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samedi, 05 février 2022

Futurisme et occultisme

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Futurisme et occultisme

Andrea Scarabelli

Source: https://blog.ilgiornale.it/scarabelli/2018/09/19/futurismo-e-occultismo/

Comme l'a écrit le politologue Giorgio Galli, en Occident, le culte de la déesse Raison du siècle des Lumières a représenté une césure sans précédent, bannissant une série de composantes alternatives, y compris le soi-disant "occultisme". Une fois passé le printemps de la Renaissance, qui a vu des scientifiques et des mathématiciens s'occuper d'alchimie et d'astrologie, la modernité a choisi une autre voie, matérialiste et mécaniste. Mais quelque chose n'allait pas : il semble que cet état refoulé ne veuille tout simplement pas savoir comment être refoulé, et le voilà qui réapparaît en fait dans les endroits les plus disparates, comme une rivière souterraine qui refait périodiquement surface. La politique en est un exemple très éloquent. Aucune formule institutionnelle n'est à l'abri de l'attrait de l'occulte : ainsi, si Galli a parlé d'ésotérisme sous le national-socialisme, mais aussi sous le libéralisme et la démocratie (notamment dans La politica e i maghi, 1995), Francesco Dimitri a écrit Communism Magico (2004) et Gianfranco de Turris a édité un volume au titre significatif Esoterismo e fascismo (2006).

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Le phénomène occultiste agit de manière karstique : chassé par la porte d'entrée par les flèches positivistes et par les "Lumières", il revient par la fenêtre, choisissant souvent les artistes comme terrain d'élection. Ceci explique, par exemple, les œuvres de William Butler Yeats, Fernando Pessoa ou Ezra Pound, auxquels sont consacrées respectivement les études de Luca Gallesi (Esoterismo e folklore in Willam Butler Yeats, 1990), Brunello De Cusatis (Esoterismo, Mitogenia e Realismo Político em Fernando Pessoa, 2005, inédit en italien) et Demetres Tryphonopoulos (Pound e l'occulto, 1998). Ces exemples témoignent d'une facette largement ignorée de l'avant-garde - et, en fin de compte, de la modernité elle-même, dans laquelle semble brûler une flamme différente de celle qui a enflammé le siècle des Lumières.

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Le futurisme - dernier phénomène culturel italien à avoir enflammé le monde - n'échappe pas à cette ambiguïté : oui, le futurisme, mouvement moderne par excellence, obsédé par la machine, le futur, la vitesse, la nouveauté... Mais il y a plus que cela. Simona Cigliana en avait déjà parlé dans son Futurismo esoterico (2002), mais récemment Guido Andrea Pautasso est revenu sur le sujet, comblant une énorme lacune, dans Vampiro futurista, publié en avril par Vanilla edizioni et consacré à la présence de l'archétype séculaire du Nosferatu, le mort-vivant, dans la littérature futuriste. Cependant, en sondant l'inconscient - individuel et collectif, comme l'aurait dit Carl Gustav Jung - les futuristes ont exhumé non seulement des vampires, mais aussi ces composantes alternatives que nous avons mentionnées. L'étude de Pautasso est riche et passe en revue de nombreuses suggestions - souvent sui generis, mais en tout cas suffisantes pour démolir les lieux communs de certaines critiques littéraires et artistiques - à travers une immense quantité de citations et de documents de première main.

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Quelques exemples ? Le manifeste La scienza futurista (1916), signé par l'entourage de la revue florentine L'Italia Futurista, qui attire l'attention "sur les domaines les moins explorés de notre réalité, [...] les phénomènes de médiumnité, de psychisme, de radiesthésie, de divination et de télépathie". Parmi les signataires figure également Bruno Ginanni Corradini (alias Corra), qui, quatre ans plus tôt, dans la revue Centauro, avait anticipé la fameuse "écriture automatique" des surréalistes: "Je vais fermer la porte de mon esprit et dire à ma plume : utilise mon encre et ma main comme tu veux [...]. Ce sera une chose presque spirituelle". Dans son poème Attimo (1916), Corra avait déclaré qu'il cherchait "une lueur vers l'ultra-naturel", vers ces régions explorées par une science qui, en plein positivisme, avait sondé tout ce qui était possible et avait maintenant atteint les frontières de l'invisible. Dans sa fureur de tout illuminer, elle a atteint une limite qu'elle ne peut pas franchir : le futuriste Arnaldo Ginanni Corradini ("Ginna", frère du susdit Bruno) en était conscient, et dans Pittura dell'avvenire, il considérait la magie comme la "science de demain" (on croirait lire Colin Wilson...), concevant même une "peinture occulte".

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Se déplaçant avec aisance à travers une immense quantité de documents, Vampiro futurista "mord" dans l'avant-garde, exterminant les "racines occultes du modernisme" dont parlait Léon Surette dans l'un de ses livres les plus célèbres, consacré à Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats et Thomas Stearns Eliot. Cette dimension se conjugue à une révolte antimatérialiste et antimoderne contre une époque qui commence à montrer les défauts qui conduiront bientôt au massacre du "siècle court". Et cette révolte a enflammé l'avant-garde, mais aussi des cercles hétérogènes comme la Societas Rosicruciana en Anglia, la Theosophical Society (avec les distinctions appropriées, ça va sans dire) et la Golden Dawn, interceptant des géants comme Alfred Richard Orage et Aleister Crowley, Pound et Yeats (entre autres, liés à la revue milanaise Poesia, fondée par Filippo Tommaso Marinetti en 1905).

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Tableaux de Gaetano Previati: "Chasser les marcvhands du Temple", "L'Assomption" et "Le Songe".

Marinetti lui-même fréquentait des érudits ésotériques et des membres de sociétés occultes, comme le théoricien divisionniste Gaetano Previati (qui était également un ami de Boccioni), qui, comme l'écrit Pautasso, a été le seul artiste autorisé par Sâr Péladan (fondateur, avec Oswald Wirth et Stanislas de Guaita, de l'Ordre de la Rose+Croix catholique du Temple et du Graal) à "représenter le symbolisme italien au premier Salon de la Rose+Croix". En 1920, le fondateur du futurisme avait été nommé président du Circolo Occultistico de Milan : des séances médiumniques y étaient organisées, dont Marinetti était témoin et qu'il discutait dans divers rapports publiés dans la revue Senza veli. En ce qui concerne le spiritisme, même Gino Severini et Umberto Boccioni n'échappent pas à sa fascination : ce dernier, en particulier, croit à la "matérialisation des ectoplasmes" et parle des séances de la célèbre médium Eusapia Palladino. Mais il a également déclaré avoir été influencé par les théories de la Quatrième Dimension de Bragdon et d'Ouspensky, un disciple de Gurdjieff.

Pour en rester aux grands noms de l'avant-garde, il est impossible de ne pas mentionner Giacomo Balla, qui a avoué dans une interview: "Je marche sans toucher le sol, tant et si bien que mon esprit s'élève et que je ressens aussi ce qui ne peut être vu (occultisme)". Tandis que son manifeste La ricostruzione futurista dell'universo (La reconstruction futuriste de l'univers), signé avec Fortunato Depero, proclame : "Nous donnerons un squelette et une chair à l'invisible, à l'impalpable, à l'impondérable, à l'imperceptible". C'est dans l'atelier de Balla que se forme, entre autres, le tout jeune Julius Evola, futur créateur d'un dadaïsme supra-rationnel et métaphysique qui s'exprime au début des années 1920 dans le manifeste de l'art abstrait et dans le "poème à quatre voix" La parole obscure du paysage intérieur.

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Non seulement les futuristes étaient ésotéristes, mais ils l'étaient de manière spécifique et différenciée. Les spécialistes, dit Pautasso, identifient même trois lignes principales: la ligne milanaise de Marinetti et Boccioni, "d'un moule magique-théosophique" ; la ligne florentine, développée autour de la revue Lacerba de Papini (fondateur du périodique théosophique L'Anima), "animiste-métaphysique" ; enfin, celui de L'Italia Futurista, lié "aux intérêts spirituels et occultistes", dans lequel apparaît, entre autres, un article d'Irma Valeria, proposant l'utilisation de méthodes occultes pour faire de l'art, à la recherche "d'une nouvelle âme aux facultés supérieures de découverte et de sensation": c'est enfin découvrir l'âme de l'univers caché ; l'atome occulte de notre être et celui du monde sont unifiés". Voici les masques du futurisme occulte: de la "subconscience consciente" qui aspire à "une vérité plus lointaine, plus cachée et occulte" dont parle Ginna, au "désir latent d'expérimenter les forces occultes de l'idéalisme cosmique" d'Enrico Prampolini ; De Carlo Carrà, qui définit ses Parole in libertà comme des "divagations médiumniques", à Ardengo Soffici, dont "la conscience est un globe de lumière qui brille de tous ses rayons selon sa propre force" ; de l'"éclatement ultra-magique" d'Alceo Folicaldi au "mysticisme" de Giovanni Tummolo. Autant d'aspects - auxquels on pourrait ajouter bien d'autres, conclut Pautasso - qui témoignent d'un "lien subtil mais profond entre la culture futuriste, l'art d'avant-garde et le monde de l'occulte". Un univers qui attend d'être découvert et étudié par une nouvelle histoire des idées qui ne s'arrête pas aux piliers des Lumières, mais qui veut étudier le monde moderne sous tous ses aspects. Haut et bas.

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samedi, 14 novembre 2015

Vanguardism: Hope for the Future

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Vanguardism:
Hope for the Future

Editor’s Note:

The following text is the transcript by V. S. of Jonathan Bowden’s London Forum lecture in London on December 3, 2011. I want to thank Michèle Renouf and Jez Turner for making the recording available.   

This is a very difficult topic to speak about because it appears to be a depressing and pessimistic era where most of the storm and stress and most of the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, seems to be against us. There’s also a preponderance for people on the Right politically to have metaphysically conservative views, which means they’re often pessimistic; they’re often loyal to Spengler’s idea in the 1920s and 1930s that “optimism is a form of cowardice” and in relation to that sort of idea the notion that one should be optimistic about the future is difficult to sustain. But given that the past speech was rather sort of statistical and slightly morbid in tone, my job is not to put a reverse spin on it, but at least to attempt to generate some optimistic energy.

There are more of us than ever before, but it’s always a question of quality as against quantity in this life, because what I am going to propose is that instead of looking at demographic and quantity-based analyses, quantitative ways of looking at things, let’s look at qualitative ways of looking at things. Let’s look at quality. Let’s look at elitism. Let’s look at the fact that all groups need a vanguard.

I remember once a Times journalist asked me a very long time ago in relation to an event called the Le Pen Dinner, which is now 20 years old and more, he said, “What’s your view of all this stuff about revisionism?” This was in the hotel in Knightsbridge/Kensington where Le Pen and his guests were situated. He said, “What’s your view of all that?” He said, “Is it all true or, contrariwise, is it all false?” And I said, thinking of some famous murder trial of the time, I used the example of the Wests, Frederick and Rosemary now, but of course this particular discussion predated that. I said, “Well, that trial . . . Is everything that occurred in that court case all true or all false?” He said, “Well, hold on a minute! Some of it is bound to be true and some of it is bound to be false.” And I said, “Well, absolutely. That will go for revisionism as much as anything else.”

All that revisionism is, is the ultimate defense of a particular vanguard at a particular time who believe that they are fighting for Western civilization. All elites and vanguard minorities are is the radical consciousness of their own group. Just as people like Louis Farrakhan were mentioned earlier on, who is the leader of a sect called the Black Muslims, and just as they are in some respects totally unrepresentative of a lot of African-American opinion, they nevertheless represent an ultimate redoubt, an ultimate salient, or a bridgehead from which their population can go forth and from which it can gain energy and succor and that’s the way you have to look at these things.

People need ultimate resources. They need absolutists, and they need semi-fundamentalists who will stand up for them at least in a conceptual way. Even if they can’t stand up for themselves, don’t want to, or wouldn’t even know how to. The point of radicals, particularly radicals who deal with the politics of identity in any shape or form, is to provide that elite, is to provide that vanguard.

You all know the technology of a bullet. A bullet is very significant in the impact it can have on a wall or a piece of wood or per force the human body, but if a bullet is perforated in the top or has mercury injected into the top and is sealed in again it becomes a far more devastating weapon. It becomes what is known as a dum-dum bullet.

Now, if a vanguard is to have the effect of such retreated bullets so that conceptually and actually the energy and vigor of debate is transformed by the use of such a vanguard and its terminology, it has to be aware of where it’s coming from, what its tradition is, where it’s going to, and what it represents at a particular time. Just because most of the politics of this era seems to running well and truly against us does not mean that the situation is hopeless, because situations are never hopeless. Groups that have been done down or perceive that they’ve been done down by history have undergone worse traumas than we are undergoing at the present time.

The danger of the ideology of the victim, which I don’t really subscribe to except as a tactic on occasion, is that you begin to think like a victim, and you begin to act like a victim. Many of our people now are almost asking for a whipping, asking for a collective beating, asking to be forgiven for the past, asking to be forgiven for sins and crimes of the past which they never committed, which they’re hardly aware of, which can be reconstrued as episodes of heroic cruelty or glorious vanguardism that don’t even need to be apologized for in the past or in the present.

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There’s a degree to which I personally think that the doctrine of vanguardism is the way out of the dilemma that we face. All Communist movements believe that the proletariat needed to be saved from itself. They believe that the masses were degraded by feudalism and by capitalism. They believe that only an elite or a vanguard party could raise the masses up to socialism as the inverse of the capitalism they wish to replace. All Communist movements that flourished in Western and other societies throughout most of the late 19th and 20th centuries based themselves upon the vanguard principle. These movements were tiny. Smaller than the number of people gathered in this room in central West London tonight by a long way.

I’ve got a book about literature on my desk at the moment. In order to tabulate historical reliefs for literary points, they give the listing of events for particular years and in one particular year – I’m not sure, it might be 1912 – it talks about the Bolshevik and Menshevik split. It might have been in that year; it might have been in another year. That split happened in London. It happened in a pub in London, and all Bolsheviki and Mensheviki means is “majority” and “minority.” There was a split between the two of them, and you can imagine them all with their beards and so on haranguing each other and debating about whether there should be an instantaneous rising in Russia or whether they should wait for the historical process to take its course, because Russia was not yet a capitalist society with a bourgeois class that could be overthrown and so on. The majority of Londoners even from the ethnic groups that a significant proportion of those Communists were drawn from would regard all that as idiocy and lunacy just as the bulk of White people today regard a significant amount of what we say as lunacy.

All people who have a vanguard, an elitist mentality, are regarded as partly mad by their own groups, because the majority of people do not want to know. The majority of people wish to live their own life in their own way, and they only look at these broader questions when life impinges upon them and comes upon them, and the hand of life grasps them by the collar and they really cannot do any other thing but notice what is in front of them.

Many of the reasons our people do not seem to have a sense of solidarity amongst themselves in relation to the degree that some other groups could be said to have is because a significant number of them have never been kicked, have never felt what it is as a group to be disprivileged in a society. Unfortunately, in certain areas of British and continental life now and North American life that process for some, and certainly not at the top or middle of the society, is beginning. They’re beginning to realize what it is like to be a minority or what it is like to be culturally disprivileged or what it is like to be dispossessed in a way.

That spirit will grow, but it will only feed into consciousness in a number of select minds, because the bulk of people are not drawn to be in a vanguard formulation. People will only listen to a vanguard when they are desperate. They will only listen to a vanguard when they think there is no other hope. They would love for many of the problems of contemporary Britain, many of which revolve around the processes of immigration, to be solved, but they would love to have nothing to do with it themselves and they would love if somebody came forward magically without trouble and without fuss to deal with it on their behalf. They want no unpleasantness and they want no nastiness, particularly in their own name. But at the same time if anybody does things of any sort that could be ascribed to that they would run away and hide initially, be privately pleased, condemn the people who did it, support the people who are against them, and yet at the same time have a secret smirk and smile on their face about the whole thing. And they would do all of that simultaneously and that’s what people are like and that’s what our own people are like up to a point and that’s the funk and the state of internal confusion and bemusement that our people are in because every time they turn on the box in the corner it says that everything is marvelous and it’s all for the best and that there’s no need to worry and that we’re all sleep-walking towards victory.

I read Nineteen Eighty-Four again recently. It’s been a good quarter of a century since I read that book, and it’s a remarkably prescient work in every sense. Of course, it’s a social democratic criticism of Stalinist authoritarianism, but in actual fact Orwell’s idea that everyone polices their thoughts before they speak, they even police the idea of their thoughts before they speak, is very germane to the present hour.

I was with a relative of mine many years ago and we were in a wood near Liverpool on our own and he looked behind him before he made a politically incorrect remark. Because he was worried! He was worried to be alone in a wood with someone else.

And if you remember, in the second section of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia and Winston have their rather tawdry affair, it has to be said in a way, against the party. Sex is rebellion against the puritanism of newspeak and all that. They go into the middle of a wood and they go into a middle of a clearing of saplings in order to get down to it and the reason that they do that is firstly, of course, it’s not in an urban area and therefore there are no telescreens. These televisions that can look both ways with the secret police and thought police behind them. And on the other hand, there are no microphones, because wherever there isn’t a telescreen you can never vouchsafe that there isn’t a microphone in that particular novel listening to you.

People are policed now by political correctness, which they adhere to and which they go along with and which they profess to love whilst at the same time hating and despising looking over their shoulder as they refute it and rebut it in the context of their own life. Because that is what the majority is always like. The majority is confused and inane and believes in the last thing that’s ever said to them. Of course, in all societies you have a hierarchy of knowledge and understanding. Probably about 40% of people are quite politically proficient, know what’s what, know to a certain degree, have a cynical regard for the system as it is, at least a compos mentis about the sort of culture and society we are living in. But a good 60% are not.

There’s a famous story about a Labour member of Parliament who went to a constituent’s door. He was Dennis Potter, the playwright that later emerged on the BBC, and he was a Labour candidate in his earlier vintage. He knocked on the door, and the woman and husband would come to the door, and the woman would say, “What are you going to do about immigration? As a Labour candidate, as our candidate, as the candidate who will speak the truth to us unlike the Tories . . .” Not understanding, of course, that Labour is a center Left party that believes in mass migration as a doctrine of law and morality and whose Nationality Act of 1948 began the modern day process of complete societal transformation because, as Attlee said at the time, “If the races of this world were mixed together there will be no more war,” and that is an ideology which many of the old Labourites believed in body and soul from the anti-colonial movement from which they came. But the bulk of Labour voters thought Labour stood for something very different from that. They thought Labour stood for them and for their family and for their extended family, and people who were like the people who lived on the posher estate down the way voted for another party. That’s what they thought.

But Potter had to answer this woman and her husband because they stood before him. He said, “Well, what do you mean? Labour is in favor of fairness for all.” A politician’s answer, of course, even on the doorstep. She said, “Oh, there’s too many, and they’re taking over the center of town, and I don’t feel safe anymore, and things have changed out of all recognition, and some of what that chap Enoch Powell says – I don’t like him, because he’s a Tory – but at the same time it’s got some truth to it.” All the time Potter was wanting to reply . . . He was wanting to reply that “you’re a bigot,” “I don’t want your vote,” “Even if you are prepared to give it to me under other circumstances where you said you repudiated what you’ve just said.” And all the time his agent was kicking him, was kicking the back of his heels saying, “Come on. There’s plenty of other doors. There’s plenty more to do, Dennis. There’s plenty to get the sort of red ribbon vote out. Let’s leave them to themselves. They’ll probably vote Labour anyway.” As indeed they will.

He kept kicking him and so on, and in the end Potter said, “Labour is for fairness for all, but of course we will listen to your concerns, Madame.” As he was turning away, the agent said, “And what will it be then?” to the husband, who had obviously not really gotten a word in beforehand. And the husband said, “Oh yeah, we’ll vote Labour as normal, because you listen to what we say.” And they’re not alone, because there are millions like that. Millions and millions like that. “Politicians will sort it out.” “Politicians left to themselves will do something to make sure that things won’t get as bad as they could be.”

The other thing you often hear about is death. People say, “It’s not going to happen while I’m around therefore I don’t need to bother about it.” I’ve had lots of people say to me, “Oh, it’s 40 to 50 years off. Who knows what will happen? I can’t do anything. You can’t do anything. So, what’s the point? In any case, I’ll be dead by then anyway or gaga or very elderly.” And so on. You hear that again and again, because of course what you have in modern Western societies is the extreme powerlessness of the individual. Apart from maybe in consumption and expenditure of cash, the average individual feels totally cut off from the external society. It’s what I call deep privatization.

Privatization in the 1980s and the 1990s meant the dispersal of public utilities and was a sort of Thatcherite and neo-liberal ideology, but privatization has actually gone much deeper than that. It’s the view that each is out for himself and society hardly exists beyond the confines of one’s own family, one’s own extended family, and people one happens to know. People feel not just sort of deracinated, but de-popularized and de-democratized, if there are such terms. People are, in an extraordinary sense, alone. Alone with the television, alone with the telescreen, which when they flip from channel to channel tells them all the time that everything is perfect and there are only nasty-minded people who will stir things up as vanguards and various forms of extremism.

Extremism, of course, is something always to be rejected, but I think extremism is necessary. I think it’s socially and mathematically necessary, because there has to be a logic to the logic of logic. There has to be something which takes the argument out to the furthest point on the circle. In maths, if you have a curve, you have a line that penetrates it at the furthest extent, and I believe that there has to be a logic that in the realms of sanity and in the realms of what’s possible bisects the line at the most radical point, and that’s what the people in this room are. That’s what vanguard forms of identity amount to. They are the most radical manifestation of the implicit sense of becoming and belonging and identitarian man and womanhood of the ordinary people in one’s own group, and you have to manifest that, and you have to represent it, and only by doing so can you have a certain effect, because you do have an effect by virtue of existing.

There are many other groups on this planet who always ask the question when anything happens, “Is it good for us?” “Is it good for us, or is it bad for the others?” But most people think actually, “Is it good for us?” Far more people, even of a vanguard or elitist temperament, are prone to say, “Is it good for us?” rather than “Is it bad for the others?” because, contrary to liberals who always think that positions of identity are based on the idea of doing others down, principles of identity are usually based on boosting or, to use an ugly contemporary phrase, bigging up one’s own group. People actually think more positively about themselves before they get into negativity about others, contrary to the view that politics of identity is all about negativity towards others and as long as you can suppress that through political correctness everyone can live happily in a multi-cult, multi-identity firmament or melting pot.

I think the point to make about vanguardism is whenever anything happens, people in other groups and people in other vanguards and liberal humanists in our own group, because as the previous speaker said quite truthfully, it is indigenous liberals who are our real enemy . . . Indigenous liberals are always the enemy. Liberalism within ourselves is always the enemy. It exists even in people who regard themselves as radical, to a certain extent.

We’ve had liberalism in an uninterrupted way for centuries. Russia has never known a liberal regime, and whether one likes it or not the politics of contemporary Russia have a lot to do with the fact that they’ve never known a period of liberalism. You could argue that since the restoration of the monarchy in the 1600s, we’ve known nothing but various forms of liberalism, most of which linked to various elements of the Protestant religion during that time. But until about the 1950s or 1960s most forms of Protestantism retained residual illiberal and patriotic ideas, as for a period they did in a very sectarian way in Northern Ireland.

So, all views have their liberal side. Even hardliners have their liberal side which they have to guard against by chipping away at them. Liberalism also feeds on indifference. Indifference to the future and indifference to the generations that are coming in the future.

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But vanguardism is something different, because it lives for the virility of what might be in the future. Make no bones about it, what vanguard Caucasians think about their future is watched and is listened to by liberals and by all the other groups. So, the idea that what we do and what we say and what we think has no relevance or no purport is not true. What is true is the competition between groups is part of the stuff of life. Contemporary society is based upon the formulation that that is not the case, and because it is the case, nature will trump all of the liberal arguments. The problem is that if it doesn’t take a political form nature’s trumping of liberalism will be a very painful process to live through, a very painful process for ourselves, for everybody, and for all other persons in other groups. That is why we have to continue with putting forward percussively the politics of identity from our own standpoint.

Let’s take something in the news at the moment. There’s a large cranking up and there’s a building up of energy for an attack on Iran. At the moment, it appears to be small. It appears to be a cloud smaller than a man’s hand. The United Nations has reported that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. The United Nations has reported that their nuclear technology is of dual use, but all nuclear technology is of dual use. When we developed a nuclear weapon the Americans were staunchly opposed to us possessing it, because they wished to live in a unipolar world where only one power had that particular device. Of course, all other major nations were working on these devices. I believe 34 other countries are developing some sort of nuclear program at the present time, including Saudi Arabia, because they fear that Iran is doing so because they’re nearby.

But let’s look at it in another way. Is it in our interest that Iran is attacked? Is it in our interest that Iran is attacked? And the answer has to be that it is not in our interest, and it is not in our interest because they are not natural friends of ours, not natural enemies of ours. They exist in a different part of the world, though we exist in a post-imperial situation now. We do not wish to be dragged willy-nilly into yet further wars after Iraq and Afghanistan at America and Israel’s behest. As soon as one factors into the question vanguardism and group identity it becomes quite clear that The Times and The Economist and all of these neo-liberal and neo-conservative journals pushing for an attack upon Iran that is not in our interest, and other groups can figure what goes on in the world directly as whether it’s in their interests or not. In a confused way, our people aren’t bothered whether Iran’s attacked or not. Our people sit there watching the TV and think, “If the Israelis do it, well . . . I don’t know what I think really. Somebody down at the pub said it was a good idea. I’ve got no idea myself. Can they refuel their jets without American help? They’ll need American help. If the Americans asked us to help, will that drag us into it?” Most of our people would probably consider, “Is there a danger of backwash of Islamist radicalism against us because we’ve aligned against Muslim nations elsewhere on Earth?” which is not a stupid thing to think actually and is probably one of the more credible middle-ranging opinions that people as they sit in front of the television would come out with.

But if our people began to think more in terms of an identitarian prospect they would nevertheless come to the conclusion that it’s not in our interest to attack Iran, and that’s just one issue out of an enormous number that could be preconfigured. Is it in our interest to help bail out the Euro? Is it in our interest to engage in yet more wars with the United States of America? Is it in our interest to have American bases on our own soil? Is it in our own interest to endlessly have a cultural of Marxian deconstruction over all of our media in comparison to what pre-existed the relatively social conservatism of the 1950s?

If you slot in all of these ideas, which the mass of people are completely unconcerned about, and yet asked an identity-related question you come up with the answer that it is not in our interests.

Then you have to switch the questions around. Are there certain things which are in our interests rather than against our interests at a particular moment in time? Is it in our interest for a significant proportion of our media to be owned by foreigners? Probably not. Is it in our interest for a considerable part of our media to be owned by pornographers? Probably not. Is it in our interest for much of our banking and for much of our media to be totally international and to have no national specificity at all? Probably not. Is it in our interests that so many of our politicians are part of a jet-set international and humanist class that sees Britain as a puddle to their own self and corporate advancement? No, it’s not. As soon as you factor into all of these questions vanguard and elitist propositions on behalf of a group you come up with an interconnected series of answers about what’s in your interests and what’s not.

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When Tony Blair went to war over Iraq, he said it was in our interest to hug America close and he was part of an ideology called “Hug Them Close.” This is the idea that you never allow, particularly if you’re a social democrat in a British context on the right of the Labour Party, any space at all between what you and what American foreign policy wants at any particular time even if privately you don’t agree with a lot of it. You still, in a gangster-like way, go along with it.

But is it in our interest to behave in that manner? When we tried to act independently in what may well have been a folly-laden enterprise which was the Suez operation in 1956, America slapped us down! Smacked us in the face and square in the chops! And we had no particular answer either. When a run on the pound was engineered by the United States in order to humiliate this country and show it the error of its ways in going for some unilateral action with the French and the Israelis but not at the behest of American power as it manifested at that particular moment, we were shown what was what. It’s interesting to note that amongst the extraordinary moralism that is part of contemporary culture where obscure Olympics are remembered and Manchester United’s victories in the ‘60s are remembered and various other events are churned over by the media, Suez is never dwelt on. Suez is never mentioned. Fifty years on from Suez receives this much attention, and the reason it does receive no attention is because it was a rank humiliation for the then ruling class in this country who learned some very salient post-war lessons, and that was that you heel to the United States like an aggressive bulldog and basically never venture to do anything without their recognizance.

Part of the multi-ethnic reconfiguration of these islands is American by proxy, because everything that happens there happens here with a slight time lapse because we have modeled ourselves upon their model of near-open borders and fiscal and capitalist movement of money all over the world whereby Communist China now controls large sections of the debt mountain that holds up the United States and where two systems that could be said to be at war with each other ideologically – ultra-capitalist America and post-Communist China – actually have each other in a handshake as well as around the throat because they now rely on each other to prop each other up in the chaotic world system that has now evolved.

The Euro is in desperate trouble, and the Chinese were asked last month to help bail the Euro out, and they refused. And quite rightly they refused, because it’s not in China’s interest to bail out the European economies unless they are reduced to an African level where they can buy country by country! As you know, China is buying up Africa. They basically say to the Black Africans in the sub-Sahara, “Unlike the Whites and unlike the Arabs, we have never oppressed you. Let us buy your country!” And they’re swarming Africa. Eventually there will be, and there are partly, Chinese cities in Africa. It’s not a stupid idea. They will begin running the bureaucracies, they will end up with their own demographic change, and with a smile on their face as they do it they will take that continent. There’s a new scramble for Africa, and it is not Europeans who are doing it. Our time over there, when South Africa went, is gone. The problem is not the dispossession of our colonial elites of the past, but the dispossession of our communities at home in the future and in the present.

But my view is that as long as there is a vanguard to put forward the proposition of an exclusiveness for ourselves, there will always be hope, and that is independent of political parties. Political parties come and go. I believe a new one will be reconfigured in the next 18 months to 2 years on the basis of all the splitting which has gone on at the present time. I believe that a new political party is the way forward, but our own people won’t vote for it. Not in sufficient numbers, because they’re afraid, and because they’re in a funk, and because they would like something to happen but are frightened of the consequences and think that even to mention these things isn’t nice. Only a vanguard can mention these sorts of issues, because only a vanguard is unafraid to deal with the thought of not being nice. These ideas afflict and paralyze our people to a degree which is quite extraordinary.

Probably, viewed systematically, more pressure has to be put for there to be more of a radical response. Such pressure is always possible. Economic collapse is always possible. New wars and disturbances are always possible. But one thing we may have to get used to is the idea that as a group and as an ethnicity we exist in Europe and North America and Australasia and also all over the world. There are plenty of other groups who see themselves as transnational groups, who see their destiny all over the world. They see their destiny in vanguard terms. They see their destiny as having a core group within their own selves that can come back from anything genetically and in other ways. Not only do they ask the question when it is asked of them, “Is it good for me or is it bad for me or my group?” They also are prepared to cleave to their own group in times of trouble.

Certain groups have preserved themselves 60-70% and more genetically since the ancient world and they have done so by a culture of coherence and identity which crosses national borders and which understands that if a group is to survive it may need to adopt some radical measures which involve rolling with the blows.

English and British people exist all over the world. We exist all over the world. All over Europe, all over North America, all over Australasia, in quite a few of the countries of Latin America, in most of the ex-colonies. English is the language of the world. It’s the lingua franca of modernity or post-modernity. We have given the world a great lot, and this is just to refract our own identity through the national consciousness of one particular people who are actually a part of it. So, I think that the worst thing that can be uttered at this time is despair, because there are more than enough of us to provide the vanguard which is necessary. The trick is to link the vanguard to the popular will and to find a way to link the vanguard to the popular will.

So far, organizationally, in the post-Second World War world there has been a failure to link the vanguard to the popular will and that has occurred in all the societies of Western and Central Europe and has occurred even in the post-Communist Eastern European societies where it did appear that such a thing was on the cards immediately after Communism collapsed. It’s also true to say that Communism inoculated these populations against the worst and the most noxious forms of liberalism.

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The New Right writer, Tomislav Sunić, who lived under Communism and was imprisoned by it in Croatia with other members of his family, once said that “Communism rots the body, but liberalism rots the soul,” and there is a strong degree of truth to that remark, because liberalism attacks on the internal front, on the front of values and identity. It’s why the majority of our people refute their vanguardistic yearnings and callings.

Most people, particularly teenage boys, have a sort of yearning for vanguardism when they’re early in life, and then they forget it as they get older, and it becomes smeared and smudged over by various forms of liberal orthodoxy. They start either not voting or they vote for one of the prescribed parties: Conservative and Unionist, Liberal Democrat, and Labour. As long as you remain in that area you’re pretty safe in this country job-wise, career-wise, patrimonially-wise, in terms of reputation, in terms of bourgeois reputation in particular. If you step outside of those boundaries, and it’s quite a wide boundary . . . Liberals would say, “Look, we’ve given you as wide a space as almost anywhere in the world where you can cavort and make hay and make political pronouncements. Why do you need to go outside that? Why do you need to go out into these extremist and unheralded furrows and sort of support things which are counter-cultural and anti-system?” And the reason that one would choose to do so is because they are not in the interests of the group from which one originates. That’s the only reason that one would choose to do so.

The only reason for vanguardism is for the elite to protect the mass and seek to bring it forward in history, because the mass can never act for itself.

In Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I mentioned at the end, Winston and Julia fail in their rebellion, feeble though it was, against the all-powerful party, and Orwell wants them to be seen to fail at the end of the novel. But hope lies in the proles, if you remember. Hope lies in the thick-set woman with the laundry basket who’s singing a song, “It was only a hopeless fancy.” Do you remember that? “It was only a hopeless fancy,” as she puts the diapers on the line she’s singing “it was only a hopeless fancy,” which is a prolefeed song given to them by the Ministry of Propaganda in that particular society.

My view is that the future always allies with the elite not with the mass. The future allies with those that will mold the mass and that will prepare for its energization when a moment comes. That’s why my message is one not of despair but of hope for the future, because as long as indigenous, nationally-conscious, ethnically aware, racially aware, inegalitarian, elitist, and other values and views are put forth in a coherent way, in a sane way, and in an educated way — because people expect views to be put forward in such a way — as long as that happens there is always hope for the future, because people will align in extremis with their own defense mechanism, and they will align with the people who have put forward the defensive barrister’s case, which can become offensive as well as defensive in a particular political and social moment.

My view is that as long as there is a continuous effort to put forward the elitist agenda of our own group in the sense that a proportion of people are prepared to place upon their own shoulders the burden of the moral leadership of their own group . . . That’s what the Black Muslims do. What the Black Muslims in the United States do is they put themselves forward in the most radical way possible. The bulk of American Blacks have no interest in Islam at all and are Christian and often deeply so and will only vote for Christian politicians. Yet their most radical vanguard group has adopted Islam, and they have done so because in their own way of looking at things they consider it to be a less White, a less Western formulation which is more in keeping with their own sense of their own self, their own strength, their own determinancy.

A similar phenomenon can be found among so-called White extremists where many evince pagan and other views, because they basically want a viewpoint which to their point of view is totally cardinal and it relates to themselves and to no one else. But that’s fine, because all those views do is sustain the strength of the vanguard. That’s why people adopt radical metaphysical views about which many people in this room would argue among themselves. But that’s not the point. They’re the fuel. They’re the food. They’re the element that keeps people staunch, because it’s difficult amongst the withering condescension of a liberal society to maintain an elitist identity politics. It’s not straightforward, it’s not easy, and therefore you need to draw upon certain strengths which are theoretical and which are metaphysical and which are emotional as much as anything else because one’s tie to one’s own group has an emotional pull just as one’s tie to a regiment if one’s a soldier has an emotional pull.

That emotional pull is extremely important. The theories are there for the upper part of consciousness and the upper part of the mind. They’re also to keep people subtle and to keep people clever and to keep people alert, because if there is such a crisis that our people feel they cannot survive they will turn to not us, but to people like us. They always have and they always will.

The crisis in our own hearts and minds is the addiction of our people to liberal answers whilst they remain in zones of economic comfort. That is the problem. Of course, there are all sorts of our people who are not in zones of economic comfort at all, but the problem is that many of them are so degraded by the consequences of life and exist day-to-day they have no concern with more general and with more theoretical and with sociological changes. They’re concerned with this luncheon voucher, this meal tomorrow, this is it to the NHS. They’re concerned with what is fundamentally before them at any particular time.

The people you always want in a society are the ones who have something to lose and the ones who are feeling that they are losing it. This enormous middle which extends from the middle of the middle class to the middle of the working class essentially, the heart of the society. Those are the people who have enough of a stake and they are frightened to lose it and at the moment they cleave to liberalism, because they feel that things are not irretrievably and atrociously so bad that they need to call upon elites or vanguards or forms of identity politics to save them. It’s our job to keep pushing the message that they need to turn to their more radical proponents in order to be saved. All that can really be done at this time is to continue to push that message. Organizations will come and go, but ideas remain if not eternal then semi-eternal, and all that we have to do is keep pushing the message of our own self-belief, of our own form of identity, of our own unique position in history, of our own unique cultural achievements, of the barriers that exist to our own advancement which are in ourselves. Although individuals could be harmed by other groups, the real cause of harm to ourselves is ourselves, our own queasiness, our own moderation, our own love of reasonableness, our own love of seeing the other man’s point of view.

All that political correctness is in some respects is a growing out of Protestant/liberal apologetics that we want to hear the other man’s point of view, that we don’t wish to be rude, that we don’t wish to be unfair, that we don’t wish to be insulting. And these things have been erected into a big engine, into a big destructive virus that can be used against us to such a degree now that people fear. People fear opening their own mouths. Everything can be said. Everything can be said. But it can only be said in an abstract and intellectual level, because if you say things at a more guttural or a more primal or a more unindividuated level, you will be arrested immediately under all of the acts which have been passed. If you put things at a high enough level, if you put things at the level of a university Right-wing seminar basically, no one can touch you. No one can touch you on Earth irrespective of all the laws that have been passed. The only exception would be some of the revisionist legislation in Europe in relation to particular statements and that applies just to certain European nation-states and not others. But broadly speaking, you cannot be touched. But this means you are speaking at an abstract level which only alienates you further from the masses, which is done deliberately for that effect.

But also remember everyone knows what you’re saying. Everyone knows what is being said, because things are digested at different levels and people absorb things sensually, intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, through the hands, through the heart, through the eye, through the fist. They sense it and hear it at different levels and everybody understands what is being said even if it’s implicit.

Ours is an implicit group. The English are, in part, shy and restrained and even slightly socially awkward. That’s why theater is so important in our history, because it gives an alternative space to be others and to be exuberant and to be passionate and to be bombastic and virile, things which are not seemingly part of the national characteristic as is. But everyone understands what is being said. Everyone understands what is happening in this society. Everyone understands the transformation that is being wrought, and everyone understands, or almost everyone understands, the choices that may have to be made in the future.

It’s quite clear that at the present time people are not going to vote for a vanguard party, and there isn’t one. But that doesn’t mean that a vanguard party shouldn’t exist. My view is that a vanguard party should exist and will have to be rebuilt for the moment when such a thing may occur, but the real point is the fact that such a vanguard exists.

Menachem Begin once said that all you needed was 200 men. For Zionism to be established in Palestine, all you needed was 200 men who are prepared to act selflessly in the national and ethnic cause and in a religious cause, although his movement was not an explicitly religious one. You don’t need many people. When the politics of mass and individual identity come up, you don’t need an enormous army of people. What you need is those who have the courage and the will to speak at a particular time and those who keep the mental continuity of that tradition going over time. Because everyone notices what we say even if it’s kept from the masses. Everyone notices what the politics of identity amounts to.

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Periodically there’s always a program on the BBC about the far Right of some salacious sort. It’s always there. It needs to be there! It’s a compulsive need. Why does it need to be there? Because liberals need to scratch. They need to find their opposite half, they need to find their other side, their shadow, their darkness. They need to stare into the pit of darkness. That’s what they need! Their love with this sinister, other side that they project onto.

In Freudian psychoanalysis, there is the idea of projection. Now, let’s not get into whether that’s a true theory or not, but it’s an interesting idea that people who don’t like something about themselves project their own nastiness and their own fear and fervor onto others, and that is in some ways what liberals do with people who have, let’s call it, nationalistic opinions in Western societies. They are the product of a sort of secular demonization, aren’t they, really? Because the elite that speaks for their own group is treated as the secular equivalent of Satanism virtually, certainly by many forms of popular media. That’s not an untruthful or particularly biased statement. I think it’s just a factual one. Certainly at the level of propaganda it’s a factual one. At the level of academic reportage, it’s not and a more realistic view is taken. But at the level of tabloid media and general media, the demonization is very strong and the demonization has worked, which is why people will not vote in enormous numbers for parties of extraordinary reasonableness. All of the populist parties have fallen over themselves to be as moderate and as acclimatizing as possible in this era. They’ve given away almost 70% of the core ultra views that manifest in these particular views and yet still people will not vote for them in a majority way and that is because the demonization, along with the apathy and the intent of liberalism have all worked.

But demonization has a point of crescendo. The demonization builds and builds and builds until it gets so out of kilter with reality that people shrug it aside as if it’s of no importance and then it can be a form of virility and it can become a form of power and it can become a form of importance.

In Northern Ireland at the moment, the Catholic group is proud to vote for Sinn Féin. Almost everybody. The moderate nationalist party now — nationalist in the context of that society, don’t forget — is dying. The SDLP is an elderly party of trade union activists which is dying.

There is a degree to which we have to understand that in our politics all is open, and anything can happen, and the future is ours if we want it to be and that the point of the elitist view that I’m putting forward is that the absence of despair is always necessary for our way of thinking and our way of looking at things. I ask you not to despair. I ask you to look to the future and to the present and to the past. I ask you to remain in faith with vanguardistic and elitist views. I ask you to remain faithful to unpopular views at the present time because they will become majority views instantaneously at a particular moment if the society should ever break and turn our way. All that can be done is to sustain ideas. One man alone in a room with a computer, a typewriter as it was, can change the world. A few people alone in a room, if they cleave to an idea whose time has come, can still change the world.

There are more of us than ever before. Our people are probably dumbed down to an incredible degree, but more are capable of being better educated than ever before. We’re stronger and fitter than ever before.

In the Boer War, when the slums of England were opened two-thirds of those that came forward were rattled and riddled with rickets and disease and couldn’t fight and wouldn’t fight because they physically couldn’t fight. Churchill once said, “What’s the use of having an empire if you can’t flush your own toilet?” One of his rare radical social statements, and there’s a degree of truth in all of that.

So, I would ask the people in this room to understand they are part of a tradition of non-surrender, a tradition of ultimate resource, a tradition that says “never say die,” a tradition that is the epitome of military life but in another area theoretically and politically and actuarily. One can never take one’s identity from one. One exists for a purpose. Liberals believe life has no purpose, but life has a purpose, and life’s purpose is to go forward and confront that which is before you. What is before us is cultural dispossession unless we are prepared to do something about it. What we can do about it will depend on the circumstances, but what we can do is to remain loyal to our own sense of identity, to our own sense of becoming, to our own sense of what we may be in the future.

Most people are truly afraid. They’re afraid to open their own mouths in relation to any of these issues. We must not fear. We must understand that that degree of fear needs to be conquered in ourselves as it will be conquered in others.

Only when the time comes will we be looked to if we remain loyal to our vision of ourselves. We know who we are, we don’t know yet where we are going, but we will always exist and we must always maximize the maximum potential of our existence.

There’s a book on the side of this room called March of the Titans, which in its way hopes to adumbrate all that we have achieved. Our quadrant of mankind has achieved an enormous amount through elite individuals who replicate back onto the majority the success of their own group in architecture, in law, in art, in scholasticism, in morals, in economics, in military affairs, in technology elsewhere but also in political leadership, also in military courage, also in vanguardism and elitism.

The present political class has betrayed us, but that doesn’t mean that political classes can be done away with. It just means they need to be replaced with people who are better and stronger and more willful and more in tune with the internal vibrations and sense of solemnity of their own group.

I ask you to put your hands together for Britain, for Europe, for Indo-European civilization, for our nation of ourselves, and for an undying and unquenchable fire that can never be put out because it never knows what it is to be extinguished.

Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/11/vanguardism-hope-for-the-future/

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[1] Image: https://secure.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Helios.jpg

mercredi, 10 avril 2013

Conquête et abandon d’une souveraineté artistique

 
Conquête et abandon d’une souveraineté artistiqueConquête et abandon d’une souveraineté artistique
 

Ex: http://diktacratie.com/

« Le suffrage universel ne me fait pas peur, les gens voteront comme on leur dira » disait  Alexis de Tocqueville. Je poursuivrai par : l’art contemporain n’est pas à craindre, les gens aimeront comme on leur dira.

1917, irruption d’un urinoir dans un musée. La malice et la provocation de Marcel Duchamp paieront, cet objet est désormais élevé au rang d’art car marqué du sceau de l’institution. Duchamp en avant-gardiste inspiré révolutionne alors les mondes de l’art. Un bouleversement sans précédents qui marqua les jugements esthétiques, et la création contemporaine. Désormais c’est le « regardeur qui fait l’œuvre ».

Symptomatique, ce coup d’état artistique conteste le conformisme esthétique de son époque. Mais depuis, toute critique radicale est reléguée au banc des archaïsmes et autres nostalgies réactionnaires ! Mettant alors hors-jeu tout jugement esthétique. Trop souvent réduit à celui de goût, il demeure pourtant nécessaire afin de reconnaître ce qui « fait » œuvre.

Ce qui était une provocation pertinente de l’époque, quand à la forme, ne cesse pourtant d’alimenter la création d’aujourd’hui. L’anti-conformisme d’alors s’est mû en conformisme d’aujourd’hui. La subversion prend un coup de vieux et sent le réchauffé. Désormais l’absence de contraintes formelles vaudra pour liberté absolue du créateur. Sur les cimaises, les « dîtes » oeuvres  rivalisent de singularités déroutantes, empêchant souvent  une compréhension immédiate du message (lorsqu’il y en a un !). Mais pour qu’une oeuvre soit d’art ne faut-il pas fatalement que ses codes et qualités puissent être saisis par le commun des mortels ? Qu’elle relie l’intime à l’universel ?

Subversion et illusion

En relativisant tout jugement esthétique, nous laissons aux experts et aux institutions le soin de décider eux-mêmes de ce qui fera « oeuvre ». Le spectateur désormais privé d’outils critiques sera prié de s’en remettre à lui-même , il est alors « libre » de prendre des vessies pour des lanternes. Tout est possible lorsqu’il devient interdit de juger !

Promotion sera donc faîte à celui, qui installant une distance avec le public,  prouvera qu’il est libéré de tout carcan idéologique. Les institutions, sont alors bien soucieuses d’exhiber « une expression libre« , attribut indispensable à toute vitrine sociale et démocrate. Les subversions de façade valideront ainsi à elles seules la liberté d’expression, dans ce qu’elle a de plus inoffensif. Mettre en scène plutôt que de faire vivre la démocratie de manière effective, voilà un dessein qui mérite bien des subventions !

Pourtant l’art contemporain, est avant-gardiste par définition. Il devrait contester, révéler les travers et les abus, tel le baromètre esthétique d’une société dont le peuple serait souverain. Que penser alors des « prises de risque » artistiques subventionnées ? Dénoncent-elles quelques abus de pouvoir, lorsqu’ il s’agit d’uriner sur une scène de théâtre, ou de plonger le Christ dans de la pisse ? Au pire elles choquent la ménagère, au mieux elle suscite l’indignation des sensibilités attaquées. Arguant au passage l’indétrônable liberté d’expression, comme preuve et garante de notre souveraineté !

Mais il semblerait surtout qu’il ne reste plus grand-chose à enfreindre restant politiquement correct…

Kelly Schmalz.

00:05 Publié dans art | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : art, art modenre, avant-garde, subversion | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

dimanche, 17 février 2013

Some Sort of Nietzschean

Some Sort of Nietzschean

By Alex Kurtagić

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

Wyndham Lewis in 1917 

Wyndham Lewis in 1917

Review:

Paul O’Keefe
Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis [2]
London: Pimlico, 2000

In his acknowledgment pages Paul O’Keefe states that it took him a decade—not including the years of research already donated to him by another writer—to complete his biography of Wyndham Lewis, a project he began in 1990 while he was president of the Wyndham Lewis Society. And this is apparent, for this volume, holding 700 pages of tightly packed print, offers an indefatigably detailed and masochistically researched account of the British modernist artist and author’s life.

Biographies differ in emphasis, depending on the author’s biases, and the tone here is set early in the first chapter, which consists of a detailed description of Lewis’ bisected brain—now preserved in the Pathology Museum of the Imperial College School of Medicine—and the progressive destruction (through compression of the adjacent structures) caused by the growth of its pituitary tumor, medically known as a chromophone adenoma. O’Keefe’s narration is temperate and balanced in the extreme, abstaining from either celebration or condemnation, or indeed evaluation, of his subject. Instead, we are presented with unvarnished facts and restrained descriptions of circumstances, and, where records have not survived or never existed and witness memories were unavailable, with the most disciplined of inference.

Initially, the effect of this cold detective approach is a certain literary anhedonia: the narrative barely raises the pulse, despite Lewis’ turbulent social life, truculence, and extraordinarily difficult personality. One feels that another author would have been able to produce much more dramatic prose with the same information.

All the same, O’Keefe’s biography is impressive, and after a somewhat laborious account of Lewis’ Bohemian early life and career—which, ironically, includes his most significant artistic period, coinciding with Cubism and Futurism, and now referred to as Vorticist—the pace picks up once we get to 1930, the year Apes of God (London: Arthur Press, 1930), Lewis’ savage satire of London’s literary scene and the Bloomsbury Group, was published. We learn, as we race through the decade, that Lewis would routinely ridicule his friends and patrons in his novels, where they would appear thinly disguised under a pseudonym. Few were spared, which led to many a falling out, libel writs, and loss of patronage. This, plus Lewis’ quarrelsome, irascible, ultra-individualistic, cruel, secretive, litigious, and somewhat paranoid personality, kept him always on the verge of bankruptcy, despite his tremendous creative energy and productivity. Indeed, when a group of friends decided to contribute monthly to a fund so that Lewis could work without financial worries—for he was always in arrears and in debt—he very quickly and rudely alienated his benefactors. This was probably because he resented being beholden to anyone. Any well-meaning gesture was an affront.

The book is hard to put down as we pass through the 1940s. From the late 1930s, when Lewis travelled to North America, where he alternated between Canada and the United States and where he remained until after the end of the war. There we are taken to what was probably the most bitter and penurious period in his life. By this time he had difficulties finding a publisher, having become notorious for attracting libel suits, locking horns with his earlier publishers, and not delivering manuscripts for which he had been paid an advance. In the United States his books were deemed by some not the most marketable. Commissions for portraits and other art, which he desperately needed and assiduously sought, were scarce and not proof against upsetting his patrons. They were also not terribly popular—in 1938 his portrait of T. S. Eliot had been rejected by the Royal Academy [3]. And speaking engagements, greatly facilitated by the publicity efforts of friend and future media guru Marshall McLuhan, proved insufficient and disappointing financially—Lewis was no Jonathan Bowden, in any event. Thus, he and his wife survived in cheap hotels and grim rented accommodation only a dollar, sometimes a few cents, away from eviction until 1945.

Lewis’ situation improved marginally thereafter, though by this time his eyesight was in steep decline, owing to his as-yet-undiagnosed pituitary tumor compressing his optic nerve. His 1949 portrait of T. S. Eliot would be his last painting. All the same, Lewis marched on, continuing to author substantial and difficult books—including the last two volumes of his Human Age trilogy, the first of which had been published many years earlier—even after he went blind in 1951. In his final years, Lewis benefited from the radio dramatisation of his trilogy and from his Civil List Pension, which, though exiguous, provided him with a bare minimum of security.

O’Keefe’s narration continues through to a search of Lewis’ condemned flat soon after his death and to his final resting place inside a niche in a wall at Golder’s Green Crematorium.

Despite its comprehensiveness in all that pertains to Lewis, O’Keefe’s biography has two major deficiencies, which stem from the fact that all we learn is tightly circumscribed to the facts and events relating to Lewis and his immediate social periphery. Firstly, aside from a few clinical descriptions, we learn very little about Lewis’ art and writing, or their cultural significance. By the time he finally receives a modicum of institutional honors and recognition, it comes almost unexpectedly; it is as if there had been a sudden sea change and the invisible powers who had previously been critical, suspicious, or unimpressed suddenly decided to relent. Secondly, there is virtually no wider historical, cultural, or sociological context, leaving Lewis’ life and work somewhat abstracted; the points of reference appear shadowy, remote, and somewhat peremptory. One can go too far in the opposite direction, of course, which would detract from a work that aims to be objective, devoid of opinion and coloration, or about an individual as opposed to his times, but it seems O’Keefe was a little too careful to avoid this.

We do obtain some perspective through Lewis’ relations with (and on occasion anecdotes involving some of) the various and now illustrious members of Lewis’ circle—which included Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and W. B. Yeats—but this perspective remains somewhat shallow, and the individuals concerned remain somewhat distant. This may well be because Lewis was a study in detachment; we learn that for him friends were there to be used, and were friends only in so much as they were useful. Bowden described him [4] as “a bit of a rogue” and “a rascal,” and one can see why.

Having said that, in this biography Lewis does not come across as the iron-hard Right-winger that Bowden made him out to be. It is admitted that Lewis wrote a book called Hitler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), but he wrote it hastily and it seems he later regretted it, writing The Hitler Cult and How It Will End (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1939) and The Jews: Are They Human? (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939), the latter of which is an attack against anti-Semitism. (O’Keefe also documents the frustration with Lewis of German National Socialists visiting the United Kingdom in the early 1930s in the face of the British author’s refusal to identify Communists as Jews—although this may have been recalcitrant individualism on the part of Lewis, for an anecdote a few hundred pages later on in the biography suggests he was aware of the “Jewish question,” a state not necessarily incompatible with dismissing anti-Semitism as “a racial red-herring.”)

It is admitted that Lewis met William Joyce and Oswald Mosley (O’Keefe, p. 370), but any relations in this biography appear vague and non-committal, his article in the British Union Quarterly notwithstanding. It is admitted also that, he wrote two other books (Left Wings Over Europe [London: Jonathan Cape, 1936] and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! [London: Lovat Dickson, 1937]) which have been interpreted as in support for Mussolini and Franco respectively, but they are anti-war tracts. Later, Lewis would write Anglo-Saxony: A League that Works (Toronto: Ryerson, 1941), which is pro-democracy, and America and Cosmic Man (New York: Doubleday Company, 1949), where he pledges allegiance to a cosmic or cosmopolitan utopianism (Cosmic Man, p. 238).

Lewis’ politics were complex. Not Red, certainly, but not pure Black either. Now, Bowden, who knew O’Keefe for a time, described the latter as a liberal, and told in his 2006 talk about Lewis how, while being a member of the Wyndham Lewis Society, he told those present at an AGM that the society was “based on a lie”—proceeding then to accuse its members of revisionism, timidity, and denial. It may be that Bowden saw in Lewis want he wanted to see, or that his interpretation of Lewis as a Nietzschean metapolitical fascist owed to Bowden’s approaching his subject as a Nietzschean and a Stirnerite. Or that he focused only on the parts of Lewis that interested him, obviously the inter-war and then the late period.

In O’Keefe’s biography, certainly, Nietzsche does not figure in relation to Lewis. This is not to say, however, that Lewis was not a Nietzschean force or cannot be seen as such: aside from what can be gleaned from his prose or the conceptual elitism of his 1917 manifesto (“The Code of a Herdsman”), Lewis was certainly always against, always difficult and “rebarbative,” and always—despite his navigating a fairly wide circle of leading modernist artists and literati, alone against all, unabated by poverty and refusing to throw in the towel even after he went blind.

The reason for the above remarks is that I read this book as background research for a biography of Jonathan Bowden. Bowden mentioned Lewis frequently in his early writing, and among his effects after his death several books by Lewis were found, including Childermass (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928), The Revenge of Love (London: Cassell and Co. 1937), Self Condemned (London: Methuen Press, 1954), Apes of God, Snooty Baronet (London: Cassell and Co., 1932), Tarr (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918; London: Chatto and Windus, 1928), and The Demon of Progress in the Arts (London: Methuen Press, 1954).

From the present biography of Lewis one can easily see the reasons why Bowden could have conceivably either identified with or seen something of himself in Lewis. Both lost a parent in early life. Both were prolific painters and writers, both of an experimental sort, though Bowden more than Lewis. Both identified with the politics of the Right, while also being aggressively individualistic, though, again, Bowden more than Lewis. Both were unafraid of—and indeed enjoyed—including friends and acquaintances in their prose, where these victims of cruel and often libellous psychoanalysis appeared quasi-cartoonified and only thinly disguised under pseudonyms. Both moved frequently during early adulthood and later lived closed off, hidden away at a recondite and obscure address. Both were secretive in their personal lives, which they strictly compartmentalized—in Lewis’ case, many of his friends were unaware of the fact that he had a wife and several children (by previous lovers) until Lewis was in late middle age; initially, he never mentioned her, few ever saw her, and no one was ever given access to the flat hidden behind a door below his studio, where she lived with him, until many years later. Both found wealth elusive, and were mostly interested in recognition. And there are other parallels. On the whole, however, Bowden was more consistent philosophically, harder politically, and a more extreme artist and writer.

Irrespective of your thoughts on modernism in general, Wyndham Lewis is sufficiently interesting on his own for this major biography to be educational and entertaining, though I suspect it will be those familiar with Jonathan Bowden’s oratory who will get the greater profit.

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/some-sort-of-nietzschean/

samedi, 08 octobre 2011

El mito y la vanguardia

El mito y la vanguardia,

Adriano Scianca

Ex: http://www.idpress.org/

El problema del lenguaje

Todo movimiento auténticamente revolucionario – es decir, portador de proyectos radicalmente innovadores y originales a todo lo que se ha experimentado y en todo y por todo heterogéneo y alternativo con respecto al mundo socio-político en que irrumpe – choca inevitablemente con el problema del lenguaje.

Esto sucede porque todo movimiento “nuevo” debe necesariamente hacer uso de un lenguaje “viejo”, impregnado de la sensibilidad y de la lógica propia del mundo que se querría subvertir. Por lo demás, no podría proceder de otra manera: el lenguaje es siempre lenguaje recibido. Observa con lucidez un filósofo contemporáneo – aunque muy lejano de nuestra perspectiva – que “un sujeto que fuese el origen absoluto del propio discurso y lo construyese ‘en todas sus piezas’ sería el creador del verbo, el Verbo en persona” (1), sería por tanto el Dios de la Biblia que crea ex nihilo, siendo el “totalmente otro” respecto al mundo, estando entonces fuera de la historia y del lenguaje. El hombre, en cambio, es siempre en el lenguaje; una obra de ingeniería lingüística le resulta completamente imposible, ya que siempre debe actuar con los “instrumentos” que encuentra en su lugar. Pero actuar con “instrumentos” pensados para finalidades completamente distintas respecto a las que uno se ha propuesto no siempre resulta cómodo.

Pensemos en Heidegger- pero problemas análogos se presentan ya en Nietzsche – que deja inacabada su obra maestra Ser y Tiempo porque carece de un lenguaje apropiado; en cierto momento al pensador alemán “le faltan las palabras”, ya que todas aquellas disponibles están irremediablemente empapadas de la visión del mundo dominante en Occidente. Pero para que el problema aquí abordado no resulte excesivamente abstracto e individualista, pensemos también en todos aquellos movimientos políticos y culturales que han pasado a la historia con el nombre de Konservative Revolution: echando un vistazo a los eslóganes, a los lemas, a los títulos de los libros, a los nombres de los distintos grupos no se puede más que observar un cierto gusto por el oxímoron, por la paradoja, por la violación abierta de los cánones y de los esquemas comunes; pensar en un socialismo que sea también nacional, en una aristocracia que hunda sus raíces en el pueblo, en una democracia desvinculada de la tutela del liberalismo plutocrático, en un cristianismo que afirme valores germánicos (es decir, paganos) – todo esto tiene orígenes de una muchísima mayor profundidad que un simple anhelo de originalidad.

Detrás de todo esto, se encuentra más bien la incapacidad de definirse uno mismo de manera adecuada a través del lenguaje dominante y hay, por tanto, una voluntad de síntesis, una tentativa de pensar de forma simultánea lo que siempre se ha concebido como distinto. Un ejemplo más todavía, pero esta vez más concreto: pensemos en nosotros mismos; pongámonos en relación con los grandes temas de la actualidad y tratemos de tomar parte en el debate tal y como nos viene presentado por los medios de comunicación.

Y bien, ¿estamos con la retórica angelical, empalagosa, igualitaria e hipócrita de los pacifistas o con la cruzada a base de Bible & business de George W. Bush? ¿Estamos contra los bárbaros inmigrantes islámicos en nombre del Occidente cristiano o somos filo-inmigracionistas a ultranza, seguidores del cosmopolitismo y del mestizaje etnocultural? ¿Estamos a favor de la fuga hacia delante del “desarrollo” neoliberal o a favor del “retorno” a una civilización neopastoral, fuera de la historia, al estilo de las últimas tribus africanas? De manera más banal: ¿somos de derechas o de izquierdas? Estas son las alternativas que nos propone el mundo contemporáneo. Nuestra incomodidad ante estas es evidente ya que la posición que hay que tomar nos parece que es siempre una tercera con respecto a las que nos dan. Eso sucede porque, en la medida en que somos realmente revolucionarios, usamos un lenguaje diferente. El lenguaje del mito.

El mito

Según Giorgio Locchi(2), todo movimiento que encarne una tendencia histórica nueva se presenta bajo forma mítica. El mito, precisamente porque es “nuevo”, no puede hablar un lenguaje totalmente in-formado por valores a él antitéticos, y sin embargo no tiene otras formas expresivas a su disposición; por esto nace bajo el signo de la ambigüedad, su expresión es la paradoja.

Respecto a los códigos lingüísticos dominantes la expresión mítica aparece como herejía, como trasgresión, como unidad de los contrarios. Esto sucede precisamente en virtud de la violación- más o menos consciente- de la dialéctica del lenguaje utilizado. El lenguaje que se parasita se desarrolla y se articula de hecho mediante la institución de parejas de opuestos y de contrarios- que en el caso del igualitarismo son, entre otras, cristianismo/ateismo, comunismo/capitalismo, nacionalismo/internacionalismo, derecha/izquierda, individualismo/colectivismo, reacción/progreso, etc.- que reflejan la autorreflexión ideológica del universo político-cultural imperante. La expresión mítica hace de cortocircuito para esta dialéctica al no pensar los contrarios ya como tales. Las palabras fundamentales son, por tanto, “falsificadas”. Significados nuevos se derraman en significantes viejos. Se tiene así un uso instrumental del lenguaje, que ya no debe explicar analíticamente, sino que ahora debe evocar, tocar una sensibilidad profunda que va más allá de la mera razón. La unidad de los contrarios propia del mito viene dada por los Leitbilder (imágenes conductoras) de las que habla Armin Mohler (3).

Los Leitbilder son los mitemas, las unidades primarias de la estructura mítica, del Weltbild, es decir, de la imagen del mundo. Son símbolos evocadores, imágenes conductoras de una idea del mundo. La creación y la difusión de los mitemas instaura un flujo comunicativo, es decir, la red de las relaciones humanas mediante la cual el mito mismo se dice y habla. Comunicar es, de hecho, instaurar relaciones, vincularse a otros, descubrir afinidades o idiosincrasias. Los individuos están necesariamente abiertos al propio contexto comunicacional; comunicándose tienden también a re-conocerse, tienden a tomar posición junto a quienes sienten como afines. La disposición mítica de quien dice el discurso mítico, en la práctica, tiende a “excitar” la disponibilidad mítica de quien acoge el discurso. Quien logra situarse como centro de la estructura de los signos lingüísticos del discurso mítico -para usar un lenguaje estructuralista precisamente- logra dominar (aunque sólo sea parcialmente: el lenguaje no se domina nunca como una cosa) el flujo comunicativo, logra imponerse en la producción de los símbolos y se sitúa como vanguardia metapolítica.

La vanguardia

Por tanto, dominar el lenguaje. Imponer una lógica nueva que deconstruya los paradigmas dominantes, que disuelva y vuelva a plasmar las formaciones. La vanguardia debe distinguirse por “una acción sistemática y culturalmente eversiva, que trate de introducir en el circuito ideas ‘envenenadas’, que trate no tanto de influir, demostrar, convencer, organizar burocráticamente, como de chocar, fascinar, crear dudas, generar necesidades, hacer que crezcan consciencias, producir actitudes y conductas desestabilizadoras. Debe, en una palabra, hablar y saber hablar el lenguaje del mito, crear a partir de sí misma su propio público, atraer plenamente la atención tanto de las tendencias espontáneas de rechazo político de la realidad del Sistema en sus variadas articulaciones, como de los arquetipos romántico-fáusticos que todavía circulan en el inconsciente colectivo europeo” (4).

Chocar y seducir. Pero para esto es preciso otro estilo, que salga definitivamente de la ritualidad vacía del nostalgismo, de los eslóganes manidos, del conformismo sectario. Superar los estereotipos, hablar un lenguaje nuevo, rechazar las lógicas del Sistema para imponer otras nuevas, enfrentarse al presente y proyectar el futuro- he aquí nuestro objetivo. Debemos practicar- como ya hizo brillantemente la Nouvelle Droite en su periodo de oro- la lógica del terzo incluso (el tercero incluido): se participa en el debate sosteniendo siempre una tercera opinión (lógicamente usando la cabeza: innovar por innovar es un ejercicio estéril) respecto a las posiciones opuestas en que se dividen los seguidores del Sistema.

De este modo, se les pone ante un discurso nuevo para el que no están preparados, se les obliga a tomar posición y a redefinir las formaciones. Los individuos habituados, por convicción o costumbre, al discurso dominante nos consideran algo ya previsible, nos asignan de oficio una identidad compuesta de ignorancia y prepotencia, de nostalgia e intolerancia, de prejuicio y arrogancia. Nuestro cometido es sorprenderles, hacer que salten por los aires las lógicas y los ritmos impuestos, escapar a las clasificaciones y a las etiquetas. Lo que importa en estar en el mundo contemporáneo, siempre dispuestos a enfrentarnos con este y a recoger sus desafíos, sin ser de este mundo, perteneciendo a otra raza, a otro estilo, ligados a otros mitos y a otros valores. Sólo así se puede escapar de dos comportamientos especulares pero igualmente peligrosos: el ansia de tomar posición, de participar, de ser recuperados por el Sistema y admitidos en la discusión entre las “personas civiles” y el opuesto repliegue a debates esotéricos e insignificantes, todos internos a un micro-ambiente aislado del mundo.

Después de todo, la misma Nouvelle Droite, aunque aquí se la ha tomado como ejemplo positivo, no ha aplicado esta estrategia más que de manera parcial, limitándose al discurso cultural y filosófico, casi como si una idea por sí misma innovadora resultase revolucionaria por el mero hecho de ser dicha. La elaboración ideológica en sentido estricto, sin embargo, ha de integrarse en una acción global y diversificada más ambiciosa y de mayor alcance, aunque al mismo tiempo más humilde y concreta.

El mito se afirma con todos los lenguajes posibles, también y sobre todo con el del ejemplo y el de la acción, afirmando cotidianamente una presencia activa en la sociedad y sobre el terreno; presencia que, de vez en cuando, no sirva para reclamar una comisión o una poltrona sino que sea, al contrario, la demostración concreta de que la alternativa es posible. Sólo madurando la capacidad de mantener y afirmar tal presencia en el corazón de la sociedad podremos arrancar de las indignas manos del carro new-global el monopolio del pensamiento alternativo, atrayendo por consiguiente hacia nuestro campo todas las institividades de rebelión y los conatos de revuelta, tratando así de “dar forma” y de movilizar conscientemente tales sentimientos expresados hasta ahora sólo en estado bruto. Tan sólo este esfuerzo constante en dirección hacia una apertura al mundo contemporáneo puede permitirnos hablar el verdadero lenguaje del mito, que por su naturaleza es siempre provocador (pro-vocare, es decir, etimológicamente, “llamar fuera”, es decir, invitar, desafiar, tentar, excitar, incitar; en una palabra: movilizar).

La alternativa es la cerrazón orgullosa en un ghetto que se cree comunidad, en una secta que se cree aristocracia, fuera del mundo y de los desafíos de la contemporaneidad, eternamente tarde en la historia, por todos mal conocidos e ignorados antes incluso que condenados y proscritos.

A nosotros nos corresponde la elección.

* * *
[i] Jacques Derrida, La struttura, il segno e il gioco nel discorso delle scienze umane, in La Escrittura e la diferenza Einaudi, Turín 2002.

[ii] Cfr Giorgio Locchi, Wagner, Nietzsche e il mito sovrumanista, Akropolis, Roma 1982.

[iii] Cfr. Armin Mohler, La Rivoluzione Conservatrice in Germania 1918-1932. Una guida, Akropolis/La Roccia di Erec, Florencia 1990.

[iv] Stefano vaj, Introducción alla prima edizione de Il Sistema per uccidere i popoli di Guillaume Faye (SEB, Milán 1997).

Extraído de Orion n° 228, settembre 2003.
http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/

dimanche, 22 mai 2011

Dragos Kalajic - Hyperborean Realism

Hyperborean Realism

Dragos Kalajic

 

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, 04 février 2011

Evola: de Mafarka a Mitra

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Evola: de Mafarka a Mitra 

Jean-Marc Vivenza representa a vanguarda musical futurista europeia. Conjugando teoria e prática, inscreve-se na história das vanguardas culturais europeias afirmando, alto e forte, uma revolução política, espiritual e artística, através do que não é música, no sentido que lhe dão os «modernos» e que só merece o seu nome. Bruitismo. Este artigo, publicado em Volonté Futuriste (1989), prova, caso fosse necessário, que da colisão de duas visões, aparentemente antitéticas, pode  nascer uma análise clara e sem falhas que poderá enriquecer cada um dos campos.

* * *

Para muitos espíritos, o futurismo estaria numa posição absolutamente antitética em relação à Tradição europeia. O percurso de Julius Evola dá-nos, sobre esse assunto, uma resposta de uma singular recorrência contra os a priori e os pronto-a-pensar.

 


Julius Evola nasce em Roma a 19 de Maio de 1898 - no seio de uma família da nobreza rural pela parte do seu pai, Vincenzo e, durante toda a vida, ficará ligado a esta cidade onde morre em 14 de Junho de 1974. Este pensador representa hoje uma das maiores figuras da filosofia tradicional. Partindo das fontes da mais longínqua antiguidade indo-europeia, constituiu, através da publicação dos seus livros, de um dos mais violentos requisitórios contra a ilusão moderna e os seus mitos contemporâneos: «a igualdade», «o regime da quantidade» e «o materialismo».

  


Romano em todas as fibras do seu ser, é sob a protecção do Império que ele coloca todas as perspectivas do seu combate «contra o mundo moderno». Eterno gibelino ao serviço do Imperium de forma quase sacerdotal, faz da sua vida uma luta contínua, luta contra as forças do niilismo actual (ou idade do ferro, segundo uma expressão sua). Teorizando, de uma forma determinista, o desaparecimento inevitável de todos os valores e concluindo pela necessidade de um retorno ao caos original através de uma paróptica «final dos tempos», tempera o seu pessimismo com nuances de uma eventual esperança de endireitamento provisório e momentâneo. No entanto, se este pensamento parece à primeira vista, na sua estrutura interna, estranho à teoria da «excitação dinâmica da História», tão cara aos futuristas, é bom conhecermos o papel que exerceu sobre Evola a vanguarda do princípio do século XX e o lugar (pouco conhecido) que ele aí detinha e a influência que isso teve na sua reflexão posterior.

Um artista de vanguarda

  


É, primeiro, como pintor e como poeta que Julius Evola se exprime no quadro da actividade artística das vanguardas. Pondo-se em contacto com a revista futurista Lacerba, descobre os fundamentos de uma crítica radical do sistema burguês, o anti-democratismo, ao mesmo tempo que nasce, segundo alguns autores, o seu interesse pelos místicos alemães e a tradição esotérica.

  


Lembremo-nos que numerosos artistas futuristas introduzem-se na pesquisa profunda e concreta do pensamento oculto. Bastará citar o caso muito conhecido de Russolo de que a obra «Para além da matéria» é uma exposição magistral de esoterismo operativo, para nos convencermos da permanência de uma curiosidade instintiva desta escola de arte sobre este assunto.
 
É necessário saber que Evola, mesmo durante o período do movimento futurista, nunca deixou de manifestar interesse pelo pensamento tradicional. Com efeito, bastará ler o seu texto Arte abstracta para melhor compreendermos o mecanismo intelectual do jovem Evola.

  


Vejamos o que ele escreve: «A consciência abstracta, suporte da estética mais acabada, liga-se, de facto, a um outro plano (quase a outra dimensão) do espírito, o qual não tem nada a ver com o que se desenrola a vida quotidiana prática e sentimental até àquele que encontra um eco nos clamores da humanidade trágica. E a via que aí conduz é difícil e dolorosa porque, para a percorrer, é necessário queimar tudo o que habitualmente os homens consideram como a sua vida mais profunda e mais autêntica. Se, por acaso, nos perguntarem a que devemos comparar isto, encontraremos, talvez, em alguns místicos qualquer coisa de aproximativo: na interioridade silenciosa e glacialmente ardente de um Ruysbroek ou de um Mestre Eckhart, por exemplo. Uma lógica que não tem mais nada a ver com aquela que todos os dias rege este mundo: nele, as luzes mais banais como as mais gloriosas enfraquecem, à imagem das débeis vegetações subterrâneas; a vontade comum reina, como que ébria; as palavras tornam-se incompreensíveis como se pertencessem a uma língua estrangeira. Diríamos que toda a vegetação se desagrega como que sugada por uma extrema rarefacção, e renova com o caos elementar, seco e ardente, ardente e monótono. Mas, para aquele que penetrou totalmente na natureza da arte abstracta, parece que esta incoerência, esta loucura, não é mais do que aparência, por detrás da qual palpita, numa luminosidade metálica, o sentido da absoluta liberdade do Eu».


Esta descoberta da expansão virtual dos sentidos e da matéria desenvolve um estudo preciso destes novos estados de consciência, regidos por esta luminosidade metálica, que ele recebe daquilo que podia, e pode ainda, aparecer como arte informal, caótica e sem ordem.

Uma nova objectividade

As pinturas de Evola que foram, na totalidade, objecto de compra por parte dos museus italianos não serão estranhas aos familiares da obra ulterior.


Elas apresentam todos os sinais da presença simbólica. «Ali encontramos», diz Romualdi *, «a interioridade ardente que Evola menciona no seu ensaio L'Arte Astratta. Os globos, de um vermelho ardente ou de um verde magnético, como acetato de cobre incandescente, de uma luz irreal sob os céus devastados; os cilindros rodam como as fábricas de fogo na noite; as formas luminosas ascendem ao céu enquanto se formam nuvens inquietantes. É uma visão poderosa do elementar apanhado, por meio de uma linguagem de formas geométricas, num espaço invisível procedido do espaço visível (comparável à Hiper-urânia platoniana ou ao goetiano "mundo das mães").»
Quando examinamos os quadros de Evola (da mesma forma que outros testemunhos do futurismo), compreendemos porque o décor do mundo moderno pode ser adaptado por algumas elites que, deixando para trás os tarecos burgueses herdados do século XIX, marcham em passo rápido para uma neue sachlichkeit, uma nova objectividade que pensam encontrar no bolchevismo, no fascismo ou no nazismo. É a eles que se destinam as formulações de O Trabalhador ** de Jünger: "Ao menos, em certos resumos parciais, o século XX oferece já as linhas mais puras e mais seguras... Começamos a ver o sentido das altas temperaturas, os frios geométricos das luzes, a incandescência do metal. A paisagem torna-se mais fria e mais ardente, com ela desaparecem os últimos rastos das "delicadezas" e da "cordialidade que fala à alma".

De Mafarka a Mithra
Se prosseguirmos a nossa análise filosófica comparada, descobrimos, no coração dos princípios evolianos, o idealismo absoluto de inspiração hegeliana incarnada na exigência fundamental de uma «realização espiritual absoluta pela acção», paralelo evidente com o axioma da trindade futurista: ARTE, VIDA, ACÇÃO.
Da mesma forma, como não reconhecer o idêntico combate e uma vontade parecida entre o instintivo manifesto futurista de 1909, que termina pela célebre frase: «Hirtos no cume do mundo, lançamos uma vez mais o nosso desafio às estrelas!...», espécie de profissão de fé gnóstica e da consciente e reflectiva reactivação do culto de Mithra no pensamento evoliano: «O dominador do Sol, o matador do touro, o padrão de uma raça real regenerada na "Força Forte das Forças"».

Entre Apolo e Dionísio, a majestade doriana do vencedor pindárico encontra numa espécie de futurismo solar a «religião da Vida», a «religião do Devir» cara a Mafarka, promessa de eterno retorno.

Este telurismo dinâmico é o ponto de contacto entre as duas experiências. Futurismo e tradição. O próprio Evola convida-nos a «abolir o limite e o apoio que representa a visibilidade das coisas para nos pormos em contacto com as existências vertiginosas». O processo pelo qual a vida orgânica está agarrada na sua raiz profunda, sem apoio, arrancada à sua natureza... arrebatada para além de si ao longo de uma vida vertiginosa onde se alumia a ordem das diferentes forças cósmicas».

Em Evola, o ultrapassar do futurismo não se operou pela sua negação. Pelo contrário, sublinha a sua importância como resposta num tempo histórico num dado período e, nota o estranho desempenho que este tem no seu espírito e no desenvolvimento do seu pensamento.

A título de purificação
Presentemente, longe do maniqueísmo de fachada, é possível entender a utilidade, da forma que o próprio Evola a entendia, da necessária acção regeneradora que podem ter certos fenómenos criativos.
O convite que ele formulava para um «salto no brutal a título de purificação» é a exacta busca que, da via tradicional à disciplina do manifesto técnico futurista, exige do aluno ou do discípulo este rigor, esta contingência afim de atingir a mestria da sua arte, isto é, de si mesmo pela revelação da energia pura, numa espécie de metalurgia espiritual onde o metal vil é rudemente malhado afim de se tornar num ferro flamejante.

Esta ascese comum não deve escapar ao observador. As vias parecem diferentes, os caminhos comunicam.

Do futurismo à tradição, é o mesmo pensamento de ordem e o ultrapassar hierárquico pelo valor que se afirma. Exprime a permanência, através das épocas e das formas, de uma doutrina que extrai profundamente as suas raízes específicas da cultura indo-europeia.

(Jean-Marc Vivenza)

Notas:
* Adriano Romualdi, Julius Évola, l?homme et l?oeuvre, Guy Trédaniel, 1985.
** Ernst Jünger, O Trabalhador - Domínio e Figura, introdução, tradução e notas de Alexandre Franco de Sá, prefácio de Nuno Rogeiro, Hugin Editores, 2000.

samedi, 11 décembre 2010

30 Years of Laibach: Total Totalitarian Retro-Avantgardists

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30 Years of Laibach:
Total Totalitarian Retro-Avantgardists

Felix MENZEL

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

Translated by Andreas Faust

Editor’s Note:

Although the author of this article does not like Laibach as much as I do, this is just the first of several pieces occasioned by Laibach’s recent 30th anniversary. Stay tuned.

The most recent (November) edition of the art magazine MONOPOL is devoted to collectives, and the title story concerns the Slovenian industrial band Laibach, who understand themselves as a “Gesamtkunstwerk.” To document the 30th anniversary of their group this year, the controversial musicians have held an exhibition, a symposium, and several concerts.

Daniel Völzke and Martin Fengel of MONOPOL traveled to the festivities in Slovenia at the end of September. They could have saved their money, however. Their report consisted mainly of opinions and insights about the provocative band which have accumulated over the decades. On one side is the accusation that Laibach help propagate a fascist aesthetic. On the other is the explanation: It’s merely an “über-identification” with totalitarian systems, which in the end reduces them to an ad absurdum.

The art critic Boris Groys speaks of a production “more totalitarian than totalitarianism.” Laibach themselves have said little on the topic. Either they give statements which the media expect, for instance:

“We are fascists to the extent that Hitler was a painter.”

Or they announce general facts without any specifics. Thus they babbled to Daniel Völzke:

“We believe in an art which advances social, political and economic reforms, but also an art which tests the boundaries of aesthetic experience. In collectively organized movements these two goals can develop more organically.”

Such statements leave us clueless.

The principle of retro-avantgardism, which the Slovenians make use of, consists in steering for the most sensitive parts of our identity, with countless historical backdrops (NS propaganda, socialist realism, Christian iconography). Yet the aim is not a political one. Rather, it’s about the maximum energetic mobilization of the observer. This can manifest as indignation, frenzied jubilation, or even physical ecstasy.

At the same time, Laibach are aware of the greatest problem currently facing them. At the symposium, founding member Ivan Novak stressed:

“It’s easy to be New when one is new, but hard when one is as old as we are.”

Put plainly: provocation wears thin over time. The industrial band’s highpoint is probably behind them, and they are even aware of this. In December they will give several concerts in Germany. On YouTube one can sign up for a fascistic “Dance Course with Laibach.” After that, anyone — far from politics — will know how a fascistic aesthetic affects them.

Source: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2010/11/18/3...

mercredi, 24 novembre 2010

30 Jahre Laibaich: Total totalitäre Retro-Avantgardisten

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30 Jahre Laibach: Total totalitäre Retro-Avantgardisten

Felix MENZEL - Ex:

Das Kunstmagazin MONOPOL setzt in der aktuellen November-Ausgabe einen Schwerpunkt auf Kollektive und beschäftigt sich in der Titelgeschichte mit der slowenischen Industrial-Band Laibach. Diese versteht sich selbst als „Gesamtkunstwerk“. Um dies zu dokumentieren, haben die umstrittenen Musiker dieses Jahr zum 30. Geburtstag ihrer Band eine Ausstellung, ein Symposium und mehrere Konzerte durchgeführt. 

Daniel Völzke und Martin Fengel von MONOPOL durften Ende September zu den Feierlichkeiten nach Slowenien reisen. Der Aufwand hat sich jedoch nicht gelohnt. Hauptsächlich trägt ihre Reportage die Meinungen und Erkenntnisse zu der provokanten Band zusammen, die sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten so angehäuft haben. Auf der einen Seite steht dabei der Vorwurf, Laibach würden sich faschistischer Ästhetik bedienen. Auf der anderen dann die Erklärung: Das ist nur „Über-Identifikation“ mit totalitären Systemen, mit der diese letztendlich ad absurdum geführt werden.

Der Kunstwissenschaftler Boris Groys spricht von einer Inszenierung, die „totaler als der Totalitarismus“ sei. Laibach selbst sagen dazu wenig. Entweder geben sie Statements ab, auf die die Presse nur so wartet. Zum Beispiel:

Wir sind genauso Faschisten, wie Hitler ein Maler war.

Oder sie erklären allgemeine Sachverhalte ohne jegliche Spezifik. Daniel Völzke haben sie vorgeträllert:

Wir glauben an eine Kunst, die soziale, politische und wirtschaftliche Reformen voranbringt, aber auch an Kunst, die die Grenzen ästhetischer Erfahrung austestet. In kollektiv organisierten Bewegungen entwickeln sich diese beiden Vorhaben organischer.

Damit sind wir genauso klug wie vorher.

Das Prinzip der Retro-Avantgarde, das die Slowenen anwenden, besteht darin, mit unzähligen historischen Versatzstücken (NS-Propaganda, Sozialistischer Realismus, christliche Ikonographie) die empfindlichsten Stellen unserer Identität anzusteuern. Das Ziel ist dabei kein politisches. Es geht vielmehr um die maximale energetische Mobilisierung des Betrachters. Dies kann sich in Empörung, frenetischem Jubel oder gar körperlicher Ekstase ausdrücken.

Laibach sind sich dabei bewußt darüber, was ihr derzeit größtes Problem ist. Auf dem Symposium betonte Gründungsmitglied Ivan Novak:

Es ist leicht, neu zu sein, wenn man neu ist, aber es ist schwer, wenn man alt ist wie wir.

Im Klartext: Provokation nutzt sich mit der Zeit ab. Wahrscheinlich hat die Industrial-Band daher ihren Höhepunkt schon hinter sich und weiß das sogar. Im Dezember gibt sie mehrere Konzerte in Deutschland. Bei Youtube kann man außerdem einen faschistischen Tanzkurs mit Laibach belegen. Danach wird jeder – fernab jeglicher Politik – wissen, wie faschistische Ästhetik auf ihn wirkt.

 

30 Jahre Laibach (2)

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30 Jahre Laibach (II)

Martin LICHTMESZ - Ex: http://www.sezession.de/

Noch ein paar Anmerkungen zum 30-Jahres-Jubiläum von Laibach, als deren Fan ich mich neulich in diesem Blog bekannt habe. Seit ihrer Gründung im Jahr 1980 hat sich nicht nur die Welt, sondern auch die Gruppe stark verändert (musikalisch eher zu ihren Ungunsten), von deren Originalbesetzung zur Zeit eigentlich nur noch Frontmann Milan Fras und Ivan Novak übriggeblieben sind. 

In einem gewissen Sinne ist die slowenische Formation seit zwei Jahrzehnten nur mehr ein Recycler ihres eigenen Mythos, dessen Wirkungsmacht eben eng verknüpft war mit dem Entstehungskontext des Projekts im post-titoistischen Jugoslawien (1980 war auch das Todesjahr des kultisch verehrten Staatspräsidenten, damit auch das Jahr, in dem der durch Blut und Eisen zusammengeschusterte Vielvölkerstaat langsam auseinanderzubröckeln begann).

Schon die Wahl des deutschen Namens für Ljubljana war eine gezielte Provokation der damaligen jugoslawischen Autoritäten. Diese waren nun in den Achtziger Jahren bereits lax und vom liberalen Rückenmarkschwund befallen genug (in der DDR wurde zur gleichen Zeit jede harmlose Amateur-Punk-Combo von der Stasi plattgemacht), daß die Band sich mühelos als „totalitärer“ als das herrschende Regime inszenieren konnte, „päpstlicher als der Papst“ sozusagen. In der Art und Weise, wie es Laibach taten, wollte der Staat zu diesem Zeitpunkt eigentlich gar nicht mehr beschworen und glorifiziert werden.

In Slowenien und Kroatien hatte man es zu einem relativen Wohlstand gebracht, und wenig ahnte man von dem verheerenden Krieg, der nur ein Jahrzehnt später ausbrechen sollte. Um 1983 herum waren Laibachs martialische Beschwörungen und Über-Emphasen der alten kommunistischen Kampf-, Askese-, Aufopferungs- und Hauruck-Rhetorik, untermalt mit aufpeitschender Krachmusik, peinlich, unheimlich, irritierend, angriffig. Der ästhetische Mix aus kommunistisch-stalinistischen mit faschistischen und nationalsozialistischen Elementen, der sich in der Mitte der Dekade noch verstärken sollte, wirkte natürlich zusätzlich subversiv, und dekonstruierte durch Annäherung und Amalgamierung den „antifaschistischen“ Mythos der kommunistischen Ideologie. Laibach attackierten indirekt den sozialistischen Staat, indem sie ihn scheinbar von rechts überholten, und ihn in Beziehung setzten zum feindlichen Bruder Nationalsozialismus.

In einem berüchtigten frühen TV-Auftritt setzte sich die Gruppe mit sinistrer Beleuchtung, blanken Stiefeln, undefinierbaren Uniformen und Armbinden mit schwarzen Kreuzen in Szene, schwieg mit eisernen Mienen, während der Frontmann die tribunalartigen Fragen des Interviewers beharrlich ignorierte, und stattdessen lange, komplizierte Manifeste vorlas: „Laibach behandelt die Beziehung zwischen Kunst und Ideologie, die Spannungen, die durch Expression subliminiert werden. Darum wird jeder direkte ideologische Diskurs eliminiert. Unsere Aktivität steht über direktem Engagement… wir sind komplett unpolitisch.“ Und so weiter und so fort.  Zur selben Zeit konnte man im Jugo-TV Pop-Videos (siehe hier, hier und hier) sehen, die sich in nichts von dem unterschieden, was gerade im Westen „in“ war.

Mit dem Album Opus Dei von 1987 begannen Laibach ihre berüchtigte Serie „faschisierter“ oder auf „martialisch“ getrimmter Cover-Versionen von populären Songs, für die sie am besten bekannt sind (darunter Titel von den Beatles, den Rolling Stones, Prince, Status Quo und, als Meta-Pop-Witz, DAF). Fanfaren und Trompeten, epischer Sound, militärisch stampfendes Schlagzeug, ins Deutsche übertragene Texte und der forciert markige Gesang an der Grenze zur Selbstparodie (den später Rammstein kopierten) verfremdeten bekannte Melodien auf eine verblüffende Weise.

Der Klassiker schlechthin ist ihre Version des Superhits „Life is live“ („Nananana“) der österreichischen Gruppe Opus, der damals in den Diskotheken weltweit ad nauseam rauf und runter lief.  Zusammen mit dem Video, in dem Laibach durch die Berge stapfen und vor monumentalen Wasserfällen posieren, voller zur Schau getragenem Sendungsbewußtsein und mit kultischem Gestus, hatte das einen ganz besonderen Touch, der die Gruppe von nun an definieren sollte.

Der Reiz ergibt sich aus dem Ineinander von verschiedenen widersprüchlichen Komponenten: einerseits handelt es sich hierbei natürlich offensichtlich um einen schreiend komischen Witz und um bewußt auf die Spitze getriebenen Camp. Andererseits hat es auch eine hin- und mitreißende Wirkung: der charismatische, kraftstrotzende Sänger mit dem Schnauzbart, der seltsamen Wüstenlegionärs-Kopfbedeckung und dem schmucken Alpen-Trachten-Outfit vor der Kulisse schneebedeckter Gipfel und rückwärts (!) strömender Wasserfluten – das geht weit über den bloßen „dekonstruktiven“ Gag hinaus. Die heroisch-teutonische Ästhetik wird ebenso zelebriert wie ironisiert. Es ist komisch und parodistisch, aber eben auch – geil.

Laibach demonstrierten, wie mit wenigen Handgriffen ein banaler Popsong einen „faschistischen“ Sound und Subtext erhalten kann. In der Alternativ-Version „Leben heißt Leben“ haben sie den englischen Originaltext eingedeutscht und nur geringfügig verändert:

When we all give the power
We all give the best
Every minute of an hour
Don’t think about the rest
Then you all get the power
You all get the best
When everyone gives everything…

Wann immer wir Kraft geben,
geben wir das Beste,
All unser Können, unser Streben
und denken nicht an Feste,
Von jedem wird alles gegeben,
und jeder kann auf jeden zählen,
Leben heißt Leben!

Life is life, when we all feel the power
Life is life, come on, stand up and dance
Life is life, when the feeling of the people
Life is life, is the feeling of the band!

Leben heißt Leben -
Wenn wir alle die Kraft spüren!
Leben heißt Leben -
Wenn wir alle den Schmerz fühlen!
Leben heißt Leben!
Heißt die Mengen erleben
Leben heißt Leben -
Heißt das Land erleben…

Auf analoge Weise verwandelten Laibach  „One Vision“ von Queen zu „Geburt einer Nation“, der einen ähnlichen „Klassiker“-Status wie „Life is live“ hat. Da mußte der Text lediglich wörtlich übersetzt werden.

One man, one goal
One mission,
One heart, one soul
Just one solution,
One flash of light
One God, one vision
One flesh, one bone,
One true religion,
One voice, one hope,
One flesh one bone
One true religion
One race, one hope
One real decision
Wowowowo oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah

Ein Mensch – ein Ziel
und eine Weisung.
Ein Herz – ein Geist,
nur eine Lösung.
Ein Brennen der Glut.
Ein Gott – ein Leitbild.

Ein Fleisch – ein Blut,
ein wahrer Glaube.
Eine Rasse, ein Traum,
und ein starker Wille
Gebt mir ein Leitbild! Ja, Ja, Jawoll, Jaaa!!

Und nun sehe man sich an, wie Queen 1985 in Rio de Janeiro ein Stadion mit zigtausend Menschen zum Mitstampfen von „We will rock you“ bringen, während Frontmann Freddie Mercury mit nacktem, muskulösem Oberkörper, in einen Union Jack gehüllt, vor den Massen auf und ab gockelt und sie dabei beherrscht wie ein schriller Glamrock-Mussolini:

Laibach haben also natürlich auch die unterirdischen Beziehungen zwischen Pop als Massenphänomen und totalitären Massenbewegungen angesprochen, die schon David Bowie in den Siebzigern in das berüchtigte Bonmot „Hitler war der erste Popstar“ faßte. Man kann auch an Jean Genet denken, der einmal bemerkte, der Faschismus sei „essentielment“ Theater.

Im Pop ist es auch kein notwendiger Widerspruch, eine Pose ausgiebig zu genießen und abzufeiern, und gleichzeitig ihre Künstlichkeit und ihren augenzwinkernden Showcharakter zu betonen. Man denke etwa an die prunkvollen Phantasie-Uniformen und den Erlösergestus von Michael Jackson. Rockstars befriedigen in demokratischen Zeiten tief sitzende monarchische Bedürfnisse, sind in ihren Welten Könige, Absolutisten, Messiase, Diktatoren, Fabeltiere, die die Huldigungen der Fanmassen entgegennehmen, über die sie Kraft ihrer Kunst herrschen, und die sich ihrerseits willig dem regressiv-wonnigen Rausch der Fan-Volks-Gemeinschaft hingeben.

In Umkehrung zu Genet läßt sich fragen, inwiefern die Kanalisierung „totalitärer“ Versatzsstücke und Ansprüche in eine Bühnenshow und ein Kunstprodukt wie den NSK-“Staat“, das, was Armin Mohler die „monumentale Unternährung“ nannte, gleichsam entpolitisieren, entschärfen und auf einer rein ästhetischen Ebene befriedigen kann. Denn wären Laibach auf reine Parodie und Dekonstruktion aus gewesen, wäre ihr Appeal nicht so stark und dauerhaft gewesen.

Mir schien es jedenfalls eher immer so, daß Laibach, sobald sie von den westlichen Intellektuellen nach einer gewissen Irritationsphase als „Kunst“ akzeptiert wurden, auch ein Ventil für jene boten, die endlich einmal guten Gewissens ihren lang verdrängten „inneren Faschisten“ ausleben wollten. Wenn die Gruppe Mitte der Neunziger in Wien auftrat, dann waren die Konzerte voll mit Lesern von alternativhippen linksliberalen Blättern wie Standard und Falter, die nun die unterdrückte Fascho-Sau rauslassen konnten und mit ausgestrecktem rechten Arm der Bühne entgegensalutierten: „Und dann feiern wir Vereinigung, die ganze Nacht! Jawollll, Jaaaa!!“ Und in der damaligen Gothic-und Wave-Nacht im Wiener U4 konnte man schon mal erleben, daß sich zu „Life is Live“ spontan ganze Marschformationen auf der Tanzfläche bildeten, die im Gleichschritt zu tanzen begannen.

Ich habe mich oft gefragt, wie sehr die hysterische Kontaminationsangst mancher Zeitgenossen vor riefenstahl’scher oder speer’scher Ästhetik auf einer uneingestandenen Faszination beruht, die man in streng puritanischer Weise nicht einmal vor sich selber zuzugeben wagt. Mit Sicherheit spüren aber sehr viele Menschen immer noch die spezifische Anziehungs- und Suggestionskraft dieser Bilder, die offenbar tiefsitzende, unausrottbare Gefühle ansprechen. Oder wie ein Soziologe in den Siebziger Jahren, dessen Namen mir entfallen ist, einmal sinngemäß und in anprangernder Absicht sagte: Faschismus befriedigt menschliche Grundbedürfnisse. (Wenn das stimmt, was folgern wir daraus? Und was ist dann noch „Faschismus“?)

Mit dem Zerfall des Ostblocks verloren Laibach den Reibungskontext, in dem sie sich ursprünglich bewegten. Ihr Ansatz geriet zunehmend zur Masche, und man merkte, daß sie nun mit Alben wie „Kapital“ (1992) und „Nato“ (1994) auf der Suche nach neuen zu unterwandernden Angriffsflächen waren. (Der Liberalismus jedoch ist im Gegensatz zum National- und Internationalsozialismus leider ein allzu elastischer Gegner, der jede Opposition wie ein Schwamm aufzusaugen vermag.) Das wirkte dann ein wenig wie eine etwas verräterische, weil dem undurchsichtigen Image der Band abträgliche Ideologie-Revue, die aber mit der Methode Laibach nicht so recht zu knacken war.

Am wenigsten überzeugend geriet dabei das Album „Jesus Christ Superstars“ (1996),  das sich nun dem „ideologischen“ Rahmen der Religion widmete und Milan Fras im Gewand eines Pilgers oder Predigers präsentierte.  Das war nun doch etwas zu einfach. „Tanz mit Laibach“, eine Art Remake des DAF-Hits „Tanz den Mussolini“ ging nochmal „back to the roots“, aber wie die Nazistiefel-Dauerschleife in dem Video war das kaum mehr als ein altgewordener, auf der Stelle tretender Witz.

Gelungener (und bei weitem die interessanteste Veröffentlichung der letzten eineinhalb Jahrzehnte) war da schon das 2006er Album „Volk“, das ausschließlich Interpretationen von Nationalhymen enthielt. Das geschah mit quasi-“ethnopluralistischer“ Verve und einem Minimum an Ironie, trotz der Herdenschäfchen auf dem Cover. Hier ist die „dekonstruktive“ Absicht deutlich zurückgetreten, und hier zeigt sich auch, daß Laibach sich doch nicht so einfach in einen „linken“ Kulturbetrieb eingemeinden und abhaken lassen, wie manche voreilig beschwichtigend meinen.

Darin schließe ich mich dem Urteil von Dominik Tischleder in der JF an:

Ganz ohne interpretatorisch doppelten Boden wird hier ein „Denken in Völkern“ als popmusikalisches Panorama entfaltet. Nationale Identität scheint als politischer Faktor ersten Ranges identifiziert.Nicht zuletzt deshalb ist „Volk“ ein intellektuell stimulierendes Album geworden, bei dem die eigentliche Musik fast schon Nebensache ist. Laibach selbst drücken es so aus: „Pop ist Musik für Schafe, und wir sind die als Schäferhunde verkleideten Wölfe.“

mercredi, 28 octobre 2009

Julius Evola: The Path of Cinnabar

Path3431808077_c83920c7a4.jpgJulius Evola: The Path of Cinnabar

Quick Overview

Not previously available in the English language, this is the first translation of Julius Evola’s autobiography, Il Cammino del Cinabro. The book provides a guide to Evola’s corpus as he explains the purpose of each of his books. This book is the key which unlocks the unity behind Evola’s diverse interests. It is a perfect place to start for those new to Evola’s thought, and a must read for all seasoned Evolians. The book includes hundreds of well-researched footnotes and a complete index. This book is also available in a hardback edition.

Product Description

Julius Evola was a renowned Dadaist artist, Idealist philosopher, critic of politics and Fascism, 'mystic', anti-modernist, and scholar of world religions. Evola was all of these things, but he saw each of them as no more than stops along the path to life's true goal: the realisation of oneself as a truly absolute and free individual living one's life in accordance with the eternal doctrines of the Primordial Tradition. Much more than an autobiography, The Cinnabar Path in describing the course of Evola's life illuminates how the traditionally-oriented individual might avoid the many pitfalls awaiting him in the modern world. More a record of Evola's thought process than a recitation of biographical facts, one will here find the distilled essence of a lifetime spent in pursuit of wisdom, in what is surely one of his most important works.

Additional Information

Title Julius Evola: The Path of Cinnabar (Softcover)
Author Evola, Julius
Full Title The Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography
Binding Softcover
Publisher Integral Tradition (2009)
Pages 302
ISBN 9781907166020
Language English
Price € 19.95
Short Description

Not previously available in the English language, this is the first translation of Julius Evola’s autobiography, Il Cammino del Cinabro. The book provides a guide to Evola’s corpus as he explains the purpose of each of his books. This book is the key which unlocks the unity behind Evola’s diverse interests. It is a perfect place to start for those new to Evola’s thought, and a must read for all seasoned Evolians. The book includes hundreds of well-researched footnotes and a complete index. This book is also available in a hardback edition.

Table of Contents

Foreword
A Note from the Editor
A Note from the Publisher

1. The Path of Cinnabar
2. Personal Background and Early Experiences
3. Abstract Art and Dadaism
4. The Speculative Period of Magical Idealism and the Theory of the Absolute Individual
5. My Encounters with the East and ‘Pagan’ Myth
6. The ‘Ur Group'
7. My Exploration of Origins and Tradition
8. My Experience with 'La Torre’ and Its Implications
9. Hermeticism and My Critique of Contemporary Spiritualism - The Catholic Problem
10. ‘Revolt Against the Modern World’ and the Mystery of the Grail
11. My Work in Germany and the ‘Doctrine of Awakening’
12. The Issue of Race
13. In Search of Men Among the Ruins
14. Bachofen, Spengler, the ‘Metaphysics of Sex’ and the ‘Left-Hand Path’
15. From the ‘Worker’ to ‘Ride the Tiger’

Appendix: Interviews with Julius Evola (1964-1972)

About the Author

Julius Evola (1898 -1974), Italian traditionalist, metaphysician, social thinker and activist. Evola is an authority on the world's esoteric traditions and one of the greatest critics of modernity. He wrote extensively on ancient civilisations of both East and West and the world of Tradition.

mardi, 16 juin 2009

Teatro e futurismo

Teatro e Futurismo

Ex: http://augustomovimento.blogspot.com/


«Il Futurismo vuole trasformare il Teatro di Varietà in teatro dello stupore, del record e della fisicofollia»

(dal Manifesto del Teatro di Varietà)


L’abilità propagandistica e il desiderio di sollevare scalpore, spingono i futuristi ad intervenire anche in campo teatrale. In particolare Marinetti credeva che tutti fossero potenzialmente poeti o drammaturghi. Da questa idea cominciarono, in tutta Italia, a dilagare le celeberrime “serate futuriste”, inizialmente nelle piazze – coinvolgendo nelle rappresentazioni anche il pubblico – e successivamente nei teatri. Marinetti, Corra e Settimelli sono considerati gli iniziatori del teatro “sintetico” futurista: questo aggettivo deriva dal fatto che si trattava per lo più di piccoli “attimi sintetici”, le cui caratteristiche sono la concentrazione, la compenetrazione, la simultaneità e il dinamismo.

Non sempre il pubblico accettava la “forza d’urto” di quel teatro, e spesso rispondeva con ingiurie e con il lancio di ortaggi. Immancabilmente le serate futuriste si concludevano con provocazioni di ogni tipo e con risse furibonde, con tanto di sfide a duello. Spesso i nemici e avversari dei futuristi affittavano interi palchi, munendosi di ortaggi, e al momento opportuno facevano scattare la baraonda. A quel punto i futuristi avevano già vinto la loro battaglia pubblicitaria. L’eco del putiferio si estendeva, attraverso i giornali, in tutta l’Italia.

Osservando più tecnicamente il teatro futurista, si può osservare che – come i dadaisti e i surrealisti – neppure i futuristi italiani furono uomini di teatro nel senso professionale del termine, ma artisti, scrittori, poeti che consideravano il teatro non solo un ideale punto d’incontro, ma anche il migliore strumento di propaganda del loro ideale vitalistico, nazionalista e tecnocratico. Nonostante la mancanza di professionismo, furono coloro che al teatro concessero un’attenzione più continua e organica, soprattutto a livello teorico, in una serie di manifesti: il manifesto dei drammaturghi futuristi (1911), del teatro di varietà (1913), del teatro futurista sintetico (1915), della scenografia futurista (1915), del teatro della sorpresa (1921).

La contestazione del teatro «passatista e borghese» investe prima di tutto il teatro drammaturgico: a un dramma analitico, basato su una logica degli eventi di fatto impossibile e sulla credibilità astrattamente psicologica dei personaggi, i futuristi contrappongono il dramma sintetico, che coglie, in un’unica visione, momenti cronologicamente e spazialmente lontani, ma connessi fra loro da analogie e da contrapposizioni profonde. Non c’è bisogno di una premessa da sviluppare in una serie successiva di episodi pazientemente organizzati, ma basta l’intuizione del nucleo essenziale dei fenomeni. I personaggi non hanno contenuto psicologico, ma si risolvono totalmente nelle loro azioni, che possono anche esaurirsi in gesti molto semplici, di assoluto valore o non esserci affatto, lasciando l’azione affidata agli oggetti.
Le “sintesi futuriste”, opera soprattutto di Marinetti, furono anche rappresentate, non però dai futuristi stessi, ma da normali compagnie professioniste che non potevano avere né una specifica preparazione, né un particolare interesse ideologico. Il loro significato rimase perciò confinato nella dimensione letteraria.

Non esiste una sola concezione di teatro futurista: esso può essere infatti sia un teatro eccentrico o grottesco, sia dell’assurdo che sintetico. A differenza del teatro classico, il teatro di prosa per eccellenza, non sono fondamentali i dialoghi o comunque le scene parlate, bensì l’attenzione viene catturata dai suoni, dalle luci e dai movimenti corporei. Non è un caso che nel teatro futurista sia utilizzata molto spesso la danza, al fine di trasmettere al pubblico, attraverso i movimenti dei ballerini, un senso di moto, di velocità e dinamismo. Al posto dei dialoghi vi sono didascalie lunghissime e molto dettagliate. Il teatro futurista è spesso un teatro muto e talvolta – in aggiunta – i personaggi sono incomprensibili nelle loro azioni, tanto che lo spettatore rimane stupito e con un senso di confusione. In più capita che il personaggio non sia un attore, bensì un oggetto. In scena si riesce a far diventare reale, normale e logico un comportamento completamente surreale, mentre le frasi, i gesti e le reazioni appartenenti al senso comune risultano banali e assurdi.
Anche il grande Majakovskij si interessò molto al nuovo teatro futurista, ma intendendolo più in senso satirico, per prendere in giro la realtà e gli schemi del buon senso.

Sul piano scenografico Enrico Prampolini sviluppò tutte le premesse insite nel gusto dei futuristi per le macchine e la tecnologia, scegliendo una scena mobile e luminosa, nella quale l’attore umano sarebbe apparso banale e superato, ed era quindi auspicabile sostituirlo con marionette o addirittura con l’attore-gas «che estinguendosi, o procreandosi, propagherà un odore sgradevolissimo, emanerà un simbolo di identità alquanto equivoca», supremo sberleffo al mattatore del tipico teatro antico italiano.
Il manifesto più significativo è forse quello del teatro di varietà, definito il vero teatro confacente alla sensibilità e all’intelligenza dell’uomo moderno, poiché esalta il sesso di fronte al sentimento, l’azione e il rischio di fronte alla contemplazione, la trasformazione e il movimento muscolare di fronte alla staticità, ma soprattutto perché distrae lo spettatore dalla sua secolare condizione di voyeur passivo trascinandolo nella follia fisica dell’azione.


Per approfondire, leggi il Manifesto del Teatro di Varietà

samedi, 21 mars 2009

Ezra Pound a Milano

«EZRA POUND  A MILANO»


Luca Gallesi, Introduzione a Ezra Pound e il turismo colto a Milano - Ex: http://www.ares.mi.it/

Una delle caratteristiche della biografia di Ezra Pound che più colpisce il lettore europeo è la sua irrequietezza tipicamente nordamericana. Nato nel 1885 a Hailey, nell’Idaho, a soli 18 mesi Pound lascia il Far West per iniziare una interminabile serie di trasferimenti che presto lo portano ad attraversare prima gli Stati Uniti poi l’Oceano Atlantico, per approdare definitivamente nel Vecchio Continente nel 1908.
 In Europa Pound vive anni molto intensi, prima  a Londra e poi a Parigi ma non è soddisfatto e decide di trasferirsi nel nostro Paese, a Rapallo, dove soggiorna dal 1925 al 1945.
  Accusato in patria di tradimento, alla fine della guerra viene fatto prigioniero dalle truppe statunitensi e torna nel Nuovo Mondo, per la prima volta in aeroplano. Giudicato mentalmente inadatto a sostenere un processo, viene internato nel manicomio criminale del Saint Elizabeths’ Hospital di Washington fino al 1958. Terminata la lunga e ingiusta  detenzione, il Poeta torna in Italia, e si stabilisce per tre anni in Alto Adige, dalla figlia Mary, prima di riprendere a vivere tra Rapallo e Venezia. Qui muore nel 1972 e da allora le sue spoglie riposano nel Cimitero di San Michele.
 
I rapporti tra l’Autore dei Cantos e il nostro Paese sono stati spesso oggetto di studio, a partire dall’ormai classico L’Italia di Ezra Pound  di Niccolò Zapponi, sino ai numerosi studi dedicati a città italiane predilette dal Poeta quali Verona, Ravenna e Venezia, che sono state anche recentemente sedi di importanti convegni dedicati a Ezra Pound.
 Si è scritto anche dei rapporti di Pound con Siena e con Pisa, nelle cui campagne si trovava il Disciplinary Traninig Center dell’esercito statunitense, divenuto tristemente famoso per la “gabbia del gorilla” dove Ezra Pound viene rinchiuso alla fine della guerra, e dove scrive la splendida poesia dei Canti Pisani.
Anche della breve permanenza di Pound in Sicilia è disponibile una curiosa testimonianza, contenuta nelle recentemente pubblicate Lettere dalla Sicilia così come molto sappiamo delle numerose visite di Pound nella Capitale, nelle vesti di commentatore radiofonico per Radio Roma. 
 

Nel meritatamente celebre Discrezioni, infine, Mary de Rachewiltz ci porta testimonianza delle frequenti visite del padre in Alto Adige, dove lei viene cresciuta per volontà paterna e dove ancora oggi vive con la propria famiglia in un ospitale castello sede di numerose iniziative poundiane.
 Di Pound a Milano, invece, nessuno aveva finora ritenuto opportuno occuparsi. Città gelosa dei propri tesori e avara nel mostrarli, Milano ha infatti frequentemente evitato di celebrare i propri ospiti illustri, anche se sono numerosi e importanti i “turisti colti” che qui vennero a soggiornare per motivi di studio o di lavoro, passando, come Pound, quasi inosservati.
 Eppure Milano è tutt’altro che irrilevante per la biografia del Poeta: sui preziosi manoscritti custoditi alla Biblioteca Ambrosiana, infatti, Pound viene a studiare per il suo Cavalcanti; qui è invitato dal Rettore della prestigiosa Università Bocconi a tenere un ciclo di lezioni  di storia dell’economia  e infine a Milano risiedono i suoi storici editori italiani, prima Giovanni e poi Vanni Scheiwiller, che gli sono vicini e complici nell’applicare sul campo i principi poundiani di quella “nuova economia editoriale” più attenta alla qualità dei prodotti che ai margini di profitto.
Oltre alle circostanze appena ricordate, Pound ha a che fare in altre occasioni con la città di Milano, come vedremo dagli scritti raccolti in questo volume: dalla vorticosa amicizia con Martinetti, che del capoluogo lombardo fa la capitale delle avanguardie artistiche d’inizio secolo allo storico discorso milanese di Benito Mussolini del 6 ottobre 1934, che Pound propone con martellante insistenza all’attenzione dei suoi numerosi amici e corrispondenti di quegli anni; dalla collaborazione con i giornali e con l’emittente della Repubblica Sociale Italiana al tragico e vergognoso scempio di Piazzale Loreto, drammatica icona posta dal Poeta all’inizio dei Canti Pisani, che peserà come un macigno nell’animo di Pound, da allora mai più riconciliato con Milano, dove non tornerà più volentieri, come ricorda Mary de Rachewiltz nel suo intervento.
 Gli scritti dedicati a Ezra Pound e il turismo colto a Milano vogliono dunque essere un piccolo ma significativo tentativo di riconciliazione tra Pound e il capoluogo lombardo, attraverso il lavoro scientifico e originale degli studiosi chiamati a discutere i vari aspetti delle esperienze milanesi del Poeta, che qui vengono per la prima volta riassunte e approfondite.
 Giano Accame e Cesare Cavalleri ricostruiscono le vicende e l’atmosfera culturale della Milano degli anni Trenta, in cui Pound viene a tenere le lezioni d’economia all’Università Bocconi, mentre Alessandro Zaccuri  ripercorre, servendosi di “coincidenze significative” i complicati intrecci di editori, amici e poeti che qui si sono incontrati; Carlo Fabrizio Carli ha esaurientemente tracciato il quadro dei rapporti di Pound con le avanguaride artistiche del primo Novecento, mentre due studiosi nordamericani, Tim Redman e Leon Surette, analizzano gli spinosi rapporti tra Pound e il fascismo.
 Il quadro complessivo tracciato da queste relazioni offre sicuramente interessanti spunti di riflessione tanto sulle insospettate risorse culturali di una città come Milano quanto sulla confermata poliedricità di Pound artista, economista dilettante e sommo poeta.

ezra-pound500x500.gif

 

 
 
Luca Gallesi