattente che, slanciandosi contro le linee nemiche per “sfondarle” o “penetrarle” (psicanalisti freudiani, sbizzarritevi!), con una sorta di furore eroico che è anche, al tempo stesso, decisamente erotico, si fa protagonista di un vero e proprio surrogato dell’atto sessuale.
Sarebbe troppo semplice insistere sul velleitarismo, nonché sulla natura eminentemente letteraria, nel senso di “straniante”, di un simile atteggiamento, che, come nel caso dei Futuristi, celebra la “bellezza” della lotta per se stessa e finisce per cadere in un eccesso di estetismo, vagamente spruzzato di superomismo e, naturalmente, del più crudo darwinismo.
Più interessante, invece, della chiave di lettura psicologica e più fruttuosa come ipotesi di lavoro, ci sembra essere quella specificamente ideologica: non potendo sottrarsi ad una spietata quanto cieca gerarchia,  che lo afferra e lo scaraventa in un sanguinoso, delirante bagno di anonimità, il “soldato” jüngheriano si prende la sua rivincita individualistica, facendo proprio quel modello gerarchico e quella impersonalità tecnologica, ma vivendoli, con orgoglio, dall’interno, illudendosi così di mutare i termini della propria condizione di totale impotenza decisionale e di radicale e assoluta sottomissione ad un tale apparato anonimo e distruttivo.
Eric J. Leed, nel suo pregevole studio «Terra di nessuno. Esperienza bellica e identità personale nella prima guerra mondiale» (titolo originale: «No Man’s Land. Combat and Identity in World War I», Cambridge University Press, 1979; traduzione italiana di Rinaldo Falcioni, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1985, 2004 pp. 200-212 passim), ha colto nel segno, a nostro avviso, allorché ha evidenziato il carattere illusorio e, al tempo stesso, auto-consolatorio, della identificazione jüngheriana fra il “soldato” e la guerra:

«Man mano che gli uomini esperivano la guerra come estraniazione dal proprio “agire”, come perdita di controllo, come svilimento delle loro potenzialità, la loro autonomia smarrita e le loro energie represse furono investite in un’astrazione: “la Guerra”, il meccanismo autonomo di macello. Ma alcuni combattenti, e in prima file Ernst Jünger, non poterono rassegnarsi allo statuto di individui qualsiasi, sofferenti passivi dello strapotere del materiale. Essi tentarono dunque di recuperare la loro potenza perduta tramite un’identificazione proprio con quel meccanismo autonomo della “Guerra” che tiranneggiava le “masse”. Nel caso di Jünger» l’identificazione personale con la tecnologia autonoma divenne fonte di potere e autorità personali; tramite questa identificazione egli fu in grado di acquisire lo statuto di esecutore di un potere sovrapersonale, un potere che concedeva a coloro che si identificavano in esso una rinnovata, anche se “amorale”, capacità d’azione. È in quest’ottica che bisogna leggere l’affermazione di Jünger secondo cui la prima guerra mondiale produsse una nuova “Gestalt”, un “uomo tecnologico” che era tanto “duro”, “insensibile”, e “imperturbabile” quanto la stessa macchina da guerra.
In base a queste identificazioni la guerra in generale, e in particolare l’immagine della guerra come realtà industriale, “tecnologica”, acquista sovente un profondo significato soggettivo. Nei libri di guerra di Jünger è evidente che la “macchina” assomma tutte le altre caratteristiche della figura d’”autorità” in grado d’impartire sofferenze e punizioni, rimanendo ad esse impermeabile – la figura del padre, lo stato, la divinità. La posizione politica post-bellica di Jünger, il suo “conservatorismo radicale”, trae le mosse da un’esperienza di guerra in cui egli apprese, una volta di più, che l’individuo non acquisisce la sua capacità di azione e la sua autonomia tramite la ribellione contro quelle figure, bensì tramite l’identificazione con esse. […]
Per Jünger la guerra fu un’esperienza che liberò i figli della borghesia dalle loro origini sociali, rivoltandoli contro i loro genitori borghesi. […]
Al pari di tutti gli altri, Jünger esperì la guerra autentica come umiliazione, come tremenda rassegnazione; il nemico era scomparso dietro una maschera macchinica che impediva ogni confronto od osservazione. I successivi anni di guerra avrebbero solo intensificato le contraddizioni implicite in questa esperienza iniziale: la guerra non era la prova delle capacità e delle volontà individuali, bensì la soppressione di ogni valore connesso all’individuo. […]
Qui l’offensiva è l’atto che risolve tutte le inibizioni: essa permette a coloro che marciscono nelle trincee e nelle buche di granata di comportarsi finalmente come pirati e tagliaborse svincolati da ogni morale o coscienza.  L’immagine di violenza sistematica nei confronti di un paese pingue e pacifico in compagnia di altri “armati di tutto punto” è necessariamente legata allo strapotere inibitore del fuoco d’artiglieria, al sistema di trincea, alle condizioni di immobilismo della guerra: sono proprio queste realtà, queste condizioni che creano le condizioni immaginarie dello straripamento di una feroce soldatesca in territori vergini. […]
Nei primi lavori di Jünger si può chiaramente cogliere - nell’idea dell’assalto di tipo militare e sociale - la sovrapposizione fra mondo sociale e mondo militare. È evidente che l’esperienza di guerra non è, almeno non a livello mentale, un’esperienza discreta, creatrice di nuove strategie psichiche; piuttosto, con i materiali dell’esperienza di guerra, Jünger semplifica e intensifica un tipo di conflitto  psichico prettamente tradizionale. Da un lato stanno tutte le realtà restrittive e inibitorie - la tecnologia, la borghesia, la figura del padre - che servono a proteggere e a difendere un territorio amico e pacifico; dall’altro stanno le creazioni della realtà e della fantasia - il pirata predone, le truppe d’assalto, gli assassini segreti della coscienza borghese, giovani che erano a un tempo “costretti a sacrificare se stessi” e armati “dei massimi strumenti di potenza”. […]
In tutti questi frangenti, il personaggio del soldato è contrassegnato da un’elevata tensione ormai abituale: in termini patologici, questo carattere è basato su di una stasi, un equilibrio teso, che fomenta in continuazione fantasie di scarica, di liberazione. Qualora si voglia ricostruire il percorso che nell’opera di Jünger lega l’esperienza di guerra ad un’ideologia del tutto ambivalente, che combina totalitarismo e rivoluzione, si deve partire dalla situazione di fatto esistente della guerra di trincea. Proprio da questa situazione in cui le scariche pulsionali e la mobilità dei singoli combattenti erano inibite dalla tecnologia, risultò una mostruosa stasi fisica; ma nel particolare caso di Jünger, questa stasi assunse il carattere di una fissazione sulla tecnologia, approdando quest’ultima allo statuto di genitrice di una generazione intera.»

Se, dunque, la guerra moderna rappresenta l’estremo punto d’arrivo, da un lato, della industrializzazione, della gerarchizzazione e dell’anonimato dei modelli sociali e, dall’altro, della loro mistificazione ideologica (perché solo così si potrebbe ottenere il consenso nei confronti di una macchina di distruzione di tale apocalittico orrore), Jünger ha visto giusto nell’individuarne i legami di contiguità, logica e produttiva, con i meccanismi economici, sociali e politici che caratterizzano la modernità in quanto tale, anche in tempo di “pace”: che altro non è se non la tregua in attesa del riaccendersi d’un conflitto permanente.
Lo provano, fra l’altro, le evidenti analogie, riscontrate già nelle retrovie dei campi di battaglia, fra le nevrosi caratteristiche della società in tempo di pace e quelle che insorgevano nei soldati alle prese con l’esperienza diretta della guerra: nevrosi da gas, nevrosi da trincea, nevrosi da bombardamento e via di seguito.
Perfino la loro ripartizione per classi sociali riproduceva fedelmente la “distribuzione” del disagio mentale in tempo di pace: gli attacchi di ansia generalizzata, infatti, erano più diffusi tra gli ufficiali, provenienti dalle classi superiori; mentre le nevrosi “specifiche”, ad esempio quelle da gas (dopo che ebbe inizio la guerra chimica con l’attacco tedesco ad Ypres, in Belgio, nel 1915, mediante un aggressivo chimico passato alla storia, appunto, con il nome di “iprite”) erano più diffuse fra i soldati di truppa, provenienti dal proletariato.
Non aveva visto giusto, invece, Jünger - a nostro avviso - allorché confondeva lo slancio aggressivo del “soldato” con una forma di affermazione dell’individuo, addirittura dell’individuo eccezionale (al punto da teorizzare che la tattica della cosiddetta “difesa elastica”, adottata dallo Stato Maggiore dell’esercito per limitare il numero delle perdite e per facilitare l’azione manovrata di contrattacco sui fianchi, era contraria allo spirito del soldato, secondo lui naturalmente offensivo), perché non sapeva o non voleva riconoscere il carattere coercitivo della macchina militare da cui il singolo soldato totalmente dipendeva, ridotto in condizioni d’irrimediabile eteronomia.
Perciò la rivolta del “soldato” contro la massificazione era, in fondo, l’inconscia rivolta dell’uomo massificato contro se stesso: contro quella proiezione illusoria di se stesso che vestiva l’uniforme di un altro colore ed era perciò identificata con il “nemico”.
Non seppe o non volle vedere che il soldato, in una guerra moderna, cioè totale, è null’altro che un ingranaggio, anonimo e perciò sostituibile a volontà, della macchina-esercito; così come non saprà o non vorrà vedere che l’operaio, nella società moderna, altro non è che un ingranaggio, altrettanto anonimo e intercambiabile, della macchina-industria.
Molto più lucido e molto più coerente con le sue premesse individualistiche, conservatrici e tuttavia, o proprio per questo, irriducibilmente antiborghesi, è stato, secondo noi, l’ultimo Jünger, quello del Waldgänger, ossia dell’anarca che “passa al bosco” (una rivisitazione, in fondo, del “masnadiere” di schilleriana memoria) e riesce così, pur dovendo vivere nell’era dei Titani, a difendere almeno l’essenziale della propria individualità, del proprio spirito critico, della propria volontà di non sottomettersi ad un sistema omologante, che tutto abbraccia e che tutto livella con l’inesorabile efficienza produttiva della Tecnica.


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jeudi, 10 mars 2011

La rivincita dell'anti-Sartre: Emil Cioran

La rivincita dell’anti-Sartre: Emil Cioran

di Andrea Rigoni

Fonte: Corriere della Sera [scheda fonte]

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_C2Bz0dUo6QQ/S-42qbmqpSI/AAAAAAAAArc/K2PD95QGE6A/s1600/cioran.jpg

Riscoperta trasversale dello scrittore a cento anni dalla nascita

Da quando, verso la metà degli anni Settanta, ho incominciato a frequentare Cioran, dedicandomi anche alla diffusione della sua conoscenza in Italia, mi sono spesso chiesto in che cosa consistesse la sua singolarità e quale fosse il rapporto fra lo scrittore e l’uomo.
La voce di Cioran si era manifestata in Francia, a partire dal 1949 quando apparve il suo Sommario di decomposizione, come una nota del tutto isolata, diversa e dissonante dal concerto intellettuale e culturale dell’epoca, che era universalmente segnato dal dominio delle ideologie e delle utopie: l’opera e l’attività di Sartre ne rappresentavano allora in Francia, e non solo in Francia, una sorta di emblema. Cioran era l’anti-Sartre. Nel celebre filosofo esistenzialista, nell’eroe dell’engagement, egli non vedeva che un «impresario di idee» , secondo l’innominato ma riconoscibile ritratto che ne ha lasciato nel Sommario: un «pensatore senza destino» , nel quale «tutto è notevole, salvo l’autenticità» , «infinitamente vacuo e meravigliosamente ampio» , ma proprio per questo capace, con un’opera che degrada il nulla al rango di una merce intellettuale, di conquistare e soddisfare «il nichilismo da boulevard e l’amarezza degli sfaccendati» . Era dunque naturale che l’opera di Cioran, con la sua lucidità bruciante e solitaria, vissuta come esperienza e forma di un destino, restasse quasi senza eco: il riconoscimento doveva limitarsi al fulgore inusitato dello stile, che balzava agli occhi, se non di tutti, almeno di alcuni, tra i quali i primi lettori del manoscritto del Sommario, che si chiamavano Jules Romains, André Gide, André Maurois, Jean Paulhan, Jules Supervielle, ma certo anche Paul Celan, che poco dopo ne avrebbe fatto la traduzione in tedesco. Tuttavia sappiamo bene che lo stile, la forma, il tono di un’opera non sono l’abito o l’ornamento estrinseco del pensiero, ma il suo corpo, la sua vita, la sua essenza e che dunque essi rappresentano assai più di un indizio... Cioran affrontava i temi capitali dell’esistenza e del mondo col linguaggio più diretto e più chiaro, ripristinando la superba tradizione che si era perduta dopo Schopenhauer e Nietzsche. È ovvio, nello stesso tempo, che egli rimanesse estraneo alle mode culturali che negli anni Settanta e Ottanta furoreggiavano in Francia e in Europa: la linguistica, lo strutturalismo, la semiologia, la psicanalisi, il decostruzionismo, i cui esponenti o seguaci apparivano ai suoi occhi quanto meno segnati dalla superstizione della scienza e dalla maledizione dell’accademia. Ma qual è dunque il tratto fondamentale che distingue lo stile e il pensiero di Cioran, lo scrittore non meno che l’uomo? La ragione di una presa e di un fascino che oggi hanno conquistato una gamma indefinibile e trasversale di lettori, fino al E. M. Cioran nacque a Rasinari (Romania) l’ 8 aprile 1911 e morì a Parigi il 20 giugno 1995. La sua opera è stata tradotta da Adelphi sotto la direzione di Mario Andrea Rigoni che gli fu amico e che, tra il 1983 e il 1991, ne presentò alcuni scritti sul «Corriere» (raccolti in Fascinazione della cenere, Il Notes magico, 2005). Rigoni ha pubblicato in Francia Cioran dans mes souvenirs (P. U. F., 2009). punto di suscitare in molti un’identificazione spontanea e una devozione fanatica? È difficile non trovare ai singoli temi del pensiero di Cioran, come di chiunque altro, un precedente o un analogo nella letteratura antica o moderna; ma è la quintessenza di lucidità di cui si sostanzia costantemente la sua riflessione che non cessa di impressionare e di affascinare. Essa si fonda, a mio parere, sul carattere diretto e personale dell’esperienza, offerta come testimonianza intima e viva di un essere, anziché di una teoria astratta o di un esercizio professionale. Un aforisma dei Sillogismi dell’amarezza asserisce che «tutto ciò che non è diretto è insignificante» . Mi sembra che questo principio o questo imperativo, che Cioran non ha mai smesso di seguire, definisca molti tratti della sua fisionomia intellettuale e letteraria: la ricerca, anzi l’ossessione, di ciò che è l’essenziale, nella metafisica come nella politica o nella letteratura; l’interesse verso i grandi moralisti e i grandi saggi; l’orrore dell’ufficialità e del professionismo; il culto della chiarezza e il rifiuto del gergo; l’amore della brevità e la pratica dell’aforisma; l’attrazione per i generi letterari che recano l’impronta immediata dell’io, come i diari, le confessioni, le memorie, le lettere, le autobiografie. Cioran era interessato assai più alla vita che alla filosofia; più alle cose che alle idee; più agli istinti e alle emozioni che ai concetti. In un’opera cercava soprattutto l’elemento personale: «Guai al libro che si può leggere senza doversi interrogare a ogni momento sull’autore!» . D’altronde la letteratura, nella sua visione, nasce da una ferita esistenziale e da una tara metafisica: «La scrittura è la rivincita della creatura e la sua risposta a una Creazione abborracciata» . È significativo che nell’opera di Tolstoj egli abbia isolato e commentato La morte di Ivan Il’ic; come pure che, nel saggio su Fitzgerald, abbia trascurato i romanzi e i racconti dello scrittore americano per concentrarsi sulla notte dell’anima, sull’ «esperienza pascaliana» del crollo evocato nelle pagine impietose del Crack-Up. Analogamente Cioran amava più i santi e i mistici che i teologi: donde il rapporto contrastato, se non il dissenso, col suo vecchio amico e maestro Eliade, al quale rimproverava di essere non tanto uno spirito religioso quanto un semplice storico delle religioni, un indifferente cronista e archivista della varietà delle fedi. Si capisce che oggi, al culmine del disincanto al quale siamo giunti, molti di noi abbiano trovato in Cioran ciò che raramente si trova in un autore: non solo uno scrittore e un pensatore eccellente, ma uno spirito fraterno, un sodale, un amico, capace di parlare alla carne e all’anima non meno che all’intelletto. Tale egli era nella vita privata: semplice e immediato, partecipe e arguto, sempre sfiorato dall’ala nera della malinconia ma pronto a mitigarne il colpo con le risorse dell’ironia e dell’autoironia, qualche volta con un divertito esercizio di autodemolizione, anch’esso segno di uno spirito superiore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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Man's Devolution Across Cycles: Radical Traditionalism on Anthropogenesis

Man’s Devolution Across Cycles:
Radical Traditionalism on Anthropogenesis

Michael Bell

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Sonnenrad.jpgConcerning the genesis of modern humanity, there are two primary theories that receive credence in anthropological circles. One is the “Out of Africa” hypothesis, which argues that today’s humans are the evolved descendants of a primitive race of hominids that, 70,000 years ago, departed its homeland in Africa and spread across the globe. Upon entering Asia and Europe, these archaic humans displaced the indigenous Neanderthals through violent conflict and higher birthrates. They then adapted to their environments and gradually morphed into today’s human races through a process called localized evolution.

The other theory is “Divergent Evolution,” which posits that the various races of mankind were spawned out of continuous admixtures between the different proto-humans (Homo-erectus, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, etc.) many millennia ago. The countless hybrid amalgams then underwent localized evolution like the single ancestor of the “Out of Africa” process.

While these hypotheses are considered to be at loggerheads, they are united by one key concept: the idea of progress. While each gives a different origin to mankind, both proceed from the assumption that as time goes on, mankind has become better. Although evolutionary theory does not imply that superior adaptations are also superior in terms of intelligence or beauty, this notion is particularly hard to shake with regard to human evolution.

Radical Traditionalism rejects the modernist assumption of progressive human evolution, regarding it as the exact opposite of how the universe functions. For Traditionalism, all things begin at their zenith and gradually degenerate, through a series of stages, into mere shadows of their former glory, a pattern no less true of human beings. The purpose of this essay is to explain how this rule has applied to mankind, who has not risen to mastery of the world from the lowly origins of some apelike ancestor, but rather has fallen from godhood into his current, all-too-human condition.

To do so, it will first be necessary to describe the Radical Traditionalist understanding of history. Like all tenets of Traditionalism, this conception of history is held to be a revealed truth passed down through a chain of initiation. What recommends the Traditionalist outlook to the non-initiate is its coherence and explanatory power. In the following essay, I show that Traditionalism explains archaeological and historical records and harmonizes with ancient myths as well. The modern empiricist will likely disregard such myths as the fancies of primitive imaginations, but that begs the question, for it is just another version of the progress thesis that Traditionalism rejects.

Cyclical History

Radical Traditionalism shares the same view of human history as our ancient forerunners from nearly every corner of the globe. As opposed to the linear model of history—whether ruled by an overriding purpose of by mere chance—the ancients accepted a cyclical model. This is evident in the texts of virtually every civilized race. The Hindus traced man’s descent across four ages or yugas, from the age of Truth (Satya Yuga) to the Dark Age (Kali Yuga), with the series comprising a single Great Age (Mahayuga). The Hellenic Hesiod, in his Works and Days, described the procession from a Golden Age to Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, which corresponds to the Persian rendition of the cycles. The Old Testament reveals that the Semitic peoples also shared this cyclical understanding. In a dream experienced by the Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar, there stood a statue with a head made of gold, a chest and arms of silver, thighs of bronze, and legs and feet made of iron and clay, all of which eventually crumbled upon being struck by a stone.[1] The list can go on, with discussions of peoples from the Aztecs to the Japanese, but the examples provided are sufficient to reveal the universality of this cyclical concept.

The ancients also agreed that with each successive age, man becomes more and more distant from a primordial state of perfection. In the Golden Age, man lived in harmony with divine beings and according to absolute, transcendent principles that brought happiness, wholeness, and near immortality to individuals while it brought order and prosperity to collective life. With the ushering in of the Silver Age came a fall from this state of grace and the establishment of an imperfect existence, where those old principles were abandoned, the gods lost much of their divine nature, and man took a step away from cosmic harmony toward chaos. For the purposes of this essay, we shall elaborate on the Golden and Silver Ages, for it was in these prehistoric periods that humanity underwent processes that bestowed our multitude of contemporary mental and physical forms upon us.

The Atlantean Silver Age

The Golden Age was a period of perfection on all levels. Human life was directly guided by the gods themselves and therefore orderly, plentiful, and enjoyable. Though the Golden Age was long ago and its location long since lost, its memory is kept alive by the mythical traditions of nearly every people on the planet. Hesiod, writing in the eighth century B.C., describes this “Age of Gold” thusly:

Men spent a Life like Gods in Saturn’s Reign,
Nor felt their Mind a Care, nor Body Pain;

The fields, as yet untill’d, their Fruits afford,
And fill a sumptuous, and enevy’d, Board.
From Labour free they all Delights enjoy,
Nor could the Ills of Time and Peace destroy;
They dy, or rather seem to dy, they seem
From hence transporting in a pleasing Dream.
Thus, crown’d with Happyness their ev’ry Day,
Serer, and joyful, pass’d their Lives away.[2]

Hesiod is one of few writers to directly mention the Golden Age and describe its qualities. Using his work as a reference point, however, the scholar can detect allusions to the same period in other ancient texts. For example, in Book 6 of the Mahabharata, the author discusses Mount Meru, “made of gold,” where the “measure of human life is 10,000 years” and “men are all of a golden complexion . . . [and] without sickness, without sorrow, and always cheerful.”[3] Outside the Aryan tradition, the Book of Lieh-Tzu (fourth century B.C.) describes what appear to be the inhabitants of the Golden Age:

All were equally untouched by the emotions of love and sympathy, of jealousy and fear. Water had no power to drown them, nor fire to burn; cuts and blows caused them neither injury nor pain, scratching or tickling could not make them itch. They bestrode the air as though treading on solid earth; they were cradled in space as though resting in a bed. Clouds and mist obstructed not their vision, thunder-peals could not stun their ears, physical beauty disturbed not their hearts, mountains and valleys hindered not their steps. They moved about like gods.[4]

Finally, we have in the Semitic memory the Garden of Eden, where man was first established on Earth at God’s decree. According to the Book of Genesis, those who dwelled there lived for nearly 1000 years in a blissful paradise.[5] The allusions to this pristine setting are numerous, from the Avestic recollection of a distant period in the Airyana Vaego, where man was under the aegis of the creator god Ahura Mazda himself, to the Buddhist remembrance of Shambhala, roughly translated “land of peace” or “tranquility.”

In tracing anthropogenesis, it is crucial to establish the physical location of this primordial paradise. Unfortunately, no material archaeological evidence lends any insight into this question. We are thus forced to rely solely on the mythological memories of our ancestors. Among the Greeks, this land “beyond the pole” where neither “pestilence nor wasting eld approach” the inhabitants was referred to as Hyperborea, meaning “beyond the north wind.”[6]

In his book Arctic Home in the Vedas, the Hindu nationalist and scholar Bal Gangadhar Tilak, writing in the early twentieth century, presents a vast array of clues from Vedic and Avestic literature to argue that the primordial paradise was located in the Arctic. Tilak explains that if one were stationed at the North Pole, the sky above would appear to be rotating around one “from left to right, somewhat like the motion of a hat or umbrella turned over one’s head.”[7] He also explains that one would see the sun continuously in the sky for roughly six months, followed by a period of dusk, night, and dawn of two months each. Thus for the Arctic inhabitant, a full year would appear to unfold as a single day.

With these astral phenomena in mind, Tilak proceeds to pinpoint allusions to them in the Aryan texts. For example, in the Mahabharata, Mount Meru is discussed in one passage as a place where the “sun and the moon go round from left to right every day and so do all the stars” and “The day and the night are together equal to a year to the residents of the place.”[8] He supports this with a selection from the post-Vedic Laws of Manu, which says “A year (human) is a day and a night of the Gods; thus are the two divided, the northern passage of the sun is the day and the southern the night.”[9] Tilak corroborates this evidence with clues from Persian tradition. From the Avesta we have reference to an “enclosure” in the Airyana Vaejo in which “the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day.”[10]

The present conditions in the Arctic make it uninhabitable. According to Tilak, however, modern scientists have conceded that at one time in distant prehistory, perhaps in pre-Glacial times, the region was hospitable, fertile, and filled with life. Among these scientists is the geologist James Geikie, who in 1893 argued that “during the Inter-Glacial period the climate was characterized by clement winters and cool summers so that the tropical plants and animals, like elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses, ranged over the whole of the Arctic region, and in spite of numerous fierce carnivora, the Paleolithic man had no unpleasant habitation there.”[11] Joscelyn Godwin confirms that such conditions were indeed possible when, as “numerous authorities” claim, “the earth was not tilted, but spun perfectly upright with . . . its axis perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun,” which was the case in “primordial times.”[12]

Since the Arctic Golden Age took place many eons before recorded history, assessing its actual place in time is troublesome. Using Hindu calculations, Traditionalist René Guénon concluded that this Golden Age took place nearly 65,000 years ago.[13] We must prefer this number over Tilak’s hypothesized 12,000 years, as the latter would place the subsequent Silver Age far too near recorded history to be possible, especially considering that the fourth, Dark Age, “is said” to have begun only 6000 years ago.[14] In addition, it would be implausible to place man’s origins only 12,000 years ago, as the devolutionary processes that reduced him to his modern form could not have fully unfolded within that short span.

Eventually, the Arctic seat and its Golden Age met a catastrophic end for a number of reasons, both physical and metaphysical. In his magnum opus, Revolt Against the Modern World, Julius Evola argues that the Earth’s axis shifted positions slightly, ushering in a cataclysmic climate change.[15] As a result, the Polar Regions became inhospitable to most life forms. In ancient texts one finds numerous references to this tilting of the axis. The Taoist tradition recalls when the “pillar which connects Heaven and earth” was “snapped” (the axis is essentially an invisible pillar that unites the sky with Earth), explaining “why Heaven dips downwards to the north-west, so that sun, moon and stars travel towards that quarter.”[16] The Hebrew story of the crumbling of the Tower of Babel, which connected Heaven to Earth, is another example. The Avesta explains the onset of the climate change in a dialog between the creator god and his disciple, king Yima: “And Ahura Mazda spake unto Yima, saying: ‘O fair Yima, son of Vîvanghat! Upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall, that shall bring the fierce, foul frost; upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall, that shall make snow-flakes fall thick.”[17] As this event would have occurred tens of thousands of years ago, it likely coincides with the beginning of one of the various Ice Ages.

One more event, metaphysical in nature, is explained to us by the Old Testament. It tells of how the “sons of God” mated with the “daughters of man” and spawned a race of mighty giants, whose evil behavior, driven by the appetites of the flesh, made God unleash elemental forces against them.[18] These sons are likely parallels to the “celestial gods” who dwelled in Airyana Vaego, as well as the other gods and demigods that the ancient texts say lived in this primordial paradise. From the clues above, we can paint the following picture regarding the end of the Golden Age. Human beings lived harmoniously with divine beings in the Arctic paradise until the two entered sexual unions that produced powerful, semi-divine half-breeds. This action caused such a rupture in the cosmic balance of the universe that the Earth’s axis shifted, bringing on the Ice Age that turned the paradise into a cold wasteland.

Following the destruction of Airyana Vaego/Mount Meru/Eden/ Hyperborea, the semi-divine survivors were forced to migrate southwards. In their exodus they retained the memory of their Polar homeland, evinced by polar symbols such as the swastika (a bent cross revolving about a fixed point) and the axial World Tree, which traditionally links Midgard (Earth) with the realms above. Some settled in areas of North America and Northern Europe, but the majority regrouped in an Atlantic location to reconstitute their civilization.

If we are to make any conjectures about the race of our Hyperboreans, we must look to those people who carried with them the memory of the primordial home. By Hyperboreans, I mean the Arctic race of “men” who lived among the gods. Discerning the features of the latter is impossible, as they are not bound by the limitations of material existence; they could have been anthropomorphic, ethereal, or capable of alternating between the two. Our only clue is that they were “Golden,” which may be an allusion to vibrant blondness.[19]

In all of the civilizations discussed above, as well as in others, our concern would be with the upper castes, namely the priests and the military aristocracy, who preserved the memories of Hyperborea. Among the Aryan peoples of Europe, this task is simpler due to the abundance of physical evidence available, namely statues, frescoes, engravings, and physical remains. The ancestors of classical Greece and Rome, Germania, and Celtia, who brought with them the worship of Zeus, Saturn, Tuisto, and Dana, were evidently of a tall, robust, fair-haired, and fair-skinned Nordic stock. The fourth century A.D. physician, Adamantios, gives us a picture of the early Hellenes, claiming that “Wherever the Hellenic and Ionic race has been kept pure, we see proper tall men of fairly broad and straight build, neatly made, of fairly light skin and blond; the flesh is rather firm, the limbs straight, the extremities well made.”[20]

As we push further east, the evidence becomes less plentiful but nonetheless revealing. The Brahmins who carried to India the oldest extant accounts of the Golden Age in Mount Meru were of that same Nordic race. If one juxtaposes a modern Brahmin or Kshatriya with a member of the lower castes, it often appears that the former has something quite different “in his woodpile.” He would tend to be taller and fairer in complexion and occasionally possess blue or green eyes and, more rarely still, fair hair. Lower caste individuals generally tend to be shorter and darker, and although many have fine Caucasoid features, others display an Australoid phenotype. Kaiyata, writing in the second century B.C., affirms that White Brahmins once “flourished in a previous cycle of existence” but that their “descendants are rarely met with even now.”[21] The sixth century B.C. Kshatriya noble, Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), is described in the Pali Canon as having abhi nila netto, or “very blue eyes,” a typical Nordic trait.

In the Far East, we have a non-Aryan milieu entirely. However, there is ample genetic evidence that tall, fair Whites roamed both Western[22] and Eastern[23] China long before the present-day Mongoloids. Taken with the racial description of the Buddha, we have enough to surmise a heavy influence upon China’s culture by Nordics or a stalwart white race akin to them. Since Buddhism influenced the development of Japanese religious culture, the same rule applies to Japan.

The list can go on, but we have already given sufficient proof that the bearers of the oldest and clearest recollections of Hyperborea were tall, fair, blue-eyed, and red or blonde-haired whites. It would thus be fair to conclude that the Hyperboreans, from whom they claim descent, were likely of a proto-Nordic race.

 

The Atlantean Silver Age

Hesiod’s poem continues with a discussion of a second age, “which the Celestials call the Silver years.”[24] In this period, man became subject to sickness and mortality. He no longer lived according to the absolute principles provided by his divine tutors during the Golden Age, and paid the gods themselves “no honors.”[25]

It is with the dawning of this era that the Arctic inhabitants, now a race mixed with divine and human elements, traveled as refugees from their destroyed Urheimat to a southern location somewhere in the Atlantic. There they founded the famed city of Atlantis in mimicry of their original homeland. After establishing themselves, they embarked on a colonizing campaign across the world, passing the “Pillars of Hercules” (the Straits of Gibraltar) and reaching deep into the Mediterranean Sea. There they established their hegemony, holding “sway . . . over the country within the Pillars as far as Egypt and Tyrrhenia.”[26] It is reasonable to assume that they also sent voyagers to the Americas, as Atlantis would have lain between them and Europe.

As this new civilization was built before recorded history, it is difficult to ascertain its precise chronology. Plato asserts that Atlantis crumbled 9000 years before his own time, while Guénon, relying once again on Vedic mathematics, says this occurred several thousand years earlier. This would, therefore, place its origins even further back. Regardless, our concern is the racial state of those dwelling within Atlantis.

The Boreal race inhabiting the Arctic was probably quite Nordic in appearance. When they mixed with the gods, however, they spawned “men of monstrous size” according to Hesiod, paralleling the Nephilim of the book of Genesis. Given that modern Nordics are some of the tallest humans, and that they themselves are merely degenerated descendants of something greater, the mythological testimony seems plausible. Thus, the Atlanteans sired from the union of gods and men were likely much taller than today’s tallest people and probably more muscular; they would have been frightfully imposing giants. Further credence is given to this idea by the fact that in Numbers, the Hebrews refer to the Anakim as “Nephilim” due to their immense stature, which made the Hebrews feel like “grasshoppers.”

These giants were not the norm, however. Plato speaks of them becoming “diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture,” suggesting that unmixed Boreal humans also lived within Atlantean borders. This was also the cause of Atlantis’s inevitable downfall, much like that of Hyperborea. After several generations of unchecked miscegenation with their human subjects, the Atlantean giants forfeited their angelic constitution and “grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts.”[27] When this happened, the cosmic balance was once again disrupted. Evidence from the myths, sometimes suggestive and other times affirmative, leads us to believe that a massive earthquake occurred, causing Atlantis, the seat of the Silver Age, to sink beneath the Atlantic. The Mesopotamian story of the deluge that submerged the first cult-centers, linked to the Biblical flood that Noah overcame, is an example.[28]

With the Atlantean admixture with humans came a race almost entirely sapped of divinity. They were the direct ancestors of modern Northern Europeans (proto-Nordics), retaining the fair complexion and keen intellect but losing their titanic build and strength. Forced to flee their sinking kingdom, these people migrated in an East-West trajectory, bringing significant numbers into the Americas and Europe.

There is some physical and genetic evidence to substantiate this claim.

Firstly, there is the link between the 18,000 year old Solutrean weapon culture of France and the 13,500 year old American weapon culture of Clovis, New Mexico. Archaeologists Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford concluded in 2004 that there was a striking similarity between the manufacturing methods of each culture, particularly because they both used a very difficult and rare technique called overshot flaking.[29] They also noted that a weapon culture discovered in Virginia, dating to 16,000 years ago, appeared to be a “technological midpoint between the French Solutrean style and the Clovis points.”[30]

Our second piece of evidence is genetic. Scientists have found that among the genes of Native American populations, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of haplogroups A through D, which are common in Asia, predominates. However, it has been found that a significant number of Native Americans in the Eastern United States possess mtDNA from haplogroup X, which is only also found in Western European populations and in some parts of Mongolia. One might argue that the presence of this mtDNA in Mongolia debunks the argument that Whites settled North America first, but this simply is not so when combined with all the other evidence provided here. Significantly, the mtDNA of pre-Columbian Native American skeletons has been studied, revealing that X was present in that race’s genes before the conquistadores arrived.[31]

Thirdly, we have the controversial Kennewick Man corpse. This 9300 year old skeleton, unearthed in Washington State in 1996, was discovered by anthropologist James Chatters to be of Caucasoid origin. In a clay reconstruction the face even ended up resembling that of British actor, Patrick Stewart.[32]

These bits of evidence indicate that a race of people predating the Mongoloid Native Americans split up and branched out into Europe and America from the Atlantic. They carried with them the same genes and tool-making methods, which they adapted to the available resources. An alternative possibility would be that this Upper Paleolithic race migrated first into Europe, with a group then splitting off and migrating eastward to America.

The Children from the Earth

As our Hyperborean ancestors ventured across the globe, first to the Atlantic and then in an East-West trajectory, they encountered preexisting societies in the lands they traversed. As the Golden and Silver Ages took place tens of thousands of years ago, these indigenous peoples were likely from the countless breeds of hominids, including Neanderthalensis and Soloensis. Whatever stock of proto-human they were, our ancestors characterized them as either chthonic, Earth-spawned beings or creatures originating from the chaotic waters. In most cases, their interaction resulted in conflict, but in others the two coexisted and even intermixed. These events have been vividly preserved in the various myths of Hyperborean origin: the epic struggle between the Tuatha da Danaan and the Fomors (people “from the water”); the battles between the Olympians and the various monsters spawned by Gaia (Earth); the vitriolic relationship between the Aesir (the Nordic sky gods) and the Vanir (trolls, giants, and other monsters); even the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf recaptures this theme in the fight between the hero and Grendel, a humanoid demon that lives beneath a lake.

Wherever the newcomers settled down and mixed with the natives, new races were spawned representing further bastardizations of the semi-divine Arctic prototype. Thus our giant, proto-Nordic race ramified into various hybrid breeds, each differing in appearance and attributes depending upon the areas they settled in, the stocks with which they mixed, and just how far they allowed this miscegenation to continue. From these mixed unions sprung the various Mongoloid, Semitic, Australoid, and Negroid races, with the latter two probably representing the farthest debasement from the original Hyperborean phenotype. In instances where mixing was less pronounced, or where adaptation to the environment and other factors had their effect, the various white races were generated (i.e. Nordics, Mediterraneans, Alpines, etc.).

Conclusions

In summary, anthropogenesis was a process of devolution, not evolution. Sixty-five thousand years ago, a race of gods described as “Golden” lived harmoniously with a race of advanced early humans, characterized by fair skin, fair hair, and light eyes, in a joyous, orderly Golden Age somewhere in the Arctic. At some point, the two races intermixed and bred giant demigods. As the Arctic seat froze over in one of the Ice Ages, these demigods led the remaining human survivors south into the Atlantic, with some remaining in different lands along the way. Those who did so, encountered autochthonous races with whom they ultimately mixed, debasing their divine nature and giving rise to a new, Silver Age that corresponded to the Atlantean civilization vividly described by Plato and remembered by many traditions as a “Western” land. It sent explorers out across the world from the Americas to the Far East. Thousands of years later this second super-civilization floundered due to continued mixing between the demigods and their human companions, generating the Upper Paleolithic proto-Nordic race.

With the sinking of Atlantis, these beings, now human in nature but still retaining a divine spark, migrated in an East-West trajectory. On this second great exodus, corresponding to a Bronze Age, some intermarried with indigenous peoples and further debased their line while others maintained their purity. The latter would later erect the most revered civilizations and empires of recorded history, such as Sumeria, Vedic India, Egypt, Hellas, Rome, China, and much later, the feudal regimes of Western Europe. The mixed peoples would be remembered as the Pelasgians, Minoans, Etruscans, Hebrews, Arameans, Iberians, and all other chthonic ethnicities that were subdued and restricted to a plebeian caste. Unfortunately, the vast empires noted above served as little more than dim reflections of the original Hyperborean civilization, precluded from fulfilling their true potential by the prevailing metaphysical conditions of the age in which they flourished.

We have now entered into the terminal phase of the Dark Age, and the type of humanity that is to inherit the succeeding Mahayuga remains to be seen; however, if the races of the world continue down the path of profligate inter-mixing, that divine spark, which drove the white peoples of the world to erect history’s grandest civilizations, and is now harbored by so few, will be completely extinguished. Humanity will then be forced to pass the torch of greatness to a succeeding species.

Notes

1. Dan. 2:35.

2. Hesiod, Works and Days, 1.154–63.

3. Mahabharata, 6.1.6.

4. Lieh-Tzu, The Book of Lieh-Tzu, trans. Lionel Giles (1912), 36.

5. Gen. 5:5.

6. Pindar, Pythian Odes, 10.29, 10.41.

7. Lokamanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Arctic Home in the Vedas (Poona City, India: 1903), 43.

8. Mahabharata, 3.7.163. Quoted in Tilak, 64.

9. The Laws of Manu, 1.67. Quoted in Tilak, 63.

10. Vendidad, 2.40. Quoted in Tilak, 350.

11. James Geikie, Fragments of Earth Lore: Sketches and Addresses, Geological and Geographical (1893), 266. Quoted in Tilak, 22–23.

12. Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival (Kempton: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1996), 13.

13. René Guénon, Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 24.

14. René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, trans. Marco Pallis (Hillsdale: Sophia Perennis, 2001), 7.

15. Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 1995), 189.

16. Lieh-Tzu, 79.

17. Vendidad, 2.22.

18. Gen. 6: 2–7.

19. Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 185. In his chapter “The Golden Age,” Evola contends that gold symbolizes the gods’ divine nature, which is “incorruptible, solar, luminous, and bright.” I see no reason, however, to reject the possibility that it could be a reference to something phenotypical.

20. Hans F. K. Gunther, The Racial Elements of European History, trans. G. C. Wheeler (London: Methuen, 1927), 157.

21. R. P. Chanda, The Indo-Aryan Races: A Study of the Origin of Indo-Aryan People and Institutions, Part I (Rajshahi: Varendra Research Society, 1916), 24.

22. “Genetic Testing Reveals Awkward Truth About Xinjians’s Famous Mummies,” Khaleej Times Online, April 19, 2005.

23. Li Wang et al, “Genetic Structure of a 2500-Year-Old Human Population in China and Its Spatiotemporal Changes,” Molecular Biology and Evolution, 17 (2000): 1396–1400.

24. Hesiod, Works and Days, 1.175.

25. Hesiod, Works and Days, 1.189.

26. Plato, Timaeus, 25.

27. Plato, Critias, 120.

28. “A Sumerian Myth: The Deluge,” trans. S. N. Kramer, The Ancient Near East, ed. James Pritchard, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 29.

29. Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford, “The North Atlantic ice-edge corridor: a possible Paleolithic route to the New World,” World Archaeology 36 (2004): 465.

30. “Stone Age Columbus-programme summary,” BBC, 21 Nov. 2002. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/columbus.shtml>. 1 Sept. 2008.

31. Maggie Villiger, “Tracing the Genes,” PBS, July 20, 2004, http://www.pbs.org/saf/1406/features/dna.htm.

32. Timothy Egan, “Old Skull Gets White Looks, Stirring Dispute,” The New York Times, April 2, 1998.

TOQ, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2010)

 

mercredi, 09 mars 2011

Notre néo-totalitarisme: une dictature du présent

totalitarisme_laine.jpg

Notre néo-totalitarisme : une dictature du présent

Si le totalitarisme ancien modèle est périmé, il existe des formes de sujétions contemporaines néo-totalitaires. Celles que nous subissons. L’idéologie unique c’est que rien n’est idéologique, c’est le bougisme, c’est la néophilie – ce qui est nouveau est mieux par principe que ce qui existe déjà -, c’est le relativisme culturel – tout vaut tout, un gribouilli vaut Monet, c’est le court-termisme. C’est la gestion de la « fourmilière humaine globale » (Alexandre Zinoviev).

Claude Bourrinet note : « Ce qui singularise le totalitarisme actuel, c’est l’emprise du présent, ou plutôt d’un éternel recommencement du même, la perte de perspective temporelle, vis-à-vis du passé et de la tradition, mais aussi par rapport à un avenir  qui ne se décline que sous sa version cataclysmique. L’homme semble fixé à son vide existentiel comme un papillon sans vie. Le totalitarisme contemporain est semblable à une neurasthénie universelle, qui s’alimente des vapeurs de néant. Le totalitarisme ancien assénait les mots comme des massues : c’était pour le faire avancer. Celui d’aujourd’hui dit tout et n’importe quoi, rendant ainsi stérile le langage et impossible tout cheminement. L’on ne sait plus quoi dire. Il n’existe plus aucune source de conviction comme centre du pouvoir. Finalement, on dirait que nous somme revenu aux temps mythiques, mais sans les mythes. »

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Maître Eckehart et la mystique néerlandaise

Maitre Eckehart et la mystique néerlandaise

conseils72k.jpgSi l’on en juge par les nombreux témoignages parvenus jusqu’à nous, les doctrines de Maitre Eckehart ont eu une grande répercussion dans les Pays-Bas. Cette influence s’expliquera notamment par le fait que ces contrées ont entretenu durant tout le moyen âge un commerce spirituel des plus intense avec Cologne et les provinces rhénanes.

Cependant, si l’histoire du mysticisme occidental nous apprend que les mystiques néerlandais ont fréquenté les foyers spirituels de la Rhénanie, il est certain, d’autre part, que les mystiques allemands sont venus de leur côté s’initier aux sources de la spiritualité néerlandaise. Mais si les voyages d’un Tauler ou d’un Suso en Néerlande sont chose généralement admise, l’influence de la mystique néerlandaise du XIIIe siècle sur un maître Eckehart, par exemple, semble encore relever du domaine des thèses hardies et peu défendables. L’analyse philologique de certains teImes eckehardiens à laquelle s’est livrée le R.P. Van Mierlo nous conduira cependant à admettre que l’infuence de la mystique néerlandaise sur Eckehart est possible, voire même certaine.

D’après le témoignage de Lamprecht von Regensburg (1) toute une littérature mystique du plus haut intérêt aurait fleuri dans les Pays-Bas avant l’année 1250. jusqu’ici deux noms à peine ont survécu à la perte des écrits de cette époque: Hadewych (2) et Béatrice de Nazareth. Mais à eux deux, ces noms suffisent pour situer la beauté de cette efflorescence mystique. Tout ce qui caractérisera un j~ur l’ori~inalité de la Mystique germanique se trouve déjà lllscrlt dans 1 oeuvre de ces femmes exceptionnelles. Et l’apparition de Eckehart au lieu de les inaugurer ne fera que confirmer les tendances spéculatives de cette mystique germanique, née dans les Pays-Bas près de la mer … Mais son génie créateur conduira ces tendances à leur suprême accomplissement, de telle manière que le maître de Hochheim peut être considéré à juste titre comme le véritable père de la «Deutschen Speculation». C’est chez lui que pour la première fois se dessine en toute sa magnificence ce grandiose édifice de la mystique germanique, et des matériaux épars dans les écrits spirituels de la Néerlande et de la Rhénanie il construira cette somme mystique qui domine encore le mysticisme allemand.

Nous n’entrerons pas ici dans les détails qui caractérisent le message du maître de Hochheim, mais nous essayerons de déceler son importance quant à l’orientation définitive de la mystique néerlandaise du XIVe siécle, telle qu’elle se précisera dans l’oeuvre de Ruusbroec l’Admirable et de ses disciples.

Ici encore nous pouvons dire, sans peur d’être contredit, que l’influence de Eckehart sur le sage de Groenendael est beaucoup moins évidente que l’on ne se plait généralement à l’affirmer. L’ignorance de la plupart des historiens du mysticisme occidental quant au développement parallèle des mystiques rhénane et néerlandaise a ainsi conduit à des conclusions par trop hâtives qui nous ont longtemps fait croire que les doctrines de Ruusbroec devaient tout à celles de Eckehart. N’a-t-on pas été jusqu’à affirmer que la terminologie de Ruusbroec était en grande partie tributaire de celle du grand créateur de «néologismes mystiques», quand la plupart de ces « néologismes» étaient depuis près d’un demi siècle le bien commun des mystiques Néerlandais et rhénans?

Comme nous le montrerons plus loin, ce n’est que dans les dernières oeuvres de Ruusbroec que l’on peut déceler d’une manière certaine que le mystique brabançon a pris connaissance de certaines thèses de Eckehart, mais alors encore pour les refuser et les attaquer comme les· pires des hérésies, cela après leur condamnation à Rome. Il est donc vraisemblable que seul le grand bruit fait autour des 17 thèses hérétiques du fougueux dominicain ait attiré l’attention du solitaire de Groenendaal sur l’oeuvre de Eckebart. Dès lors, l’affirmation d’un Van Olterloo, selon laquelle Ruusbroec aurait suivi pendant un certain temps l’enseignement de Eckehart à Cologne nous semble devenir peu défendable.

Quoique lui-mêine ait été soupçonné d ‘hérésie par certains maîtres en théologi.è, l’on peut dire qu’une importante partie de l’activité de Ruusbroec a été consacrée à combattre les hérésies de son temps (3), Selon le témoignage de son biographe Pomerius, Ruusbroec aurait même entrepris cette sainte croisade dès les premières années de sa prêtrise en s’attaquant à J’une des plus célèbres et des plus mystérieuses hérétiques de son temps: la Bloemardinne (4).

Dès sa première oeuvre, «LE LIVRE DU ROYAUME DES AMANTS DE DIEU», Ruusbroec fait allusion aux hérésies si «pernicieuses pour: la vraie foi» et dans son énumération de ceu?, qui sont incapables de suivre le chemin surnaturel vers Dieu, il citera dans le même chapitre les mécréants et les hérétiques, Plus loin il citera les quatre principales raisons d’hérésie en indiquant les moyens de les éviter. Dans tous ses autres écrits également Ruusbroec trouvera moyen de faire allusion aux divers aspects d’hérésie. Il en va ainsi dans «L’ANNEAU OU LA PIERRE BRILLANTE» au chapitre des «cinq sortes de Pécheurs» ; dans son «LIVRE DES QUATRE TENTATIONS» qui toutes sont évidemment à l’origine des errements de la foi : dans son «LIVRE DU TABERNACLE SPIRITUEL», où l’hérésie est cependant moins explicitement attaquée: dans son «LIVRE DES SEPT CLOTURES» où la cinquiè me clôture, celle de la fausse vacuité est décrite avec force détails qui nous montrent combien proche celle-ci se trouve du panthéïsme.

Dans «LES SEPT DEGRES DE L’ECHELLE D’AMOUR SPIRITUEL» nous trouvons également au chapitre XI une description de ceux qui se croient grands et élevés devant Dieu. Dans «LE MIROIR DU SALUT ETERNEL» Ruusbroec parle longuement de cette sorte de gens qui ne peuvent approcher de la Sainte Table et parmi lesquels les hérétiques prennent une place d ‘exception, parce qu’ils ne croient pas que le Christ se trouve en chair et en sang dans le Saint Sacrement, ou parce qu’ils affirment qu’ils sont -eux-mêmes Dieu et le Christ, leur main ayant créé le ciel et la terre, etc. etc… En d’autres endroits encore du même livre,Ruusbroec s’attaque à ces mêmes hérétiques en les vouant aux pires supplices.

Quant à son « LIVRE DE LA PLUS HAUTE VERITE» il y résume au chapitre IV tout ce qu’il a dit précédemment contre l’hérésie; nous y trouvons ainsi une véritable synthèse de la croisade idéologique de Ruusbroec contre les errements de son temps, synthèse qu’il lui suffira de reprendre dans son « LIVRE DES DOUZE BEGUINES» pour y dresser un réquisitoire définitif contre toutes les hérésies qui portent atteinte à la vraie foi.

Les hérésies que Ruusbroec combat dans ses premiers livres sont manifestement celles des Beggards et des Béguines, telles qu’elles f”rent condamnées par le Concile de Vienne de 1311, et dont il suffirait de reprendre. les différentes thèses latines pour en retrouver un écho direct, en langue populaire! dans les divers ouvrages de Ruusbroec.

Ce n’est qu’à partir des « SEPT CLOTURES» et des «DOUZE BEGUINES» que Ruusbroec s’attaque directement aux tendances de l’hérésie panthéïstique, et c’est ici que l’on retrouve clairement et pour la première fois certaines alluSions aux thèses condamnées de Eckehart et de ses disciples.

Sans que le nom d’Eckehart soit cité une seule fois dans les «DOUZE BEGUINES» plusieurs errements eckehardiens y sont explicitement réfutés. Ici encore l’on peut se demander si Ruusbroec: s’en est bien référé directement aux oeuvres du savant dominicain, ca’r il est plus vraisemblable de croire que Ruusbroec s’en est tenu aux «Errores Eckardi » telles qu’elles sont relatées dans la Bulle «In Agro Dominico » de Jean XXII, du 27 mars 1329 (5).

Certaines tournures de phrase du texte de Ruusbroec font cependant croire que celui-ci a également eu connaissance de quelque rédaction allemande des thèses hérétiques de Eckehart, mais alors encore a-t-il pu les trouver dans certaines variantes respectant plus ou moins fidèlement la pensée du maitre. C’est ce qui pourrait expliquer le gauchissement imprimé à certaines phrases citées par Ruusbroec, pour être immédiatement passées au crible. Après une analyse minutieuse des textes ruusbroeciens l’on en arrive à conclure que l’information de Ruusbroec quant aux doctrines eckehardiennes. Ne semblerait être que de seconde main, ce qui nous conduit en définitive bien loin d’une dépendance immédiate du solitaire de Groenendael à l’égard du Père de la « Deutschen Speculation » (6).

Un disciple de Ruusbroec, Jan Van Leeuw, reprenant les arguments de son maitre contre les doctrines de Eckehart, s’élève dans un de ses livres avec une rare violence contre les erreurs qu’elles comportent (7), Ne ménageant point ses mots, le bonus cocus reprochera à Eckehart d’être un homme diabolique, plein de morgue, qui ne songerait qu’à entrainer ses semblables en Enfer, Le feu de la polémique entraina cependant trop loin le brave cuisinier mystique qui, dans un écrit ultérieur, a dû faire amende honorable (8), Dans deux chapitres de ce manuscrit il justifie ses attaques, en se défendant à son tour d’avoir écrit des choses hérétiques: «Si j’ai pu écrire faussement, dira-t-il fort humblement, j’en demande pardon auprès de Dieu et de mes lecteurs». Cela n’empêche qu’il essayera de prouver son innocence en reconnaissant que Eckehart a abjuré toutes les hérésies qu’il lui reprochait. Il va même jusqu’à dire que « si Eckehart se trouve actuellement au Ciel – comme il l’espère – celui-ci doit non seulement approuver la chaleur avec laquelle lui, Jan van Leeuw, a pu l’attaquer dans ses hérésies, mais que si cela était en son pouvoir, celui-ci les attaquerait lui-même avec plus de violence encore … ».

Les répliques de Ruusbroec et de son disciple aux thèses hérétiques de Eckehart laissent supposer que, quoi que condamnées en haut lieu, celles .. ci devaient avoir une répercussion certaine, en séduisant les âmes pieuses, pout les entrainer dans les voies du panthéisme.

Les très nombreux manuscrits thiois de Maître Eckehart retrouvés dans les principales bibliothèques d’Europe laissent supposer que ses doctrines doivent avoir eu un grand retentissement dans les Pays-Bas. Si l’on songe qu’un manuscrit devait passer de main en main et faire J’objet de lectures à haute voix devant ‘un auditoire choisi, l’on peut dire que c’est par centaines, si pas par milliers que devaient s’y recruter les amis de Eckehart.

Un des plus curieux témoignages de l’influence de Eckehart est ce dialogue entre «Meester Eggaert» et de laïc anonyme (9), Ce texte se compose de 80 pages in-folio, de quatre colonnes chacune. Il est un véritable essai de vulgarisation de la doctrine eckehardienne. Il se présente sous forme de questions et réponses et fut probablement écrit dans le courant du XIVe siècle, bien que le seul manuscrit que nous connaissions soit du XVIe siècle.

Dans l’ensemble, ce texte ne nous apprend rien de nouveau sur Eckehart, mais le fait d’avoir été écrit sous forme de questions ~t de réponses lui confère la valeur d’un véritable catéchisme mystique à l’usage des âmes simples qui « ne connaissent assez de latin que pour dire « Pater»

Que ce manuscrit ait encore été recopié au XVIe siècle nous prouvera d’autre part la persistance de J’influence eckehardienne dans les Pays-Bas.

Sans doute est-ce parce que la pensée de Eckehart se prêtait facilement à une interprétation panthéistique qu’elle joue un rôle si prépondérant dans J’évolution de certaines sectes dont la plus célèbre est celle des frères du «Libre Esprit».

Très réputée en Rhénanie, cette secte était dirigée au XIVe siècle par le néerlandais Walter de Hollande, dont les relations avec les Pays-Bas furent fréquentes et fécondes. C’est surtout par J’entremise de son école que les «hérésies panthéistes» de Eckehart furent anonymement répandues dans ces contrées.

Ruusbroec et ses disciples immédiats ne furent d’ailleurs pas les seuls à combattre tes hérésies; d’autres auteurs mystiques de son école, tel ce Gerhard Zerbold de Zutphen, auquel on attribue le «DE LIBRIS TEUTONICALIBUS». L’interprête autorisé de la doctrine des «Frères de la Vie Commune» s’y élève avec violence contre les «hérésies» sous prétexte qu’elles sont «valde nocipi et periculosi».

Cependant, l’interprétation hérétique du message eckehardien était trop séduisante pour que les anathèmes des esprits orthodoxes l’atteignent profondément. Durant le XIVe et jusque fort avant dans le XVe siècJe les sectes hérétiques connurent un rayonnement prodigieux et cela malgré Jes persécutions les plus tragiques.

Dire l’histoire de ces sectes, établir leurs doctrines et leurs filiations serait chose bien tentante; hélas. nous ne sommes renseignés à leur sujet que par le témoignage indirect de ceux-là mêmes qui les combattirent et qui ont du facilement fausser leur pensée exacte. Quant aux écrits mêmes des hérétiques. ils furent la proie des bûchers.

Il est impossible, dans de telles conditions d’établir l’influence réelle des doctrines de Eckehart sur ces hérésies, tout comme il est malaisé de déceler l’influence de celles-ci sur son système. Quant à la mystique orthodoxe, c’est surtout par les voies de ses disciples Tauler et Suso que Eckehart a pu avoir une influence positive et indirecte sur les mystiques néerlandais. Mais chez ces auteurs également il est bien difficile de déceler ce qui appartient en propre à la mystique rhénance, ces deux auteurs ayant séjournés également dans les centres spirituels des Pays-Bas.

Pour suivre les thèses du R. P. Van Mierlo quant aux relations entre la mystique des Pays-Bas et celle de la Rhénanie, nous dirons qu’en vérité il ne peut être question que d’interférences dont l’état actuel de la science ne peut établir les courbes exactes. Trop de documents perdus nous empêchent de retrouver les chaînons qui nous permettraient de parler valablement de cet aspect complexe de la spiritualité occidentale.

Dès maintenant une: conclusions s’impose cependant, c’est que mystiques néerlandaise et rhénane se confondent constamment et bien souvent ne font qu’une.

Marc. EEMANS

(1) Lamprecht von Regensburg : « DIE TOCHTER SIONS ».

(2) Les affinités évidentes entre la mystique de Hadewych et les doctrines de Eckehart ont conduit A. E. Bouman, dans une étude parue dans la revue Néo-Philgus (8e année) a affirmer non sans quelque légèreté que Hadewych était tributaire de Eckehart… La gratuité de cette thèse apparaîtra immédiatement si l’on songe que les oeuvres de Hadewych ont été écrites près d’un demi siècle avant celles de Eckehart. Nous n’en concluons cependant point que c’est Eckehart qui est tributaire de Hadewych, nous pourrons affirmer tout au plus que l’un

et l’autre ont puisé à une tradition commune et que l’interaction des mystiques néerlandaise et rhénane donnent à ces deux écoles de spiritualité une évidente parenté. Notons également en passant qu’une Sainte Hildegarde que l’on situe généralement à l’origine de 1a mystique germanique ne présente encore aucune des caractéristiques de cette école, mais participe encore entièrement de la tradition des Pères de l’Eglise.

(3) Voir notamment le R. P. Van Mierlo: « RUUSBROEC’S BESTRIJDING DER KETTERIJ « Ons Geeslelijk Erf. Oct. 1932. (N° Ruusbroec).

(4) Le R. P. Van Mierlo a analysé av,ec son érudition coutumière le cas de la Bloemardinne dans son étude

« OVER DE KETTERIN BLOEMARDINNE » dans Verslagen en Mededeelingen der Kon. VI. Académie, 1927.

(5) Voir p. 70 de ce numéro. Pour de plus amples détails consulter également G. Théry O. P. « EDITION CRITIQUE DES PIECES RELATIVES AU PROOES D’ECKHART CONTENUES DANS LE MANUSCRIT 33b DE LA BIBLIOTHEQUE DE SOEST », l. c. Paris, 1929.

(6) Ruusbroec et son entourage devaient cependant connaître les textes des Sermons XV et LXXXVII. Voir la traduction de ces deux sermons dans le présent numêro. Voir aussi Walther Dolch : DIE VERBREITUNG OBERLANDISCHER MYSTIKERWERKE IM NIEDERLANDISCHEN, Teil I. Diss, Leipzig 1909,

(7) Voir notre traduction page 91.

(8) Ms. 667 de la Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, à Bruxelles.

(9) Ms. Biblio, Royale de Belgique, N° 888.890.

jeudi, 03 mars 2011

Liberalism is the cause of inequality

One of the pitfalls of being human is the many perceptual traps that can ensnare us. Spotting an object in water is difficult because of refraction; our ability to estimate the lengths of lines is hampered by nearby objects. Colors surrounding an object affect how we perceive it.

For the past five hundred years, a perceptual trap has gained momentum. This trap starts simply: we see civilization around us, and that it provides for us, and we assume that it will always be that way, even if we make changes. So greedily we demand as much as possible for ourselves and ignore the consequences of those acts.

More than a political movement, this is a social movement based on the wishful thinking of people who are not engaged in maintaining the civilization itself. They view society as like a supermarket: you take what you want, pay your money, and worry about nothing else.

In the USA and Europe, a resistance movement has awakened to resist this perceptual trap. We resist it both as an economic doctrine (socialism/liberalism) and as a philosophy of civilization (narcissism). We don’t want it in any form because it is the opposite of a healthy attitude toward life, and its results are correspondingly bad.

A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244. – MJ

The good liberals over at MotherJones.com, who provided us the above quotation and several informative charts, have stepped into a perceptual trap. They assume that individual equality exists, therefore that if inequality exists, something must be wrong.

They point out an interesting fact, however: the average income in the USA is dropping, while the incomes of the “super-rich” are rising, which is symptomatic of a third-world population. However, what they forget is that liberalism caused this vast inequality by undermining the middle class:

  • Spreading the wealth. The agenda of liberalism is equality, which becomes filtered through the socialist notion of redistributing the wealth from rich to poor; if we’re all equal, the rich have that wealth unfairly, they think. The problem is that in doing this they take money away from those who are more competent, and who will use it to make more money, and spread it to people who are by definition less able to make competent financial decisions.
  • Importing voters. A favorite liberal tactic since 1965 has been to import voters from third-world nations. The problem with this is that it skews the population demographic toward low-income low-skilled workers. This cheapens our cost of basic labor-oriented tasks, but in turn, forces the same amount of value to go to more people and ensures that any given task requires more people. The result is a dissipation of value, so that even if the number values remain the same, quality declines, as we’ve seen happen in American construction, poultry/meat and manufacturing since the 1990s.
  • Fast money. Bill Clinton effected an economic miracle by making money easy and quick to borrow. While this provided a great stimulus to business in the short-term, in the long-term it shifted profitability from production of value-adding goods to the shuffling of paper and reselling of financial instruments. This produced an economy that while “profitable” existed entirely on paper. This not only creates a new class of super-rich manipulators, but also devalues the currency as investors worry about its actual value.
  • Red tape. Affirmative action, H1-B visas, anti-discrimination legislation, Obamacare, environmental regulations, extensive safety rules and a Byzantine tax code afflict our businesses with miles of red tape. This in turn makes them less competitive, which they compensate for by cutting corners, which in turn reduces the value of their goods relative to those who have fewer obligations. Even more, this tempts them to outsource, where they don’t have to pay these costs.
  • Unions. Unions combine the worst of all of the above: they spread money to the wrong people, including organized crime; they create violent social polarization between classes; they support and encourage immigration; they generate miles of red tape; they spread the wealth from those who make more wealth to those who sit in offices and pore over books of rules. In addition, unions wreck our competitiveness by creating more internal communication over non-productive issues, having more rules and more people to buy in on any compromise. If unions were biological we’d call them cancers.
  • Allegiance. Removing the more organic questions of culture, heritage and ability, the liberal Utopia promotes people based on their allegiance to political concepts. Whether Viet Cong recruits reciting Mao, or Bono from U2 having the “right opinions,” we make a new elite for political motives. Surely Barack Obama, with his missing dissertation and questionable accomplishments, serves as a vanguard for this new political ueber-class.

All of the above are liberal darlings because the above support the liberal agenda of equality through wealth distribution and fragmentation of any majority group (who could possibly be more equal than the rest of us). In addition, the American left gets most of its funding from unions and associated concerns.

Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party. – Washington Examiner

If you want to know why your money is decreasing in value, and thus inequality is increasing, it is because of the liberal left’s attempts to make inequality disappear.

Before the left took over, the philosophy of Europe and the United States was that we would provide opportunity and reward those who were more competent. This natural philosophy, a lot like natural selection, enabled us to grow and challenge ourselves and produce an elite of smart, capable, dedicated people.

As the fight over the federal budget gathers pace, we will also see big confrontations between the reformers and the hostages to the status quo in Washington. Democrats are salivating over a possible backlash against Republican lawmakers if they force a government shutdown in early March by insisting on spending cuts. And complacent Republicans are dreading that very possibility in the face of the onslaught from the more energetic House Republican freshmen who recently passed that bold measure to reduce the federal budget by $61 billion.

The United States has been getting away with surreal levels of debt for far too long. If the dollar were not the world’s reserve currency, a major debt crisis would have exploded by now. The total outstanding federal debt has reached $14.1 trillion, almost the equivalent of what the economy produces in a year. Meanwhile, the annual deficit, a major source of that ever-mounting debt, stands at more than $1.6 trillion for 2011. It represents almost 11 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — which compares pitifully even with Greece, whose deficit in 2010 amounted to 8 percent of that country’s economy.

As a result of these imbalances, and of the illusion that unemployment can be brought down with government spending, the Federal Reserve has been printing dollars like crazy — half of them to purchase Treasury bonds. The policy of easy money has contributed to skyrocketing commodity prices, whose ugly political, social and economic consequences we are only beginning to see around the world. – Real Clear Politics

As the left got more popular, it introduced the perceptual trap: why can’t we all just be equal, spread the wealth, be pacifists, and live in tolerance of each other. The problem is that wealth redistribution penalizes the competent and responsible, and replaces them with a few vicious controllers and vast clueless masses who do not care about social problems they cannot understand.

There’s a major difference between the US aristocracy and the meritocracy though. Aristocrats like Henry Chauncey, bred at Saint Grottlesex boarding schools and the Ivy League, were conscious of their privilege and social responsibility, and focused on developing the character and leadership skills necessary for public service. Many of today’s meritocrats, in contrast, don’t believe it’s a rigged game in their favour, and commit themselves to winning it at all costs, which means stepping on everyone else. As a result, too many lack self-reflection or self-criticism skills, meaning even those who are grossly overpaid give themselves outrageous bonuses.

But as long as the global elite is armed with and shielded by the belief that they are a genuine meritocracy they’d find it morally repulsive to make the necessary compromises. Whether American or Chinese, individuals who focus too much on ‘achievement,’ and who believe the illusion that they’ve achieved everything simply through their own honest hard work, often think very little of everyone else as a result.

That’s the ultimate irony of the otherwise admirable efforts of Conant and Chauncey to create a fairer world: in giving opportunities for the bright and able (regardless of whether they are rich or poor), they’ve created a selfish and utilitarian elite from which no Conant or Chauncey will be likely to appear from in the future. – The Diplomat

Liberal policies create inequality. By enforcing an equality of political means, instead of practical ones, they create a false elite. This false elite then takes from the middle class, and funnels that wealth into a cancerous government and a new “elite” fashioned out of those who benefit from gaming the system. These aren’t innovators and trailblazers; they’re people who have learned to manipulate society for their benefit.

In addition, much like the Soviet Union and the ill-fated Southern European socialist states, these entitlement states spread the wealth too thin and re-direct it from growth areas into dead-ends, resulting in not only bankruptcy but a delusional population who, when the money runs out, won’t stop their own benefits in order to get everyone through the trouble. A nation that is disunified like that isn’t a nation; it’s a supermarket.

Traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited amount of good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft; they must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy, rather than admiration of success, reigns.

In contrast, Western civilization began with a very different, ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner — if he was left to his own talents, and if his success was protected by, and from, government — would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better-off. – National Review

The psychology of hating inequality produces greater inequality. Where natural inequality may seem unfair, it works to produce “more equal” people who rise above the rest and, through their competence, give to the rest of us a functional society with profitable industries. Artificial equality on the other hand forces us all to the same level of poverty, leaving a few cultural/political elites to rule us, as is the case in most third-world nations.

The choice is upon us: first-world inequality, or third-world equality? The battle in Wisconsin is symbolic more than it is a choice of Wisconsin as a place particularly in need of fixing; it’s a battle over the philosophy that will define us, and decide which of these two societies we pick.

mercredi, 02 mars 2011

Reflections on Carl Schmitt's "The Concept of the Political"

Reflections on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political

Greg Johnson

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

“Why can’t we all get along?”–Rodney King

carl_schmitt-20300.jpgCarl Schmitt’s short book The Concept of the Political (1932) is one of the most important works of 20th century political philosophy.

The aim of The Concept of the Political is the defense of politics from utopian aspirations to abolish politics. Anti-political utopianism includes all forms of liberalism as well as international socialism, global capitalism, anarchism, and pacifism: in short, all social philosophies that aim at a universal order in which conflict is abolished.

In ordinary speech, of course, liberalism, international socialism, etc. are political movements, not anti-political ones. So it is clear that Schmitt is using “political” in a particular way. For Schmitt, the political is founded on the distinction between friend and enemy. Utopianism is anti-political insofar as it attempts to abolish that distinction, to root out all enmity and conflict in the world.

Schmitt’s defense of the political is not a defense of enmity and conflict as good things. Schmitt fully recognizes their destructiveness and the necessity of managing and mitigating them. But Schmitt believes that enmity is best controlled by adopting a realistic understanding of its nature. So Schmitt does not defend conflict, but realism about conflict. Indeed, Schmitt believes that the best way to contain conflict is first to abandon all unrealistic notions that one can do away with it entirely.

Furthermore, Schmitt believes that utopian attempts to completely abolish conflict actually increase its scope and intensity. There is no war more universal in scope and fanatical in prosecution than wars to end all war and establish perpetual peace.

Us and Them

What does the distinction between friend and enemy mean?

First, for Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy is collective. He is talking about “us versus them” not “one individual versus another.”

Schmitt introduces the Latin distinction between hostis (a collective or public enemy, the root of “hostile”) and inimicus (an individual and private adversary, the root of “inimical”). The political is founded on the distinction between friend (those on one’s side) and hostis (those on the other side). Private adversaries are not public enemies.

Second, the distinction between friend and enemy is polemical. The friend/enemy distinction is always connected with the abiding potential for violence. One does not need to actually fight one’s enemy, but the potential must always be there. The sole purpose of politics is not group conflict; the sole content of politics is not group conflict; but the abiding possibility of group conflict is what creates the political dimension of human social existence.

Third, the distinction between friend and enemy is existentially serious. Violent conflict is more serious than other forms of conflict, because when things get violent people die.

Fourth, the distinction between friend and enemy is not reducible to any other distinction. For instance, it is not reducible to the distinction between good and evil. The “good guys” are just as much enemies to the “bad guys” as the “bad guys” are enemies to the “good guys.” Enmity is relative, but morality—we hope—is not.

Fifth, although the friend/enemy distinction is not reducible to other distinctions and differences—religious, economic, philosophical, etc.—all differences can become political if they generate the friend/enemy opposition.

In sum, the ultimate root of the political is the capacity of human groups to take their differences so seriously that they will kill or die for them.

It is important to note that Schmitt’s concept of the political does not apply to ordinary domestic politics. The rivalries of politicians and parties, provided they stay within legal parameters, do not constitute enmity in Schmitt’s sense. Schmitt’s notion of politics applies primarily to foreign relations — the relations between sovereign states and peoples — rather than domestic relations within a society. The only time when domestic relations become political in Schmitt’s sense is during a revolution or a civil war.

 

Sovereignty

 

If the political arises from the abiding possibility of collective life or death conflict, the political rules over all other areas of social life because of its existential seriousness, the fact that it has recourse to the ultimate sanction.

For Schmitt, political sovereignty is the power to determine the enemy and declare war. The sovereign is the person who makes that decision.

If a sovereign declares an enemy, and individuals or groups within his society reject that declaration, the society is in a state of undeclared civil war or revolution. To refuse the sovereign’s choice of enemy is one step away from the sovereign act of choosing one’s own enemies. Thus Schmitt’s analysis supports the saying that, “War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself.”

 

Philosophical Parallels

The root of the political as Schmitt understands it is what Plato and Aristotle call “thumos,” the middle part of the soul that is neither theoretical reason nor physical desire, but is rather the capacity for passionate attachment. Thumos is the root of the political because it is the source of attachments to (a) groups, and politics is collective, and (b) life-transcending and life-negating values, i.e., things that are worth killing and dying for, like the defense of personal or collective honor, one’s culture or way of life, religious and philosophical convictions, etc. Such values make possible mortal conflict between groups.

The abolition of the political, therefore, requires the abolition of the human capacity for passionate, existentially serious, life and death attachments. The apolitical man is, therefore, the apathetic man, the man who lacks commitment and intensity. He is what Nietzsche called “the last man,” the man for whom there is nothing higher than himself, nothing that might require that he risk the continuation of his physical existence. The apolitical utopia is a spiritual “boneless chicken ranch” of doped up, dumbed down, self-absorbed producer-consumers.

Schmitt’s notion of the political is consistent with Hegel’s notion of history. For Hegel, history is a record of individual and collective struggles to the death over images or interpretations of who we are. These interpretations consist of the whole realm of culture: worldviews and the ways of life that are their concrete manifestations.

There are, of course, many interpretations of who we are. But there is only one truth, and according to Hegel the truth is that man is free. Just as philosophical dialectic works through a plurality of conflicting viewpoints to get to the one truth, so the dialectic of history is a war of conflicting worldviews and ways of life that will come to an end when the correct worldview and way of life are established. The concept of human freedom must become concretely realized in a way of life that recognizes freedom. Then history as Hegel understands it—and politics as Schmitt understands it—will come to an end.

Hegel’s notion of the ideal post-historical state is pretty much everything a 20th (or 21st) century fascist could desire. But later interpreters of Hegel like Alexandre Kojève and his follower Francis Fukuyama, interpret the end of history as a “universal homogeneous state” that sounds a lot like the globalist utopianism that Schmitt wished to combat.

Why the Political Cannot be Abolished

If the political is rooted in human nature, then it cannot be abolished. Even if the entire planet could be turned into a boneless chicken ranch, all it would take is two serious men to start politics—and history—all over again.

But the utopians will never even get that far. Politics cannot be abolished by universal declarations of peace, love, and tolerance, for such attempts to transcend politics actually just reinstitute it on another plane. After all, utopian peace- and love-mongers have enemies too, namely “haters” like us.

Thus the abolition of politics is really only the abolition of honesty about politics. But dishonesty is the least of the utopians’ vices. For in the name of peace and love, they persecute us with a fanaticism and wanton destructiveness that make good, old-fashioned war seem wholesome by comparison.

Two peoples occupying adjacent valleys might, for strategic reasons, covet the high ground between them. This may lead to conflict. But such conflicts have finite, definable aims. Thus they tend to be limited in scope and duration. And since it is a mere conflict of interest—in which both sides, really, are right—rather than a moral or religious crusade between good and evil, light and darkness, ultimately both sides can strike a deal with each other to cease hostilities.

But when war is wedded to a universalist utopianism—global communism or democracy, the end of “terror” or, more risibly, “evil”—it becomes universal in scope and endless in duration. It is universal, because it proposes to represent all of humanity. It is endless, of course, because it is a war with human nature itself.

Furthermore, when war is declared in the name of “humanity,” its prosecution becomes maximally inhuman, since anything is fair against the enemies of humanity, who deserve nothing short of unconditional surrender or annihilation, since one cannot strike a bargain with evil incarnate. The road to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki was paved with love: universalistic, utopian, humanistic, liberal love.

Liberalism

 

Liberalism seeks to reduce the friend/enemy distinction to differences of opinion or economic interests. The liberal utopia is one in which all disputes can be resolved bloodlessly by reasoning or bargaining. But the opposition between liberalism and anti-liberalism cannot be resolved by liberal means. It is perforce political. Liberal anti-politics cannot triumph, therefore, without the political elimination of anti-liberalism.

The abolition of the political requires the abolition of all differences, so there is nothing to fight over, or the abolition of all seriousness, so that differences make no difference. The abolition of difference is accomplished by violence and cultural assimilation. The abolition of seriousness is accomplished by the promotion of spiritual apathy through consumerism and indoctrination in relativism, individualism, tolerance, and diversity worship—the multicult.

Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists, they are just less capable of honesty.

Liberalism, however, generally prefers to kill us softly. The old-fashioned version of liberalism prefers the soft dissolution of differences through cultural assimilation, but that preference was reversed when an unassimilable minority rose to power in the United States, at which time multiculturalism and diversity became the watchwords, and the potential conflicts between different groups were to be managed through spiritual corruption. Today’s liberals make a fetish of the preservation of pluralism and diversity, as long as none of it is taken seriously.

 

Multicultural utopianism is doomed, because multiculturalism is very successful at increasing diversity, but, in the long run, it cannot manage the conflicts that come with it.

The drug of consumerism cannot be relied upon because economic crises cannot be eliminated. Furthermore, there are absolute ecological limits to the globalization of consumerism.

As for the drugs of relativism, individualism, tolerance, and the multi-cult: only whites are susceptible to their effects, and since these ideas systematically disadvantage whites in ethnic competition, ultimately those whites who accept them will be destroyed (which is the point, really) and those whites who survive will reject them. Then whites will start taking our own side, ethnic competition will get political, and, one way or another, racially and ethnically homogeneous states will emerge.

Lessons for White Nationalists

To become a White Nationalist is to choose one’s friends and one’s enemies for oneself. To choose new friends means to choose a new nation. Our nation is our race. Our enemies are the enemies of our race, of whatever race they may be. By choosing our friends and enemies for ourselves, White Nationalists have constituted ourselves as a sovereign people—a sovereign people that does not have a sovereign homeland, yet—and rejected the sovereignty of those who rule us. This puts us in an implicitly revolutionary position vis-à-vis all existing regimes.

The conservatives among us do not see it yet. They still wish to cling to America’s corpse and suckle from her poisoned tit. But the enemy understands us better than some of us understand ourselves. We may not wish to choose an enemy, but sometimes the enemy chooses us. Thus “mainstreamers” will be denied entry and forced to choose either to abandon White Nationalism or to explicitly embrace its revolutionary destiny.

It may be too late for mainstream politics, but it is still too early for White Nationalist politics. We simply do not have the power to win a political struggle. We lack manpower, money, and leadership. But the present system, like all things old and dissolute, will pass. And our community, like all things young and healthy, will grow in size and strength. Thus today our task is metapolitical: to raise consciousness and cultivate the community from which our kingdom—or republic—will come.

When that day comes, Carl Schmitt will be numbered among our spiritual Founding Fathers.

mardi, 01 mars 2011

The Culture of Critique & the Pathogenesis of Modern Society

The Culture of Critique & the Pathogenesis of Modern Society

Michael O'Meara

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Reinhart Koselleck
Critique and Crises: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988

La politique, c’est le destin. — Napoleon

Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis (1959) is one of the great dissertations of the 20th-century German university system.

It cast new light not just on the past it re-presented, but on the present, whose own light informed its re-presentation.

This was especially the case with the potentially cataclysmic standoff between American liberalism and Russian Communism and the perspective it gave to Koselleck’s study of the Enlightenment origins of the Modern World.

How was it, he asked, that these two Cold War super-powers seemed bent on turning Europe, especially Germany, into a nuclear wasteland?

The answer, he suspected, had something to do with the moralizing Utopianism of 18th-century rationalism, whose heritage ideologically animated each hegemon.

1. The Absolutist Origins of the Modern State

Koselleck was one of Carl Schmitt’s postwar “students” and his work is indebted to Schmitt’s The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938).

Like his mentor, Koselleck saw modern ideologies, despite their atheistic rejection of faith, as forms of “political theology” that spoke to the faith-based heart that decides how one is to live.

In this sense, the self-proclaimed Enlightenment of the 18th century was a philosophical rebuttal to political Absolutism, whose institutional response to the breakdown of medieval Christendom occurred in ways that frustrated the liberal aspirations of the rising bourgeoisie.

In the century-long blood-letting that had followed the Protestant critique of medieval Catholicism, Europe’s ecclesiastical unity and its traditional social supports were everywhere shattered.

As the old estates broke down and old ties and loyalties were severed, there followed a period of anarchy, in which Catholics and Protestants zealously shed each others blood in the name of their contending truths.

In this sectarian strife — this bellum omnium contra omnes — where ecclesiastical authority ceased to exist and each man was thrown back upon his individual conscience, morality became a banner of war and the public observance of morality a justification for murdering Europeans with dissenting beliefs.

It was the advent of the Absolutist State system, philosophically anticipated in Hobbes’ Leviathan, that brought these bloody religious conflicts to a halt, establishing a peaceful basis to European life — by “privatizing” morality, secularizing authority, and depriving individual mentalities of political effect.

The neutralization of religious belief that came with the Absolutist secularization of the State would secure conditions requisite to the citizen’s peaceful pursuit of his private will or gain, as private ideals ceased to be obligatory duties and the State became “the artifact of atomized individuals.”

Absolutist regimes succeeded in this way in “reducing measures of contingency, conflict, and compulsion” to the status of differences of opinion — bare, in effect, of religious significance, as “external compulsion” imposed restraints on the individual’s “inner freedom.”

The historians’ designated Age of Absolutism and Enlightenment begins, then, with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which brought not just the Thirty Years War in the German-speaking lands, but all Europe’s religious wars to an end (except on the borderlands of Ireland and the Balkans) — and ends only with the advent of another European civil war, which opened with the liberal revolutions of 1776/1789 and closed with the English triumph over Napoleon in 1814.

History, though, rarely conforms to the tidy categories scholars make of it.

Unlike the Continent, England went from religious war to Absolutism and then to bourgeois revolution and finally to a bourgeois Restoration all in the course of a half-century (c. 1642–1688), experiencing an intense though only brief period of Absolutism.

England’s expanding maritime power, opened to all the world it dominated, had, in fact, merely a transitional need of Absolutism, for it would soon become the first implicitly liberal of the “modern” regimes.

Koselleck focuses on the longer, more pronounced Continental developments, treating England as a variant of the larger trend.

In his depiction, the Absolutist State system emerging after the Treaty of Westphalia was based on a transformation of political authority — which divided the “public sphere” into two sharply separate domains: That of political authority proper (the sovereign State) and that of society, conceived as a subaltern realm of individual “subjects.”

The subject’s moral conscience in this system was subordinated to the requirements of political necessity — what Hobbes called “reason.”  This restricted morality to the social realm of private opinion, depriving it of political effect.

With Absolutism, the public interest, about which the sovereign alone had the right to decide, ceased to lay under the jurisdiction of the individual’s moral conscience.

The Continent’s new monarchical States — with Louis XIV’s France the model of the others — would govern according to a raison d’état (Staatsräson), which made no reference to religious considerations.

Law here was severed from special interests and religious factions, becoming part of a domain whose political decisions — ideally — transcended “Church, estate, and party.”

“To traditional moral doctrines, [Hobbes] opposes one whose theme is political reason.”

Persecuting churches and religiously bound social fractions were hereby forced to give way to the sovereign authority of the Absolutist monarch, who recognized no higher authority than God Himself.

As Absolutist peace took priority to faith, the individual subject — previously situated in a loose medieval hierarchy, imbued with certain corporate rights and responsibilities — was transformed into an apolitical subject.

He had, as such, to submerge his conscience to reasons of State — to reasons necessary for maintaining the peace.

This privatization of morality dictated by the State’s secularization was not directed against religion per se, but against a religious conscience whose political claims, in a period of general breakdown, threatened war.

What the Absolutist State did — and what Hobbes theoretically legitimated in the Leviathan — was to transform the individual’s conscience into a matter of “opinion,” of subjective belief, separate from politics — and thus from the political reasons of the State.

This was accomplished by making the public interest the prerogative of the sovereign, not that of the individual’s religious conscience, for the latter inevitably led to religious strife.

In this secular political system, State policy and laws became the sole concern of the sovereign monarch, who stood above religion, anchoring his laws not in a higher transcendence, but in State imperatives.

In Hobbes’ famous formulation: “Laws are made by authority, not by truth.”

Hereafter, State policy and laws would be legislated by reasons of State — not the moral conscience and not self-interest and faction.  For the State could fulfill its function of securing peace and maintaining order only if individuals ceded their rights to the sovereign, who was to embody their larger welfare.

Contested issues were thereby reduced to differences of opinion that could be resolved by reasons of State.

Through Absolute sovereignty, it was possible again to create an internal realm of peace, separate from other Absolutist State systems, each of which possessed a similar peaceful interior, where the individual was free to believe whatever he wished as long as no effort was made to impose his “private” belief on the public, whether Catholic or Protestant.

This would keep religious fanaticism from trespassing on domestic tranquility and, at the same time, guarantee the State’s integrity.

Among Absolutist States, relations remained, of course, that of “a state of nature” — for each upheld and pursued policies based on their own rational sense of self-interest (raison d’état).

Conflict and war between Absolutist States were nevertheless minimized — not just by the fact that they accepted the integrity of the other’s moral conscience — but also by a sense of sharing the same Christian civilization, the same standards of significance and style, the same general, interrelated history that distinguished them from non-Europeans.

On this basis, the community of European States after 1648 grew into a family of sovereign powers, each respectful of the others’ domestic integrity, each of whose kings or queens shared the blood of other royal families, each of whose wars with other Europeans was governed by a jus publicum europaeum.

2. The Culture of Critique

It was the failure to comprehend the nature of the Absolutist State system (its avoidance of divisive political questions of faith and belief) that gave rise to the Enlightenment and its culture of critique.

For once the religious wars came to an end and authority was secularized, European society “took off.”

By the time Louis XIV died in 1715, the bourgeoisie, formerly an important but subordinate stratum of medieval European society, had become the chief economic power of an 18th-century society more and more dependent on its economic prowess. Made up of “merchants, bankers, tax lessees, and other businessmen” who had acquired great wealth and social prestige, this rising class (whose deism and materialism took “political” form in liberalism’s scientistic ideology) was nevertheless kept from State power and powerlessly suffered monarchical infringements on its monied wealth.

Resentful of State authority, the intelligentsia of this rising class took its stand in the private moral realm, which the Absolutist State had set aside for the subject and his moral conscience.

Through this breech between the public and the private, the chief ideologue of this rising bourgeoisie, John Locke, would step. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding – “the Holy Scripture of the modern bourgeoisie” — helped blur the boundary between moral and State law, as the former assumed a new authority and the distinction between the two diminished.

Pace Hobbes, Locke argued that bourgeois moral laws (now divorced from religion and anchored in rationalist notions of self-interest devoid of transcendental reference) had arisen in the human conscience, which the State had exempt from interference. As such, the citizen had a right to pass moral judgements on the State.

Such judgements, whatever the motive, eventually made State law dependent on the consent or rejection — the rule, in effect — of the bourgeoisie’s allegedly “objective” opinion.

In this situation, the bourgeois view of virtue and vice — its “religion of technicity” — took on a political charge, superseding the realm of private individual opinion, as it became “public opinion.”

At the same time, bourgeois critics favored the risk-free sphere of the unpolitical private realm, where they sought to dictate policy. Instead, then, of forthrightly challenging the underlying metaphysical principles of the Absolutist order, they framed their defining metaphysical identity (matters of faith — in this case their godless theology) in moral and economic terms devoid of political responsibility.

Bourgeois morality, not the State’s “reason,” proceeded in this way to take hold of the public — society — and set the standard for the “moral value of human action.”

This opened the way to a reconfiguration of the Absolutist relationship between morality and politics.

The public realm in Locke’s bourgeois philosophy was accordingly re-conceived as a social realm of individual consciences and this realm’s opinion as the “law” that was to bind the public.

Bourgeois morality, as such, not only entered, but soon conquered society, as its private views rose to that of public opinion.

Few, moreover, would be able to resist the pressure of its judgment.

“Reasons of State” were henceforth subject to the secular, calculating “reason” of the bourgeoisie — as “reason” ceased to be the avoidance of civil war and became the self-interest of the rationalist acting individual.

This made society increasingly independent of the State, just as State laws were increasingly subject to the “empowering” moral (and economic) judgments of society.

In the course of the 18th century, the bourgeois as citizen would assume, through his culture of critique, the “rank of a supreme tribunal” — ultimately passing judgment on the State (though doing so safely removed from the day-to-day imperatives of the political realm).

In England, following the oh-so Glorious Revolution of 1688 (a terrible, fateful year, with more to follow, in Irish history), the Whig bourgeoisie, through Parliament, became dominant, entering into an alliance with the constitutionally-bound monarch (William of Orange).

On the more religiously polarized continent, where Absolutist States had a greater role to play, the antithesis between State legislation and bourgeois secular morality (rooted in Protestantism’s critical essence) assumed a different, more antagonistic character.

This continental polarization of morals and politics — compounded by the growing social weight of the bourgeoisie and the discontent generated by its political disenfranchisement — grew in the course of the 18th century, as the bourgeoisie increasingly assumed the leadership of “society.”

Its moral critique of the State and of the ancien régime — a critique posed in secular and rationalist, rather than Christian terms — is what is known as the “Enlightenment,” that metapolitical “culture of critique,” whose light allegedly emanated from the bourgeoisie’s rational conscience (which was modeled in many ways on that of the Jews, for it was based on the dictates of money and its unpolitical affirmation of the private).

3. The Crisis of the Old Order

“When and whenever [men] are subjects without being citizens, they inevitably endow other concerns and pursuits—economic, social, cultural—with an independent and hence rival authority.” This was the great failing of Absolutism.

In such a situation, the voluntary associations of the bourgeoisie—Masonic lodges, salons, clubs, coffee-houses, academies, sociétés de pensées, the “Republic of Letters”—became rival centers of moral authority and eventually rival models of political authority.

The criticism of these bourgeois organs sought to “test” the validity or truth of its subject, making reason a factor of judgement in its process of pro and con.

Bourgeois judgements critical of the political system set off, in turn, a crisis threatening the existing State.

As scientific materialists, armed with a naive analytic-empiricist epistemology, such bourgeois critics waged their subversive campaign with no appreciation of existing political realities or the imperatives and limits these realities imposed. This would make their moral crusade unrealistic, Utopian, unconcerned with the “contingency, conflict, and compulsion” that occupies and defines the political field.

Their Utopian proposals (their anti-political politics) constituted, as such, no actual political alternative, based as they were on a purely formal, abstract understanding of the political realm, which it subjected to the individual’s moral conscience.

But once the private moral realm started to impinge on the political sphere of the Absolutist State, the State itself was again called into question.

First unconsciously and then increasingly consciously, the bourgeois Enlightenment applied its Utopian and ultimately hypocritical standards to the State, whose political imperatives were ignored rather than recognized for what they were—so as not to complicate its own geometrical schemes of reform.

The Enlightenment, it followed, was wont to see itself in moral terms, not political—not even metapolitical—ones.

This self-deceiving politics could only end in ideological excess and terror—for the sole way to realize its Utopian political theology would be by forcing others to accept and submit to it.

The result, Koselleck concludes, was the advent of the modern condition—this “sense that we are being sucked into an open and unknown future, the pace of which has kept us in a constant state of breathelessness ever since the dissolution of the traditional ständische societies.”

The turbulent “tribune of reason” bequeathed by the Enlightenment aimed, moreover, at every sphere of human endeavor—not just the Absolutist State, traditional Catholic Christianity, or the numerous corporate restraints inhibiting the market.

Everything historically given was, as such, to be re-conceived as a historical process that had to be re-directed, reformed, and re-planned, as the dictates of fate gave way to the rationalist obliteration of political aporia (i.e., the impasses or challenges posed by exceptional situations determined only by the sovereign).

Through its Règne de la Critique, the bourgeoisie (as prosecutor, judge, and jury) subjected the State to an enlightened conscience that debunked its “rationality” and increasingly advocated, or implied, its replacement.

With this rationalist critique of Absolutism came an unfolding philosophy of history—which promised a victory that was to be gained without struggle or war, that applied to all mankind, and that would bring about a better, more rational, and peaceful future—if only “reason” (i.e., bourgeois interests) was allowed to rule.

Through this critique, politics—the tough decisions fundamental to human existence—was dissolved into an Utopian project indifferent to the historical given. Everything, it followed, was subject to criticism, nothing was taboo—not the “order of human things,” not even life itself would be spared the alienation that came with the critic’s unpolitical reason.

Then, as the critic assumed the right to subject the whole world to his verdict, acting as “the king of kings,” criticism was “transformed into a maelstrom that sucks the present from under the feet of the critic”—for his criticisms amounted to an endless assault on the present in the name of a far-off, but allegedly enlightened future.

4. Modern Pathogenesis

At the highest level, Koselleck offers “a generic theory of the modern world”—one that seeks to explain something of our age to us.

In his view, criticism engendered crisis, calling the future into question.

The Enlightenment’s culture of critique could, however, only culminate in revolution—a revolution whose new order would privilege the rich and powerful (and, in time, the Jews).

By subordinating law to morality, ignoring the differences that divide men over the great questions of existence, the liberal State born of Enlightenment culture stripped sovereignty of its power.

Henceforth bourgeois morality became the invisible framework of the State, as sovereign authority was changed into an act of persuasion and reason—and the essence of politics (no longer the polemic over fundamental problems of human existence) became the non-political rule of a discursive bourgeoisie indifferent to matters of faith and desirous of a fate-less society without a sovereign State.

As social and political realities were indiscriminately mixed and subjected to the invisible opinion of the bourgeois public, based on an ostensively objective reason, everything failing to accord with that opinion became an injustice, subject to reform.

Society here assumed the right to abrogate whatever laws it wished, inadvertently establishing a reign of permanent revolution.

Refusing to recognize the State’s amoral (rather than immoral) character, the emerging bourgeois political system—with its culpablizing, but “value free” politics and its civil ideal taken as the universal destiny of all humanity—not infrequently had to resort to naked force to realize its Utopia: the terror and mass killings that followed 1789, the nuclear holocaust inherent in the Cold War, the on-going, unrelenting destructuration of the local and global today.

The consequence has been liberalism’s non-political State (whether in its 19th-century guise as a Night Watchman State or in its 20th-century Nanny State form). This State replaced politics with morality, tradition with planning, disagreements with a cold indifference to all that matters. It became thus a legal order, a Rechtsstaat, supposedly unattached to any constituting system of ascription or belief, and thus beyond any “exception” that might make visible the actual basis of bourgeois rule.

In this situation, where politics were negated and political problems were reduced to “organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks,” the world was emptied of “seriousness” and turned into a vast realm of entertainment, where the bourgeois was allowed to enjoy the fruits of his acquisitions.

With liberalism, then, politics ceases to be a destiny and becomes a technique hostile to all who refuse its philistine philosophy of history—for the linear notion of progress inherent in this philosophy undermines and “reforms” everything that has historically ensured the integrity of white life.

Source: TOQ Online, Dec. 24, 25, & 26 2009

lundi, 28 février 2011

Plato & Indo-European Tripartition

Edouard RIX

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Translated by Greg Johnson

plato.jpgIn 1938, Georges Dumézil discovered, the existence of a veritable Indo-European “ideology,” a specific mental structure manifesting a common conception of the world. He writes:

According to this conception, which can be reconstructed through the comparison of documents from the majority of ancient Indo-European societies, any organization, from the cosmos to any human group, requires for its existence three hierarchical types of action, that I propose to call the three fundamental functions: (1) mastery of the sacred and knowledge and the form of temporal power founded upon it, (2) physical force and warlike valor, and (3) fruitfulness and abundance with their conditions and consequences.[1]

On the social plane, one finds this tripartition in the whole Indo-European realm, from India to Ireland, the three functions corresponding schematically to the priest-kings, the warriors, and finally to the producers, peasants, and craftsmen. In traditional India, the Brahmins correspond to the first function, the Kshatriyas to the second, and the Vaishyas to the third. According to Julius Caesar, in the extreme west of the Indo-European realm, Celtic society was composed of Druids, of Equites or Knights, and Plebs, the people.

In ancient Greece, however, there had been a tendency quite early on to eliminate any trace of the trifunctional ideology. According to Dumézil, “Greece is not helpful to our case. Mr. Bernard Sergent made a critical assessment of the expressions of the trifunctional structure, isolated most of the time in the process of fossilization, that one might recognize there: it is next to nothing compared with the wealth offered by India and Italy.”[2] However, an attentive reader of the works of Plato can find proof there of the survival of functional tripartition in traditional Greece.

The Platonic Ideal City

In the Republic, Plato discusses the ideal city, affirming that “the classes that exist in the City are the very same ones that exist in the soul of each individual.”[3] According to Plato’s analysis of human nature, the human soul has three parts: reason, located in the head, which enables us to think; feeling, located in the heart, that enables us to love; and desire, located in the belly, that drives us to sustain ourselves and reproduce. Each part of the soul has its own specific virtue or excellence: wisdom, courage, and temperance. Justice is the proper relationship of the three parts. According to Plato, the constitution of the city is merely the constitution of the soul writ large.

Concretely, the philosopher distinguishes three functions within the city. First, “those who watch over the City as a whole, enemies outside as well as friends within,”[4] the guardians, who correspond to the head, seat of intelligence and reason, the Logos. Then, the “auxiliaries and assistants of the decisions of the rulers,”[5] who correspond to the heart, seat of courage, Thymos. Finally the producers, craftsmen and peasants, who correspond to the belly, seat of the appetites. “You who belong to the City,” Plato explains, “are all brothers, but the god, in creating those among you able to govern, mixed gold in their material; this is why they are the most valuable. He mixed silver into those who are able to be auxiliaries, and as for the rest, the farmers and craftsmen, he mixed in iron and bronze.”[6]

Plato emphasizes that, “A city seems to be just precisely when each of the three natural groups present in it performs its own task.”[7] Indeed, just as an individual must subject his stomach to his heart, and his heart to his reason, the crafts must be subjected to the art of the warriors, who themselves must be subjected to the magistrates, i.e., to politics—this last being inseparable from philosophy, for the magistrates must become philosophers.

Plato also distinguishes three kinds of political regimes, each of which is related to the one of the functions of the city and by extension with one of the parts or faculties of the human soul. Regimes ruled by reason include monarchy, government by one man, and aristocracy, or government by the best. “Timocracy” is Plato’s term for government by warriors, which is ordered by the noble passions of the heart. Regimes ruled by the lowest passions of the human soul and material appetites include oligarchy, or rule by the rich; democracy, or rule by the majority; and tyranny, the rule of one man who follows appetite, not reason.

Without a doubt, this Platonic ideal city resting on three strictly hierarchical classes, reproduces the traditional Indo-European tri-functional organization of society. Indeed, in Greece which completely seems to have forgotten tripartition, Plato entrusts the political life of the city to philosopher-kings, the guardians, assisted by a military caste, the auxiliaries, who reign over the lower classes, the producers.

Plato is convinced that only the guardians, i.e., the sages, have the capacity to use reason equitably for the community good, whereas ordinary men cannot rise above their personal passions and interests. On the other hand, the members of the ruling caste must lead an entirely communal life, without private property or family, as well as many elements of egoistic temptation, division, and, ultimately, corruption. “Among them, no good will be private property, except the basic necessities,” decrees the philosopher, who recommends, moreover, “that they live communally, as on a military expedition,” and who among the inhabitants of the city “they are the only ones who have no right to have money or gold, or even to touch them; they are the only ones forbidden to enter private homes, wear ornaments, or drink from silver and gold containers.”[8]

“Because,” he adds, “as soon as they privately own land, a dwelling, and money, they will become administrators of their goods, cultivators instead of being the guardians of the city, and instead of being the defenders of the other citizens, they will become their tyrants and enemies, hated and hating in turn, and they will pass their lives conspiring against the others and will become the objects of conspiracy, and they will often be more afraid of their interior enemies than those outside, bringing themselves and the whole city to ruin.”[9] Moreover, their children will be removed at birth in order to receive a collective military education.

This “Platonic communism,” a virile and ascetic communism that has nothing to do with the Messianic nightmares of Marx and Trotsky, is not unrelated to the national communitarianism of Sparta.  As Montesquieu put it with some justice, “Plato’s politics is nothing more than an idealized version of Sparta’s.”

Notes

1. G. Dumézil, L’oubli de l’homme et l’honneur des dieux et autres essais. Vingt-cinq esquisses de mythologies (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 94.

2. Ibid, p.13.

3. Platon, La République (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), p. 262.

4. Ibid, p. 199.

5. Ibid, p. 200.

6. Ibid, p. 201.

7. Ibid, p. 245.

8. Ibid, p. 205.

9. Ibid, pp. 205–206.

Source: Réfléchir & Agir, Winter 2009, no. 31.

samedi, 26 février 2011

The Radical Tradition

  • TOMISLAV SUNIC – History and Decadence: Spengler’s Cultural Pessimism Today
  •  
  • JONATHAN BOWDEN – A Polyp Devours Its Feed, Paracelsus Unzipped: An Analysis of F.W. Murnau’s Film, Nosferatu
  • TROY SOUTHGATE – Heidegger: The Application of Meaning in An Increasingly Transient World
  •  
  • WAYNE JOHN STURGEON – Anarcho-National-Syndicalist: Some Reflections on Being Shot by Both Sides
  •  
  • ALEX KURTAGIC – Lessons From the Music Industry

BRETT STEVENS – The Civilisation Cycle and its Implications for the Individual

MAXIM BOROZENEC – An Introduction to Intertraditionale

DR. K.R. BOLTON – The Art of Rootless Cosmopolitanism: America’s Offensive Against Civilisation

VINCE YNZUNZA – The Manifesto of the Psychedelic Conservative

TROY SOUTHGATE – Schopenhauer and Suffering: Eternal Pessimist or Prophet for our Times?

WAYNE JOHN STURGEON – Anarcho-Gnosticism: Golgotha of the Absolute Mind 

SEAN JOBST – Towards a Sufi Anarch: The Role of Islamic Mysticism Against Modernist Decay

BEN CRAVEN – Are Human Rights a Fiction of Modern, Western Liberal Democracies That Bring Us No Closer to a Shared Ethical Framework?

TONY GLAISTER – 50 Years On: Notes on the New Right

WAYNE JOHN STURGEON – The Impossible Dream: An Introduction to Christian Anarchism

KEITH PRESTON – The Nietzschean Prophecies: Two Hundred Years of Nihilism and the Coming Crisis of Western Civilization

TROY SOUTHGATE – Transcending the Beyond: Third Position to National-Anarchism

GWENDOLYN TOYNTON – Reforming the Modern World: Addressing the Issue of Cultural Identity

You may recognize some of these names from around here. We’re looking forward to this interesting release which takes politics from beyond the narrow linear confines of self-interest into a concept of human life as more than the sum of its parts.

Available in March 2011 from Primordial Traditions.

Le désenchantement du monde (de Marcel Gauchet)

Le désenchantement du monde (M. Gauchet)

Gauchet reprend l’expression de « désenchantement du monde », utilisée par Max Weber pour décrire l’élimination du magique dans la construction du Salut, mais ce qu’il désigne par là va au-delà de l’objet désigné par Weber. Pour Marcel Gauchet, le religieux en tant que principe extérieur au social, et qui modèle le social depuis l’extérieur, c’est fini. Et l’originalité de l’Occident aura consisté, précisément, à opérer cette incorporation totale, dans le social, des fonctions traditionnellement allouées au religieux.

Le « désenchantement du monde », version Gauchet, ce n’est donc pas seulement l’élimination du magique dans le religieux, c’est bien encore la disparition du religieux en tant qu’espace collectif structurant et autonome.

Il s’agit donc ici de comprendre pourquoi le christianisme aura été, historiquement, la religion de la sortie de la religion. L’enjeu de cette histoire politique de la religion : comprendre, au-delà des naïvetés laïcardes, quelles fonctions la religion tenait dans les sociétés traditionnelles, et donc si d’autres moyens permettront de les maintenir.

 

*

 

Commençons par résumer « l’histoire politique de la religion », vue par Marcel Gauchet. C’est, après tout, pratiquement devenu un classique – un des très rares grands textes produits par la pensée française de la fin du XX° siècle.

Le fait est que jusqu’ici, le religieux a existé dans toutes les sociétés, à toutes les époques connues. Qu’il ait tenu une fonction dans chaque société, à chaque époque, n’est guère douteux. Une première question est de savoir si cette fonction fut constamment la même, et, dans le cas contraire, comment elle a évolué.

Pour Gauchet, il faut mettre à jour une structure anthropologique sous-jacente dont le religieux fut l’armature visible à un certain stade du développement historique. Cette structure fondamentale, c’est ce qu’il appelle : « L’homme contre lui-même ». Il entend par là la codification par l’homme d’un espace mental organisé autour du refus de la nature (celle du sujet, celle des autres hommes, celle de l’univers), afin de rendre possible un contrepoids salvateur, le « refus du refus » (qui permet d’accepter les autres hommes au nom du refus du sujet auto référant, d’accepter le sujet au nom de son refus, et finalement d’accepter la nature de l’univers au nom du refus général appliqué à la possibilité de la refuser). Le religieux a été, pour Marcel Gauchet, la forme prise, à un certain moment de l’histoire de l’humanité, par une nécessité incontournable induite par la capacité de refus propre à l’esprit humain : l’organisation du refus du refus, de la négation de la négation – bref, du ressort de la pensée même.

Gauchet renverse ici la conception classique, qui voit dans la religion un obstacle à la perspective historique. Faux, dit-il : la religion a eu pour mission de rendre possible l’entrée de l’humanité dans l’histoire, précisément en organisant une entrée « à reculons ». L’humanité ne voulait pas, n’a jamais voulu être historique. L’historicité lui enseigne une mortalité qu’elle redoute, qu’elle abhorre. La religion, en organisant le refus dans l’ordre symbolique, a été la ruse par laquelle l’humanité, tournant le dos à son avenir, pouvait aller vers lui sans le voir. Une méthode de gestion psychologique collective, en somme : en refusant dans l’ordre symbolique, on rend possible l’acceptation muette du mouvement permanent qu’on opère, par ailleurs, dans l’ordre réel, à un rythme si lent qu’on peut maintenir l’illusion d’une relative stabilité.

Sous cet angle, la « progression du religieux » peut être vue comme son oblitération progressive, au fur et à mesure que l’humanité accepte de regarder en face son inscription dans l’histoire, et d’assumer, donc, son refus de la nature. Des religions primitives au christianisme, on assiste ainsi à une lente réappropriation du fondement du religieux par l’homme, jusqu’à ce que « Dieu se fasse homme ».

C’est un long trajet car, au départ, dans la religion primitive, les Dieux sont radicalement étrangers à l’homme. Leur puissance le surpasse infiniment. Les succès humains ne peuvent être dus qu’à la faveur divine, les échecs à la colère (forcément juste) des divinités offensées. Voilà toute la religion primitive. Elle est étroitement associée à un système politique de chefferie, où l’opposition pouvoir-société est neutralisée par l’insignifiance (réelle) du premier, rendue possible par l’insignifiance (volontairement exagérée) de la seconde. La création d’une instance symbolique de régulation au-delà de la compétence humaine a d’abord été, pendant des millénaires, une manière de limiter la compétence des régulateurs humains. Le holisme fondamental des sociétés religieuses, nous dit Gauchet, ne doit pas être vu comme le contraire de notre individualisme, mais comme une autre manière de penser le social : un social qui n’était pas, et n’avait pas besoin d’être, un « social-historique ». C’était un social « non historique », où la Règle était immuable, étrangère au monde humain, impossible à contester.

Cette altérité du fondement de la règle, propre aux religions des sociétés primitives, est, pour Gauchet, « le religieux à l’état pur ». En ce sens, l’émergence progressive des « grandes religions » ne doit pas être pensée comme un approfondissement, un enrichissement du religieux, mais au contraire comme sa déconstruction : plus la religion va entrer dans l’histoire, moins elle sera extérieure au social-historique, et moins, au fond, elle sera religieuse.

Cette remise en cause du religieux s’est faite par étapes.

D’abord, il y eut l’émergence de l’Etat. En créant une instance de régulation mondaine susceptible de se réformer, elle a rendu possible le questionnement de la régulation. Il a donc fallu codifier un processus de mise en mouvement de « l’avant » créateur de règles. Les dieux se sont mis à bouger ; jusque là, ils vivaient hors du temps, et soudain, ils ont été inscrits dans une succession d’évènements. L’intemporel s’est doté de sa temporalité propre. Enjeu : définir, par la mythologie, une grille de cautionnement de la domination politique, ancrée dans un récit fondateur. La hiérarchie des dieux impose la hiérarchie des hommes à travers la subordination des hommes aux dieux, subordination rendue possible par le début de l’effacement de la magie (où le magicien maîtrise les forces surnaturelles) et l’affirmation du cultuel (où le prêtre sert des forces qui le dépassent). Le processus de domination mentale (des prêtres par les dieux, des hommes par les prêtres) devient ainsi l’auxiliaire du processus d’assimilation/englobement par l’Etat, donc de la conquête. Ce processus s’est accompli progressivement, en gros entre -800 et -200, dans toute l’Eurasie.

Le contrecoup de ce mécanisme, inéluctablement, fut le tout début de l’émergence de l’individu. Le pôle étatique définit un universel ; dès lors, le particulier devient pensable non par opposition aux autres particuliers, mais par opposition à l’universel. L’individu commence alors  à être perçu comme une intériorité. Et du coup, l’Autre lui-même est perçu dans son intériorité.

D’où, encore, l’invention de  l’Outre-Monde. Pour un primitif, le surnaturel fait partie du monde. Il n’existe pas de rupture entre le naturel et le surnaturel, entre l’immanent et le transcendant. Au fond, il n’existe pas d’opposition esprit/matière : tout est esprit, ou tout est matière, ou plutôt tout est esprit-matière, « souffle ».

Et d’où, enfin, le mouvement interne du christianisme occidental.

 

*

 

Progressivement, dans le christianisme, la dynamique religieuse se déplace pour s’installer à l’intérieur de l’individu. Le temps collectif étant historique, le temps religieux devient le temps individuel. Ce déplacement de la dynamique religieuse est, pour Gauchet, le mouvement interne spécifique du christianisme occidental.

Les autres mondes sont restés longtemps bloqués au niveau de la religion-Etat, du temps historique religieux ; seul le monde chrétien, surtout occidental, a totalement abandonné le temps collectif à l’Histoire, pour offrir à la religion un terrain de compensation, le temps individuel. Gauchet écrit : « Avec le même substrat théologique qui a porté l’avènement de l’univers capitaliste-rationnel-démocratique, la civilisation chrétienne eût pu rejoindre la torpeur et les lenteurs de l’Orient. Il eût suffi centralement d’une chose pour laquelle toutes les conditions étaient réunies : la re-hiérarchisation du principe dé-hiérarchisant inscrit dans la division christique du divin et de l’humain. »

Il n’en est pas allé ainsi. L’Occident est devenu une exception, et sa dynamique religieuse est allée jusqu’à son terme.

Il en est découlé, dans notre civilisation et au départ seulement dans notre civilisation, un accroissement des ambitions et de l’Histoire, et de la religion.

Jusque là, les deux termes étaient limités l’un par l’autre. De leur séparation découle la disparition de leurs limitations. L’Histoire peut théoriquement se prolonger jusqu’à sa fin. Elle a cessé d’être cyclique. La religion, de son côté, peut poursuivre la réunification de l’Etre à l’intérieur de la conscience humaine.

L’adossement de ces deux termes ouvre la porte à une conception du monde nouvelle, dans laquelle l’homme est son co-rédempteur, à travers la Foi (qui élève son esprit jusqu’à l’intelligence divine) et les œuvres (qui le font participer d’une révélation, à travers l’Histoire). Seul le christianisme, explique Gauchet, a défini cette architecture spécifique – et plus particulièrement le christianisme occidental.

Progressivement, à travers le premier millénaire, d’abord très lentement, le christianisme élabore cette architecture. Avec la réforme grégorienne et, ensuite, l’émergence des Etats français et anglais, l’Occident commence à en déduire des conclusions révolutionnaires mais logiques. Le pouvoir politique et le pouvoir spirituel se distinguent de plus en plus clairement.  La grandeur divine accessible par la conscience devient étrangère à la hiérarchie temporelle, elle lui échappe et fonde un ordre autonomisé à l’égard du politique. En retour, le politique se conçoit de plus en plus comme un produit de l’immanence. Le souverain, jadis pont entre le ciel et la terre, devient la personne symbolique d’une souveraineté collective, issue des réalités matérielles et consacrée avant tout à leur administration. Avec la Réforme, l’évolution est parachevée : l’Etat et l’Eglise sont non seulement distincts, mais progressivement séparés.

Les catégories de la « sortie de la religion », c'est-à-dire le social-historique dans le temps collectif, le libre examen dans le temps individuel, sont issues directement de cette évolution. Ici réside sans doute un des plus importants enseignements de Gauchet, une idée qui prend à revers toute la critique classique en France : notre moderne appréhension du monde en termes de nécessité objective n’est pas antagoniste de la conception chrétienne de l’absolu-divin personnel : au contraire, elle en est un pur produit.

 

*

 

La conclusion de Gauchet est que la « sortie de la religion » ouvre la porte non à une disparition du religieux, mais à sa réduction au temps individuel (une évolution particulièrement nette aux USA, où la religion est surpuissante comme force modelant les individus, mais quasi-inexistante comme puissance sociale réelle). Et d’ajouter qu’avec l’émergence puis la dissolution des idéologies, nous avons tout simplement assisté à la fin des religions collectives, qui sont d’abord retombées dans le temps historique à travers la politique, et s’y sont abîmées définitivement.

Sous-entendu : voici venir un temps où il va falloir se débrouiller sans la moindre religion collective, et faire avec, dans un cadre en quelque sorte purement structuraliste, en nous résignant à être des sujets, sans opium sacral pour atténuer la douleur de nos désirs. Car c’est à peu près là, au fond, la seule fonction du religieux qui, aux yeux de Gauchet, ne peut pas être assurée par le social radicalement exempt de la religion.

En quoi, à notre avis, Gauchet se trompe…

L’expulsion du religieux, retiré totalement du temps collectif, implique que ce temps-là, le temps collectif, ne peut plus être pensé en fonction de la moindre ligne de fuite. S’il n’y a plus du tout de religieux dans le temps collectif, alors la mort des générations en marque les bornes. Et donc, il n’y a plus de pensée collective sur le long terme, au-delà de la génération qui programme, qui dirige, qui décide (aujourd’hui : la génération du baby-boom).

Eh bien, n’en déplaise à Marcel Gauchet et sans nier que le structuralisme soit une idée à creuser, il nous semble, quant à nous, que les ennuis de l’Occident commencent là, dans cette désorientation  du temps collectif. Tant que le religieux se retirait du temps collectif, il continuait à l’imprégner d’une représentation du très long terme, et aspirait en quelque sorte le politique vers cette représentation : ce fut la formule de pensée qui assura l’expansion de l’Occident, le retrait du religieux ouvrant un espace de développement accru au politique, à l’économique, au scientifique, tous lancés secrètement à la poursuite du religieux qui s’éloignait. MAIS à partir du moment où le religieux s’est retiré, l’espace qu’il abandonne est déstructuré, et il n’y a plus de ligne de fuite pour construire une représentation à long terme.

La dynamique spirituelle de la chrétienté occidentale a suscité des forces énormes aussi longtemps qu’elle était mouvement ; dès l’instant où elle parvient à son aboutissement, elle débouche sur une anomie complète. Oserons-nous confesser que le vague « structuralisme » de Gauchet, conclusion mollassonne d’un exposé par ailleurs remarquable, nous apparaît, à la réflexion, comme une posture de fuite, et une manière pour lui de ne pas tirer les conclusions logiques de sa propre, brillante et tout à fait involontaire enquête sur la décadence occidentale ?

 

Principes stratégiques fondamentaux

Clausewitz_Bokomslag+med+portr%C3%A4tt.jpg

 

Principes stratégiques fondamentaux

Edouard RIX

Ex: http://tpprovence.wordpress.com/ 

Si l’on estime, comme Spengler, que « la politique n’est qu’un substitut à la guerre utilisant des armes plus intellectuelles » (1), appliquer la grille de raisonnement propre à la stratégie militaire au combat politique peut s’avérer fécond.

 

Les grands principes en matière de stratégie militaire, sont au nombre de cinq. Le 1er, la concentration des forces, consiste à frapper avec le maximum de puissance l’ennemi, en un point choisi comme étant le plus faible de son dispositif, pour obtenir soit une percée, soit sa destruction totale. En effet, seule l’attaque du fort au faible est payante, l’attaque du fort au fort ne conduisant qu’au carnage, comme l’Histoire l’a montré. Tel fut le cas de Gettysburg en 1863, qui coûta 23 000 hommes aux Nordistes et 28 000 aux Confédérés, soit un tiers de leurs troupes. Même résultat tragique pour l’offensive anglaise de la  Somme, en juillet 1916, qui entraîna des pertes ahurissantes, la résistance allemande n’ayant pas été entamée par les tirs d’artillerie préalables : 19 240 morts le 1er jour, et plus de 600 000 jusqu’en novembre ! A noter que la concentration des forces implique la maximisation de la puissance de feu : il faut impérativement concentrer son feu pour s’assurer la destruction de l’ennemi, plutôt que de le disperser sur plusieurs cibles…

2ème grande règle, l’économie des forces, qui consiste à privilégier un objectif principal sans s’attarder sur des objectifs secondaires. La défense cherche à disperser l’attaquant, alors que ce dernier doit se concentrer sur son objectif.

3ème principe, la surprise, l’un des éléments les plus importants de la stratégie militaire. On distingue deux niveaux : la surprise stratégique, qui consiste à cacher son plan de campagne, ses objectifs et ses manœuvres; la surprise tactique qui consiste à dissimuler la marche ou la position de ses armées, un nouveau matériel ou une supériorité technique. Pour profiter pleinement de la surprise, il importe que celle-ci débouche sur un avantage décisif : on revient à la concentration des forces, car il faut à tout prix « tirer pour tuer ».

4 ème règle de base à respecter : l’unité de commandement, qui garantit la rapidité de réaction et l’intégrité du plan initialement mis en œuvre. Elle doit être entendue comme unité de pensée, que se soit entre les armes (Terre, Air, Mer) ou entre les conceptions stratégiques. Mais ce principe est rarement atteint, même au sein d’une armée nationale, encore moins entre des commandements alliés de plusieurs nations. Les Américains ont toujours su unifier leur direction, que ce soit pendant la guerre de Sécession, celle du Pacifique, ou en Europe avec Eisenhower. Le commandement interallié de Foch, nommé commandant en chef du Front de l’Ouest en mars 1918 est un autre exemple de commandement unifié voulu par les Alliés. A l’inverse, les Allemands ont, au cours des deux guerres mondiales, totalement échoué à mettre en place cette unité de commandement, que ce soit au niveau des stratégies nationales ou des armes (Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Waffen SS).

Dernier élément, l’initiative des opérations : c’est le but essentiel de la manœuvre, qui découle de la maîtrise des autres principes stratégiques. Le camp qui dispose de l’initiative bénéficie d’un avantage moral considérable. Mais celui qui déclenche les hostilités n’est pas forcément celui qui engage les opérations : en 1939, si les Alliés surprennent Hitler en lui déclarant la guerre, ils restent sur leurs positions, abandonnant toute initiative stratégique au führer.

UN EXEMPLE DE MAITRISE DES PRINCIPES STRATÉGIQUES : AUSTERLITZ

La bataille d’Austerlitz, menée de main de maître par Napoléon, est le meilleur exemple d’une stratégie réussie.

Apprenant la formation de la 3ème coalition, Napoléon exécute un retournement complet de son armée massée à Boulogne, qu’il envoie à Ulm battre l’Autriche, s’emparant de l’initiative stratégique. Face aux Russes et aux restes de l’armée autrichienne, il étudie soigneusement la carte de Moravie et sélectionne le site d’Austerlitz, imposant le champ de bataille aux Coalisés.

Le commandement est unitaire chez les Français. Clausewitz, fortement influencé par Napoléon, retiendra le principe du « généralissime ». A l’inverse, le conseil de guerre coalisé est bicéphale (Autriche-Russie), et le plan finalement adopté est un compromis boiteux entre les deux alliés.

Le plan de bataille français est simple et expliqué la veille aux soldats par Napoléon : il consiste à attirer l’aile gauche coalisée dans un piège en faisant reculer l’aile droite française, afin de prendre le plateau de Pratzen avec le gros des forces et, à partir de cette brèche, effectuer une manœuvre en tenaille. Au contraire, le plan des Coalisés est compliqué, exposé lors d’un interminable conseil de guerre où le maréchal Koutouzov s’endort ! Pis : les ordres sont donnés aux officiers russes au dernier moment et en allemand !

Les Français pratiquent la concentration des forces avec comme objectif principal le plateau de Pratzen. Les Coalisés se donnent plusieurs objectifs, d’où une dispersion de leurs forces qui sont battues en détail. Résultat : l’emploi des grands principes stratégiques offre sa plus grande victoire à Napoléon.

LA BATAILLE DE FRANCE DE MAI 40

Autre exemple parlant, la campagne de France de 1940. L’avantage de l’initiative stratégique est perdu par les Alliés lors de l’invasion allemande de la Pologne, et ils ne la retrouveront plus.

L’état-major allemand fait preuve de flexibilité en changeant son plan sous l’impulsion d’Hitler. La réédition du plan Schlieffen de 1914 initialement prévu (poussée massive vers le nord de la France à travers la Belgique) est abandonné. Alors que le plan français prévoit une avance du gros des forces alliées pour contrer l’avance ennemie, les allemands attaquent la Belgique et la Hollande tandis que leurs blindés percent à Sedan, dans les Ardennes, un endroit considéré par la doctrine française comme infranchissable par les chars (cours d’eau plus massif forestier). Les Allemands exploitent à fond la surprise.

Sur l’objectif principal, Hitler concentre 7 divisions blindées, face à 7 divisions d’infanterie et 2 divisions de cavalerie légère françaises. Le principe de l’attaque du fort contre le faible est respecté, les Allemands cherchant à réaliser la percée à un point précis, le Schwerponkt, point de rupture, en l’occurrence à Sedan. Grâce à la mobilité de leurs divisions blindées, ils foncent vers la Mer du Nord et isolent le gros de l’armée alliée en Belgique par un « coup de faux ».

PRINCIPES STRATÉGIQUES ET COMBAT POLITIQUE

Ces principes stratégiques ne visant qu’un but, la victoire, il semble donc pertinent de les appliquer aussi sur un plan politique.

Incontournables, la concentration et l’économie des forces, qui consistent à frapper avec le maximum de force militante le point faible de l’adversaire politique. En 1968, Alain Robert créera le GUD en partant du constat qu’un noyau dur de militants concentrés sur un bastion universitaire valait mieux que des centaines d’adhérents éparpillés (cf Occident). Le nid de résistance, véritable Nanterre à l’envers, ne pouvait qu’être Assas, plus favorable sociologiquement. Si l’on excepte Jean-Marie Le Pen, candidat gyrovague (Paris, Auray, Marseille, Nice), tous les dirigeants du FN se sont efforcés de constituer un fief électoral inexpugnable : le couple Stirbois à Dreux, Bruno Mégret à Vitrolles, Marine Le Pen à Hénin-Beaumont. A chaque fois, l’on retrouve les mêmes ingrédients qui assurent la victoire finale : concentration des forces vives du parti sur un point faible de l’ennemi – en l’occurrence, une mairie socialiste gangrénée par l’insécurité, l’immigration et les scandales -, et au final percée électorale décisive qui ouvre une brèche dans le mur du silence politico-médiatique.

Sur le plan idéologique aussi, il s’agit de frapper du fort au faible, et sur un nombre limité d’ «objectifs ». Pour percer, un mouvement politique doit se limiter à quelques idées simples et porteuses. L’émergence du FN dans les années 80 s’explique ainsi par « la règle des trois I » : Immigration, Insécurité, Impôts. Lorsque Le Pen reniera ce triptyque, en 2007, il obtiendra son pire score présidentiel. En revanche, l’attaque du faible au fort, c’est-à-dire sur des thèmes totalement verrouillés par le Système – antisémitisme, révisionnisme – déclenche immédiatement un violent tir de barrage médiatique et relève du grand suicide politique… Lancer l’offensive sur ces forteresses puissamment défendues par 50 ans de terrorisme intellectuel, c’est faire bien peu de cas de l’élément primordial de toute stratégie : la surprise.

Autre principe à ne pas ignorer, l’unité de commandement. L’expérience a montré la supériorité du principe du chef (qui a parlé de « führerprinzip » ?…) sur une direction collégiale. Initiative nationale, mensuel du Parti des forces nouvelles, présentait deux photos, l’une de Le Pen, l’autre du bureau politique du PFN, ainsi sous-titrées : « Face à face : Président (…) et Bureau Politique. Deux conceptions de l’action » (2). L’histoire a tranché entre un leader charismatique et une direction multiple et, au final, acéphale. Alors que Le Pen persévéra dans la dénonciation du giscardisme et de la « fausse droite », les jeunes gens du PFN multiplieront les stratégies les plus variées, passant d’un soutien à VGE en 1974, à un ralliement à Chirac en 1977, puis au lancement de l’Eurodroite avec le MSI néo-fasciste !

Ces principes stratégiques théorisés par les auteurs classiques suivent ce que l’historien de l’Antiquité gréco-latine Victor D. Hanson a appelé Le modèle occidental de la guerre (3), qui repose entièrement sur la recherche de la bataille décisive, chère à Clausewitz – bataille qui doit conduire à l’écrasement de l’adversaire -, ignorant d’autres formes de guerre, comme la guerre assymétrique.

Edouard Rix, Réfléchir & Agir, automne 2010, n°36.

NOTES

(1) O. Spengler, L’Homme et la technique, Gallimard, 1969, p. 120.

(2) Initiative nationale, novembre 1977, n°22, pp. 18-19.

(3) Victor D. Hanson, Le modèle occidental de la guerre, Les Belles Lettres, 2001, 298 p.

 

vendredi, 25 février 2011

Democracy Needs Aristocracy

Democracy Needs Aristocracy, by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne

Democracy Needs Aristocracy
by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne
221 pages, Harper Collins, $15.

In the early pages of Democracy Needs Aristocracy the author mentions Alexis de Toqueville and his groundbreaking Democracy in America and not surprisingly, the newer work continues in the footsteps of that classic with a broad-reaching thesis on the nature of government that sides with the organic over the mechanistic.

Experienced writer Peregrine Worsthorne mixes his far-reaching thesis with personal narrative and precise examples in the form of contradictions that eliminate exceptions to his arguments. He writes in a hybrid style somewhere between relaxed academia and vivid popular non-fiction but with the logical thoroughness of a legal brief. Like the topic of the book itself, his style spans a vast breadth of knowledge and distills it into a single voice, like condensation turning mist to rain.

As a consequence, Democracy Needs Aristocracy is both one of those books that zooms by at light speed as massive ideas thrust the reader across time and space, and is also like a textbook an exacting read that requires the full attention of the reader. Each chapter drops important pieces into our understanding of history and how we arrived at the present time, not all of them controversial assertions so much as forgotten and decontextualized ones.

The style is not circular so much as it returns to core concepts after breaking them apart, bringing the forgotten but necessary counterpart to deconstruction, re-integration, to the reading process. As a result reading this book is like peeling an onion, with each layer revealing more of the big picture. It offers what few books can manage anymore: a vertiginous sense of discovery and concepts dropping into place that can explain the subtle mysteries of our present political climate.

Worsthorne’s thesis suggests that aristocracy, or an organic social order of the most qualified who enforce a balance that linear-thinking government cannot, not only arises naturally but if well-selected, provides an elite who are dedicated to public service more than themselves. It succeeds because it is decidedly non-mechanistic: he delights in the social aspects of an elite dedicated to stewardship, and illustrates how civility as a guiding principle ensures politics do not become abandoned to abstractions unrelated to life itself.

Finally, he contrasts society under rule by aristocracy, whose members are secure in their position and steeped in its tradition, with the “meritocratic” rise of the “classless society,” and points out in detail how the classless society fails to achieve its objectives and may achieve instead the inverse. As both an aristocrat and a journalist, Worsthorne describes the view from both sides of the bench on this issue.

A good part of the book addresses the necessary conditions of his thesis, including the most difficult to define parts such as “civility” and the notion of an organic, non-governmental caste who nonetheless provide the backbone to all governmental activities. For moderns, understanding caste is like trying to understand the use of a pressure cooker inside a black hole; Worsthorne elaborates slowly, but works up to his point:

“Aristocracy, however, is different because the bonds forged at birth and maintained at every subsequent stage in life, create a degree of loyalty between members as strong as, if not stronger than, those that bind together the members of a nation. The Old Etonian George Orwell tried to escape them but never wholly succeeded, concluding sadly, at the end of his life, that it was easier to change your party than change your class. Speaking personally, I cannot imagine life without class, which is not a passive condition but one that provides you with a general culture, a network to which you naturally belong, a stream of history in which you feel free and safe — almost a collective individuality.” (86)

In his retelling of history, the UK survived the time of the French Revolution because unlike the French, the English did not centralize their power into a single agency, but made government less efficient and instead cultivated a class of experts, united by a code of civility or “gentlemanly” conduct, such that they could conduct the appropriate circumventions of authority in smoke-stained lounges over glasses of cognac.

In this Worsthorne’s view is a hybridization of elitism and anarchy, in which the purpose of aristocracy is to avoid a powerful central government and its Boolean rules, and instead to cultivate a pool of talent that can organically and covertly address problems that are beyond the understanding of the electorate. His appeal to civility, the mode of aristocracy, is a call for a moral renovation to the modern state.

“For as a result of this method of selection, Britain’s political class had inherited enough in-built authority — honed over three centuries — and enough ancestral wisdom — acquired over the same period — to dare to defy both the arrogance of intellectuals from above and the emotions of the masses from below; to dare to resist the entrepreneurial imperative; to dare to try to raise the level of public conversation; to dare to put the public interest before private interests; to dare to try to shape the nation’s will and curb its appetites.” (50)

Bureaucracies, which he describes as the “natural enemies” of aristocrats, rely on rigid rules of a binary nature. When triggered, they must follow through blindly, causing periodic outrages so ludicrous they remind us of the rote actions of a machine out of control. In contrast, Worsthorne advocates the reliance on a class of people he describes as devoted to public duty, and their ability to intervene in place of blind rules.

As he reminds us, good leadership is unpopular because it does not pander to the arrogant intellectuals or emotional masses. In fact, it avoids special interests so that the nation as a whole can thrive. He describes it with a metaphor from his boarding school:

“I wanted the best of both worlds: authority figures who at one and the same time both protected me and left me alone; who came to my aid in emergencies but otherwise allowed me to mind my own business. Officious busybody prefects who kept an eye on one all the time were more a liability than an asset. But unofficious prefects who noticed what was going on from a corner of the eye were the opposite. Even more to be desired were the few older boys who turned down the office of prefect but were natural authority figures on the side of justice and order requiring, by virtue of strong individual character, no official badge of office.” (22)

This winding book, arcane like an ancient castle yet refreshing like finally finding the answer to your research in a footnote in the last book even tangential to your “official” topic, provides many such challenging ideas. Underlying every part of it is a distrust in the idea of a government that unites its public and private faces and thus is manipulable by special interests; Worsthorne argues for an older yet, if you look at it critically, more mature form of government, where rule by quality of people predominates under rule by book of rules.

Democracy Needs Aristocracy is a challenging and engrossing read, and even for those hostile to aristocracy, provides a thorough exploration of where our current systems of government fail. His thesis is flexible, and deliberately written from a liberal-friendly position, to show that democracy becomes anti-elitist mob rule without some mediating elite to keep anti-egalitarianism from becoming crowd revenge. As such, it is every bit as eternal as de Toqueville, and presents a vision of government that none can afford to fully ignore today.

You can find this book at Amazon for $15 or from Harper Collins UK for £9.

mardi, 22 février 2011

Multiculturalism is Dead - Where Do We Bury the Body?

Multiculturalism is Dead – Where Do We Bury the Body?

By Jim GOAD

Ex: http://takimag.com/

Suicide.jpgI’ll never forget a painting I saw at a West Berlin youth hostel in 1985. The background depicted bombed-out ruins, presumably Dresden after the Allied firestorm. In the foreground were two women, their backs to us as they faced the charred, blown-out buildings. One woman was starting to lift her arm in a Sieg Heil salute, while the other rushed to grab her arm and stop her.

What a weird image it was, mixing national pride with national defeat and national self-loathing.

After World War II ended, no nation on Earth has been force-fed as many Guilt Sandwiches as the Germans, despite the fact that they’d lost seven to nine million of their own Volk in that conflict. One never hears about “the nine million.” It’s nearly verboten to even mention them.

When I saw that painting in 1985, Germany had already endured four decades of post-WWII shaming. Despite all that, I knew that sooner or later, that one lady would tire of holding down the other lady’s arm.

Sixty-five years after World War II’s end, Germany is finally becoming OK with being German again. On October 16 while addressing her Christian Democratic Union party, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said:

In Frankfurt am Main, two out of three children under the age of five have an immigrant background.…This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about each other, this approach has failed, utterly failed.

Loud applause greeted that last sentence.

For five years running, the stout, doughy Merkel has been Nummer Eins on Forbes magazine’s list of “The World’s Most Powerful Women,” so her statement is no small potatoes. But only a month earlier, Merkel was telling Germans that they should get used to seeing more mosques in their country. She was also condemning Thilo Sarrazin’s “absurd, insane opinions” as expressed in his shockingly popular book Germany Abolishes Itself.

It’s unclear why Merkel has suddenly shifted her ample hips rightward. She could be responding to recent polls showing that six in ten Germans would like to see Islam restricted, three in ten say they feel their country is “overrun by foreigners,” seventeen percent say that Jews have an undue influence over German affairs [oops!], and thirteen percent say they’d welcome a new Führer [now hold it right there!].

There go those pesky Germans again, refusing to hate themselves. How dare a German say anything besides “I’m sorry” for the next thousand years?

I don’t see the upside to our newer, more multicultural America. The only thing we share is the currency, and maybe that was the point all along.

Everyone expected the Germans to get an attitude sooner or later—after all, they’re the Germans. What seems more troubling, at least to the sworn enemies of All Things European, is that all of Europe seems to be getting the same attitude simultaneously.

What one might refer to as indigenous Europeans—you know, the palefaces, the Ice People, the Ghost Men, the Evil Aryans, the Abominable Snowmen—are beginning to chafe at the iron rainbow to which they’ve been yoked since World War II. Geert Wilders has blossomed into a political force solely by promising to protect Dutch culture from Islamofascism. An anti-immigration party just placed twenty anti-immigration asses into the Swedish Parliament’s seats. France is goin’ wild banning burqas and sending the Roma packing. The Swiss have flipped the bird at minarets. Putin’s brand of post-Soviet Russian nationalism is insanely popular, at least among insane Russians.

Even in the self-loathing, culturally obsequious, crushed-and-bleeding former empire that is the UK, comments in response to Merkel’s proclamation were lopsidedly in favor of what she said. Most of the anonymous online whisperers, presumably British nationals, agreed that multiculturalism was a colossal failure in their country as well.

Reading the comments, I saw parallels between Europe’s brand of “multiculturalism” and the American product. Both hither and yon, there’s anger about racial job quotas, oppressive speech codes, and double standards regarding who’s allowed to show ethnic pride.

What’s important is the way multikulti has unfolded and where. You don’t see such sensitivity training being forced upon anyone in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or South America. You don’t hear China, Japan, or Israel being lectured to swing open their doors to foreigners. Almost exclusively, multiculturalism is a psychological marketing program designed for majority-white countries. Often, it is sold with the idea that whites are paying a historic debt, are reaping what they’ve sown, that what goes around comes around, that the wheel has turned full-circle, the chickens are coming home to roost, and that it’s time to pay the swarthy piper his due.

Country by country, continent by continent, there’s a sense that the newer, darker arrivals are receiving preferential treatment over those who’ve been there for generations. In the UK, it’s called “Positive Discrimination.” In America, it’s called “affirmative action” and “amnesty.” And across every border where whites are a majority, there’s a creeping sense that politicians don’t give a fuck about how they feel. They never asked for these new waves of immigrants, and they had no choice in this odd social-engineering experiment that’s demolishing whatever they used to share as a common culture.

Suddenly, this doesn’t seem so much like a celebration of all cultures as it does punishment of a specific culture. And that doesn’t sound like such a swell recipe for having everyone get along.

We’ll be continually reminded that European satellite nations such as Canada, the USA, and Australia were settled atop indigenous skulls, so the land-grabbing descendants of those race-murderers have no right to whine about being gradually wiped out themselves by newcomers.

Once again, for Christ’s sake, whether he’s dead or alive: Two wrongs don’t make a right. If colonialism was wrong then, it’s wrong now. Multiculturalism is merely colonialism with a prettier name. I realize and concede the fact that it awards us with a dazzling array of ethnic restaurants unparalleled in their tastiness.

Under multiculturalism, we have a wider selection of food…and no one talks to anyone anymore. Many of us now speak different languages and wouldn’t even know how to talk to one another. Rather than erasing borders, multiculturalism has merely created new borders within borders. Rather than destroying nationalism, it creates mini-nations within nations.

If we’re going to push multiculturalism’s glories, shouldn’t we point out where has it worked in the past? If diversity is a strength, why did stretched-too-thin empires such as ancient Rome and the Soviet Union eventually fall from the weight of their own diversity?

Stop calling me a racist and shoot some believable answers at me. I really want to hear them.

As always, the “chattering classes” are working out their postcolonial guilt complexes at the lower classes’ expense. Either they’ve known what they were doing all along or they haven’t, and I’m not sure which is worse.

It’s dangerous to ignore the fact that all the technology in the world, the ceaseless multicultural brainwashing that’s been laser-beamed into our eyeballs over the past 65 years, has not eradicated the basic human tendency to be tribal. If they didn’t fully murder such instincts in the Germans—and God fucking knows they tried hard with the Germans—maybe such instincts can’t be killed.

Yes, I realize we’re all human. If that’s your point, you’ve already made it—and, I might add, at a tremendous expense. What you fail to realize is that humans tend to be tribal. And if you get too many tribes, you don’t have a nation anymore.

I guess we should celebrate the fact that even though no one speaks to one another anymore, at least the people who aren’t speaking to one another are more “multicultural” than they used to be back when people actually spoke to one another.

What kind of newly enriched and suddenly empowered American culture do I see when I drive on the highway near my house? I see Wal-Mart, Chili’s, Motel 6, Wendy’s, and Home Depot. It could be Indianapolis. It could be Omaha. It could be Seattle. It could be anywhere in America. It happens to be Stone Mountain, GA, but you’d have no idea you were even in the South. In 2010, the only cultural landscape we share consists of familiar corporate logos. There’s no local flavor, no sense of indigenous culture. Things don’t seem richer, livelier, and more colorful; they’re empty, listless, and dead.

At least that’s how it feels to me. I don’t feel as if there’s any glue, cohesion, or sense of belonging in this society anymore. I’m feeling the anomie something awful. I don’t see the upside to our newer, more multicultural America. The only thing we share is the currency, and maybe that was the point all along.

Multiculturalism has failed, but it has only begun to fail. Now what? After constant states of flux, our society now seems fluxed-up beyond repair. How do we sort out the mess while avoiding more Trails of Tears?

Multiculturalism is dead, sure, but what do we do with the body? I’ve yet to hear a good burial plan, and I fear we may need one.

And what makes me most nervous is that I’m not even sure who “we” are.

lundi, 21 février 2011

Negativity

Cloud_of_Negativity.gif

Negativity

by Brett STEVENS

Ex: http://www.amerika.org/

Trying to grow up and be “cool” was a painful time. It is always every bit as immature as that previous sentence suggests. Some of the sheep surge out ahead socially and adopt attitudes and behaviors, and so many of the rest follow. It’s a big Ponzi scheme that keeps someone on top.

When you’re growing up however, especially in those too-painful-to-recall teenage years, “cool” is your ticket out of being a child. Before you were aware of social pressures, you just did what your parents told you and thought the same things were awesome that they thought were awesome.

Then you need to break away. Prove to the world you’re your own person, and you do that by negating all that happy harmless pleasant world of childhood, and racing into the cold arms of whatever adult pleasures and pitfalls you can find.

The goofy thing is that a decade on, you’ll find most people are doing the same thing: they’re adopting a pose they see on movie screens or TVs, or maybe read about or saw another person do, to be cool. The most common method is an affected disinterest or negativity, a kind of fatalism where you put all your energy into yourself and ignore the world.

If you wonder why sunglasses are featured in any media vision of “cool,” it’s because they (metaphorically) do this. They hide the eyes, the windows to the soul, and make you look entirely disinterested. While I walk through this wasteland, I’m above you all because I couldn’t care less, they say.

Yet like traffic staggers in cascading waves backward from a single car braking, the coolness Ponzi pyramid is like a game of Secret. You whisper the cool secret to a friend, he or she tells another, and so on across the room, and when it gets to the other side, it’s a degraded or tangential form of itself.

The result is that most people distill “cool” into negativity and apathy, which leaves them with nothing to like except themselves. They translate this immediately into bitterness, because you can only please yourself so much before you wonder why you’re caught in a repetitive loop.

Negativity underscores much of our society, but most of it is covert. People do not want to expose themselves to criticism so they do not speak of their negativity, only act out its effects, usually by denying the joy inherent to life and replacing it with a hidebound tendency to replace the possibility of joy with the certainty of the mundane.

  • Jobs. We would all rather sit at do-nothing desk jobs where our responsibilities are few and nothing exciting happens, than explore more rigorous and less “safe” situations where we might actually feel alive.
  • Ugliness. “Utilitarian” does not explain why our architecture is so brain-dead functional, blocky and ugly, or why we choose to line our streets in clashing signs and commercial messages. If public opinion turned against these, they’d vanish overnight.
  • Love. Love is a risky playing field. Sex, and then settling for the person you can have sex with and not hate, is not. We like to think we’re romantics but really we’re searching for another high, orgasm or otherwise, to lift out us out of our pervasive negativity. But you cannot have it without risk.
  • Anti-depressants. Much of our society is strung out on SSRIs. These drugs work by filtering out anything too intense, whether good or bad, leaving you a pleasantly confused zombie. It’s safer that way, but you miss out on the good that might be stuck to the bad because “what goes up, must go down” — sometimes.
  • Culture. Surface is the word. Profundity makes us alarmed and makes our inevitable deaths and utter powerlessness at that event seem more like they are real and we will face them. Denial favors movies about the dramatic misery of others, unrealistic violence and catty sexual drama that when you think about actually living it, seems a pathway to the paralyzing boredom of actions without meaning.

We have been given a world where fruit grows on trees, blue sky sunny days wash over us like the touch of God, and there are uncountable challenges which can reveal infinite joy. It’s like a giant piece of paper that renews itself at the touch of our crayons. Yet rarely do you see it expressed this way.

In fact, people seem to prefer compulsion. I didn’t choose to be in love with her; I got flung into it by lust that I just couldn’t resist. The man is beating me down at the job but heck, I’ll get a twelve pack and watch some porn. I’m being forced to go out and chase away my fears, maybe conquer something I’d always wanted to experience.

These dark words make dark times. Our society prizes a kind of oblivious politeness that emphasizes only the positive because we believe none of it, and are looking for those uplifting little treats and moments of levity to distract us from what we feel has already won, a pervasive and radical depression.

No matter what we find at the ends of politics or philosophy, or how seriously we take it, our souls need to lift themselves up from this dark mire. By the grace of something unknown, we are here, we can think, we can decide, and we can make beauty in ourselves and our world.

If you stop to think of it, we live in paradise, except when by our own hands we choose to dwell in darkness.

dimanche, 20 février 2011

Kein Kulturrelativismus!

 

relativismeculturel.jpg

Kein Kulturrelativismus!

Götz KUBITSCHEK - http://www.sezession.de/

In der FAZ von heute warnt die Soziologin Necla Kelek zwei Zeitungsspalten lang vor dem Kulturrelativismus der Justizministerin Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. Sie biedere sich den Muslimverbänden auf doppelte Weise an:

Zum einen wiederhole sie den alten Zopf, daß alle Religionen dieselben universellen Prinzipien verträten, und zwar ungeachtet ihrer institutionellen und somit geschichtlichen Entwicklung. Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger ignoriere dadurch etwa die Tatsache, daß der Islam bisher nirgendwo bereit sei, Religion und Politik zu trennen: Die Politik sei selbst nach gemäßigter islamischer Auffassung weiterhin den Glaubenssätzen untergeordnet. Das Christentum hingegen habe im Vergleich dazu seine Säkularisierung längst hinter sich.

Der Kulturrelativismus werde, so Kelek, noch deutlicher, wo die Justizministerin den Eindruck vermittle, „Grundgesetz und Scharia seinen nur unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten, Recht zu sprechen“ (wobei Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger das „vorurteilsbeladene“ Wort Scharia konsequent vermeide). Es gibt da also keine Wertung, keine Ablehnung einer den Deutschen wesensfremden und ihrem geschichtlichen Weg nicht angemessenen Religion und religiösen Praxis und Rechtssprechung: Stattdessen Relativierung als Ausdruck einer  — Kapitulation vor der Macht des Faktischen? Oder als Ausfluß einer tiefen inneren Ablehnung des Eigenen, des So-Seins? Einer Hoffnung auf Befreiung vom Wir?

Joschka Fischer hat solches in seinem Buch Risiko Deutschland ja schon vor zehn Jahren programmatisch auf den Punkt gebracht: Deutschland müsse von außen eingehegt und von innen durch Zustrom heterogenisiert, quasi „verdünnt“ werden. Leutheusser-Schnarrenbergers Kulturrelativismus ist – nach der bereits erfolgten Bevölkerungsheterogenisierung – ein Meilenstein auf dem Weg einer Rechts- und Institutionenheterogenisierung.

Das ist ein Angriff auf so ziemlich das letzte, was noch „Mark in den Knochen“ hat: Wo wir nämlich der Willens- und Schicksalsgemeinschaft schon seit langem entbehren, haben wir doch noch eine Rechtsgemeinschaft. Das ist eine Schwundstufe zwar im Vergleich zu dem, was einmal war, aber es ist viel, wenn man sich die Alternbativen ausmalte: uns nicht gemäßes Recht.

Im Zusammenhang mit Keleks Artikel in der heutigen FAZ sei auf das Themenheft „Islam“ der Sezession verwiesen, es sollte heute und morgen bei den Abonnenten eintreffen. Von Kulturrelativismus findet sich darin nicht viel, einiges aber vom Selbstbewußtsein, mit dem man der ebenso religiös wie institutionell dämmernden Überfremdung entgegentreten kann.

Den Inhalt des Heftes kann man hier einsehen.

Naiveté

Naiveté

by Brett STEVENS

Ex: http://www.amerika.org/

Ingenue.jpgOur modern society is based on a simple principle: in the name of everyone else’s rights, shove them aside and assert your perfect and immutable right to do whatever you want. It’s like a shopping mall with a moral justification attached.

Part of the fallout from this little deception is that we all become naive in our inability to see the actual motivations of the people around us. For starters, it’s not polite. In addition, it makes us a target. Finally, it forces us to see our own entrenchment in this scam.

We are oblivious to it normally because of our society’s insistence on reversed thinking. Normally, you think from cause to effect. Socialization makes you think from effect to “intent,” a nebulous cause attributed to the desires of others, and ignore any effects but the one you saw first.

Our naivete manifests itself in such mundane ways that we come to accept it like a tapeworm, ignoring the squirming after every meal, because it doesn’t act like a threat. It only undermines everything we do.

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan is recovering in an American hospital this week after being sexually assaulted and beaten by a mob in Egypt’s Tahrir Square late on Friday.

The same day that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, Logan was surveying the mood of anti-Mubarak protesters for a “60 Minutes” story when she and her team “were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration,” CBS said in a statement Tuesday. The network said that a group of 200 people were then “whipped into a frenzy,” pulling Logan away from her crew and attacking her until a group of women and Egyptian soldiers intervened. – LAT

As my able colleagues at In Mala Fide and Dissention have pointed out, there may be cause for doubting her narrative.

But there is also a bigger picture: our naiveté makes us think that any revolution is the act of benevolent, educated, restrained, good-natured and helpful people. Our media says these people are freedom fighters, so they can’t be a large discontented mob of semi-criminals who want to see the world burn. And so we treat them as if they were Western intellectuals calmly discussing politics in one of our comfy American suburbs.

In the modern industrialized world, we are committed to thinking the best of each other and to equality. Equality means that every point of view is valid. That means we reverse our thinking, and stop wondering what people are trying to achieve, and start muddling our minds by fitting their intent into a narrow range of acceptable thoughts.

In this emasculated thinking, Somali pirates are “forced” to steal because they’re poor; they can’t simply be murdering bastards in a country where 99% of the population are not pirates. From our naive view, any revolution is an ideological quest for the equality of all, not a power grab by a hungry group who turn out to be murdering bastards:

Moaz Abdel Karim, an affable 29-year-old who was among a handful of young activists who plotted the recent protests here, is the newest face of the Muslim Brotherhood. His political views on women’s rights, religious freedom and political pluralism mesh with Western democratic values. He is focused on the fight for democracy and human rights in Egypt.

A different face of the Brotherhood is that of Mohamed Badi, 66-year-old veterinarian from the Brotherhood’s conservative wing who has been the group’s Supreme Guide since last January. He recently pledged the Brotherhood would “continue to raise the banner of jihad” against the Jews, which he called the group’s “first and foremost enemies.” He has railed against American imperialism, and calls for the establishment of an Islamic state. – WSJ

They must be laughing all the way to the bank. Trot our your most innocent-sounding members, seize power, and then do whatever it was you really wanted to do. On a purely military level, that would be replacing the relatively stable Mubarak regime with an Egypt geared up to impoverish itself trying to invade technologically superior Israel.

More naiveté:

Interviews by NBC News with some of the plaintiffs in the case reveal disturbing and previously unreported allegations of sexual abuse in the military, including some in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, one of the plaintiffs, identified as a naval aviator, charges in the lawsuit that she was drugged and gang-raped by two of her colleagues while serving at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma just two months ago.

Mary Gallagher, a former sergeant in the Air National Guard, says that within weeks of being deployed to an air base outside of Baghdad in 2009 she was brutally assaulted by a fellow sergeant who burst into the ladies’ room, pushed her up against the wall, pulled her pants and underwear down and ground his genitals against her, talking the whole time how much he was enjoying it.

“I thought he was going to kill me that night,” Gallagher told NBC in an interview. “I felt completely isolated and alone and really scared. Here I was, in the middle of a foreign country in the middle of a war.” – MSN

It’s as if these people just got hit in the head with the frying pan of life. Soldiers, geared up for aggression and under great stress, with a few bad apples in the crop, raping women? It could happen, you know. But we want to keep sleepwalking ahead with the idea of equality, and so we’re going to assume every viewpoint is valid and everyone is benevolent.

We in the West are walking chumps who seem to invite others to victimize us because of our naivete. Whether that’s stumbling into a third world country and picking as the new leader the first bloodstained warlord who claims he likes capitalism, or believing desperate defectors who tell us what we want to hear, or even thinking that we can have government debt that exceeds our economy and still turn out OK. It’s like no one is driving our reckless bus in its mad dash down the road, but it doesn’t matter, because as individuals we’re all partying it up in here.

Amy Sullivan, senior editor of Time magazine, was at a security checkpoint in Miami Airport on Tuesday when she opted out of passing through a backscatter scanning device – described by experts as a ‘virtual strip search’.

When she went through a metal detector instead and was searched by a woman, a male Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official is alleged to have said: ‘Hey, I thought she was mine – I was going to do her!’

Ms Sullivan’s claims follow those of Eliana Sutherland, who was flying from Orlando Airport last November and said security workers picked her out for further screening because of the size of her breasts. – Daily Mail

Our comfortable lifestyles make us oblivious to everything but the obvious. We stagger in circles, denying the underlying truths, and then when they hit us in the face (like a rake left lying in the grass), we turn around and make excuses, talk a lot about rights and equality, and hope that fixes the problem somehow.

If you wonder why worldwide we’re getting less respect suddenly, it’s because as our economy bankrupts itself and we let politics take precedence over reality in our leadership, we’re increasingly revealing why we’re naive — it’s not because we’re “nice,” but because we’re completely in denial.

samedi, 19 février 2011

The horizontally totalitarian future-world

The horizontally totalitarian future-world

Ex: http://majorityrights.com/

robot_A.jpgLast February, by way of an introduction, I put up a post about the great German jurist Carl Schmitt.  He is a highly useful guide to the ways of Power.  His elucidation of the theoretics of state power in extraordinary times established the framework employed by many, and probably most, thinkers in this, let’s say, increasingly topical field.  In particular, Schmitt’s concepts of the decision and the state of exception open up the operation of total power for examination like a dead butterfly on a display board.

 

As Tom Sunic wrote in Homo Americanus: child of the postmodern age:-

Carl Schmitt ... realized an age old truth; namely, political concepts acquire their true meanings only when the chief political actor, i.e. the state and its ruling class, find themselves in a sudden and unpredictable state of emergency. Then all former interpretations of “self-evident” truths become obsolete. One could witness that after the terrorist attack of 9/11 in America — an event that was never fully elucidated — the ruling class in America used that opportunity to redefine the legal meaning of the expressions “human rights” and “freedom of speech.” After all, is not the best way to curb real civic rights the adoption of abstract incantations, such as “human rights” and “democracy”?

What just about everyone with a triple-digit IQ understands is that the events of 11th September 2001 and the subsequent War on Terror have been ruthlessly exploited throughout the West to advance a profoundly undemocratic and disturbing domestic security agenda.  Whether a true state of exception ever existed is highly doubtful.  But Power decides what is moral and what is, in a vulgar sense, true.  It has decided that its officers shall usurp the legal code at will, and shall stipulate on their own authority the terms under which its citizens go about their business.

I happen to live under the most abusive of any Western government in this respect.  The UK authorities have the Civil Contingencies Act already, and a growing DNA database to which it is intent upon adding us all, and on top of that it is constructing the complete surveillance society.  But the trend is appearing everywhere.

What this amounts to is an impressively uniform and aggressive war on the defence of civic liberties which have informed Western legal codes for centuries.  Its significance is vast and unmistakable: the foundations are being laid for a different kind of political regime, to be conducted in a permanent state of exception.  The Executive is strengthening and freeing itself as a body empowered, but in no way constrained, by ad hoc procedural law subject only to official decision.

The big question is: what structure of global/local government will emerge out of this new strength and freedom?

In local, day-to-day terms, it will decide for domestic policy blandness and irrelevance - the towering racial injustice of an anti-white MultiCult make that inevitable.  Meanwhile, the moral duty of government and public alike will be directed to far-flung places where “profitable problems” require corporate-military intervention.

To all intents and purposes, this will be a totalitarianism or dictatorship, if only because it must regulate more and more social relations in the interests of racial panmixia in order to resolve the problem of the European natives.  But I can’t see how any form of world-wide imperial police state can emerge from the new dispensation, even given the coming of global economic unity. 

If one assumes, as I do, that this dispensation represents the deepest political convictions of a diverse, internationalist power elite, and not only the will of bankers and mega-corporations, it is apparent that there is no “centre” capable of, or needful of, global government through a totalitarian vertical heirarchy.  Schmitt holds the key.  A permanent, global state of exception and the distribution of decision are enough.  The governing class will operate as it does today, patronised and informed of its obligations by the higher elites without those elites ever comprising a structured global government themselves.

In a word, the deracinated, de-sovereignised, and legally denuded post-nation ...

“There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That is a 19th-century idea, and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.”
Wesley Clark, to a CNN reporter in 1999

“The president believes the world will be a better place if all borders are eliminated—from a trade perspective, from the viewpoint of economic development and in welcoming [the free movement of] people from other cultures and countries.”
Tom Hogan, president of Vignette Corporation, speaking after a convseration with Bill Clinton in Australia in 2001

... can be governed by a structure no different than the one that governs it now.

The future will, then, continue to be plural, and yet will be totalitarian.  Our lives will be free in the ways that we are required to live them, but will be regulated in every other.  We shall have “nothing to fear if we are innocent” from a non-law that is subject wholly to the decision of the, of course, always benign official.

Leviathan will command a near borderless world of super-diversity filled with national symbols.  And we WILL be happy, although it will be as impossible to struggle for happiness as it will for political freedom.

mercredi, 16 février 2011

The Multicultural Mystique

The Multicultural Mystique, by Harriet E. Baber

The Multicultural Mystique: The Liberal Case Against Diversity
by Harriet E. Baber
Prometheus Books, 246 pages, $27.

This book caught my eye because it contains some of the most insightful and honest critique of multiculturalism I have ever read. On the other hand, its “solution” is to remove culture from the picture entirely, which is so brain-dead I have trouble respecting the book.

Onward to the good, however: this book gives us a working definition of each type of multiculturalism, albeit with hokey postmodern-style metaphors. The kind the author rails against is “salad bowl” multiculturalism, where members of different ethnic groups move to a new land and then stay segregated by ethnicity. The kind the author endorses is assimilation, or everyone giving up on their source culture and joining the new culture. Difficulty: the author admits that such a culture doesn’t exist, and just about goes far enough to admit that diversity kills it, but then launches on a praiseful tirade in favor of individualism and having no higher cultural goals.

The justification used for this course of action comes right out of the early 1990s. Baber distinguishes between “salient,” or components of our social identity, and non-salient attributes to individuals, like ethnicity. No attempt is made to address populations as organic wholes; in fact, that heresy against deconstruction is considered outside the realm of intelligent discourse. Her point is that majority cultures like indigenous whites in Europe and America do not have to notice their race (you can find this sentiment in any publication on “white privilege”) but that anyone else must.

For white Americans, ethnic identification is largely a matter of choice, since whiteness in the United States and Europe is nonsalient and, as it were, transparent. This is, indeed, the fundamental characteristic of “white privilege”: to be white is, in an important sense, to lack racial identity, to be “just regular” as regards race. (10)

At this point, her liberal thinking takes a turn toward the semi-Randian. Having expectations of culture imposed upon you, she says, limits your ability to be individualistic and to make individualistic choices because your ethnic group will enforce them upon you and if they don’t, society at large will project them on you. She uses delightful examples like overachieving black kids getting dinged for “acting white,” or clueless white people politely asking random black people to explain Kwanzaa.

However, ultimately her solution is a dumbed-down modern form of colonialism: import the people to your country, integrate them into your culture, and in a few generations they will have lost whatever origins they had. It is colonial because as she frequency points out, non-majority-ish populations get imported as cheap labor, with the hope and guess that they will depart when the wages go:

The worry that mass immigration will make receiving countries “too diverse” or that it will “thin out” their cultures is a sham. The fear is that immigrants will not remain sufficiently “diverse” to accept second-class jobs, do harsh jobs for low pay, and conveniently disappear when their labor is not needed. (233)

This passage shows the book in microcosm: insightful analysis that reveals the attitudes of Americans toward their imported diverse labor pool, coupled with editorializing that considers a few out of the many factors and plays fast and loose with the concept of ethnicity in contrast to culture.

Profundity and the same old boilerplate wrapped together in an easy package? It’s kind of like honor students who own that one Iron Maiden album so they can, you know, let loose and walk on the wild side every tenth Saturday night. If you write for the liberal establishment, you have to smother any dose of shock with a heaping helping of familiar territory.

Another example:

The relevant moral questions are: to what extent does the cultural self-affirmation of some members of a group have consequences for other members of the group and are those consequences so significant as to override rights to free speech, religious freedom, and self-expression? These rights are not absolute. (165)

Baber hones in on the central issue of modern time, which is whether our individualism is absolute, and comes down in favor of the absolute — without presenting an argument for it. Assumptions exist, and personal histories, but we’re not seeing a cause-effect reason for these assumptions. However, the question needed to be asked, and it’s better in print from a liberal source than from a conservative one which would immediately be dismissed by anyone left of center.

In this chapter, I also address the important question, rarely discussed, of when, if ever, ethnic diversity ends. Do multiculturalists imagine that the salad bowl is forever and that ethnic minorities will maintain distinct cultural identities in perpetuity without coalescing? It is hard to see how such an arrangement could be maintained without the establishment of a virtual millet system of semiautonomous communities maintaining their own schools, institutions, and, perhaps, systems of personal law with the approval and support of the state. (11)

These are very important questions. Baber does not ask what happens when the “majority” population the United States and Europe is in fact worldwide a minority population, and a wealthy one, which means that many more of them want to move here than there are members of the “majority” group. Do they get bred out? Do they have a right to exist as well? You won’t find that in this book.

The Multicultural Mystique may be fun because it is such a mixed bag. Baber brings up the important issues; she then explains them away with stock-in-trade liberal platitudes. Because the liberal modus operandi is to take an individualist position, and passive aggressively react to any assertion of a different viewpoint as if it were straight out of a hostile nation’s propaganda broadcast, she does what most political writers tend to do, which is cherry-pick sources. Why consider multiple factors, when there’s one you need? Why mention the breadth of an issue, when you can take data out of context and imply its relevance? A good deal of the arguments in this book conclude with her asserting an example that might support them, and as if that proof were evident, ending the paragraph.

In style, the book resembles much of the other popular literature from our philosophy departments. Its strength is that it makes its points clearly; its weakness is that it deconstructs so much that the entire document is not a strawman attack, but a strawman discussion, with theoretical beings existing in vacuums without time, place or context batting each other around using absolute concepts like individual rights. Much of it reeks of a lonely white woman alone in a Starbuck’s, writing from a stack of The Atlantic magazines and what she can find with Google, and not bothering to edit for circularity. Around we go again and again; fifty to a hundred pages could have dropped from this book with no loss in meaning.

For all of its faults and biases, however, The Multicultural Mystique won me over because it kicks open the door on several important issues: Assimilate or respect culture? We know this path will destroy culture and replace it with individual desire, right? No one is thinking past the immediate; most people who support diversity do so for low-cost lawn care and social identity points. And last but not least, what is the goal here? Do we want culture, or not, and if not, why? Many of these questions arise from the reading of the book and are not embedded in it, which makes it doubly impressive as a conversation starter.

Your average person will not find this book compelling because it is, without exception, and indulgently so, written in the “philosophical” style of lots of flavor-words for concepts, plenty of comma-separated phrases, with allusions to terms trending in academia. However, for those who are interested in this issue which since 1865 has dominated American and European politics, The Multicultural Mystique provides a good place to start your open-minded research by seeing what the best of the liberal side have to say.

You can find this book on Amazon for $27.