by Greg Johnson
The anachronistic presence of the metanarrative constitutes a brake on the development of our continent in all fields: science (data-processing and biotechnology226), economics (the support of liberal dogmas within the EEC), military (the fetishism of a bipolar world and servility towards the United States, paradoxically an economic enemy), cultural (media bludgeoning in favor of a cosmopolitanism that eliminates Faustian specificity and aims at the advent of a large convivial global village, run on the principles of the “cold society” in the manner of the Bororos dear to Lévi-Strauss227).
THE REJECTION OF NEO-RURALISM, NEO-PASTORALISM . . .
The confused disorder of literary modernism at the end of the 19th century had a positive aspect: its role was to be the magma that, gradually, becomes the creator of a new Faustian assault.228 It is Weimar—specifically, the Weimar-arena of the creative and fertile confrontation of expressionism,229 neo-Marxism, and the “conservative revolution”230—that bequeathed us, with Ernst Jünger, an idea of “post-metanarrative” modernity (or post-modernity, if one calls “modernity” the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, subsequently theorized by the Frankfurt School). Modernism, with the confusion it inaugurates, due to the progressive abandonment of the pseudo-science of the Enlightenment, corresponds somewhat to the nihilism observed by Nietzsche. Nihilism must be surmounted, exceeded, but not by a sentimental return, however denied, to a completed past. Nihilism is not surpassed by theatrical Wagnerism, Nietzsche fulminated, just as today the foundering of the Marxist “Grand Narrative” is not surpassed by a pseudo-rustic neoprimitivism.231
In Jünger—the Jünger of In Storms of Steel, The Worker, and Eumeswil—one finds no reference to the mysticism of the soil: only a sober admiration for the perennialness of the peasant, indifferent to historical upheavals. Jünger tells us of the need for balance: if there is a total refusal of the rural, of the soil, of the stabilizing dimension of Heimat, constructivist Faustian futurism will no longer have a base, a point of departure, a fallback option. On the other hand, if the accent is placed too much on the initial base, the launching point, on the ecological niche that gives rise to the Faustian people, then they are wrapped in a cocoon and deprived of universal influence, rendered blind to the call of the world, prevented from springing towards reality in all its plenitude, the “exotic” included. The timid return to the homeland robs Faustianism of its force of diffusion and relegates its “human vessels” to the level of the “eternal ahistoric peasants” described by Spengler and Eliade.232 Balance consists in drawing in (from the depths of the original soil) and diffusing out (towards the outside world).
In spite of all nostalgia for the “organic,” rural, or pastoral—in spite of the serene, idyllic, aesthetic beauty that recommend Horace or Virgil—Technology and Work are from now on the essences of our post-nihilist world. Nothing escapes any longer from technology, technicality, mechanics, or the machine: neither the peasant who plows with his tractor nor the priest who plugs in a microphone to give more impact to his homily.
THE ERA OF “TECHNOLOGY”
Technology mobilizes totally (Total Mobilmachung) and thrusts the individual into an unsettling infinitude where we are nothing more than interchangeable cogs. The machine gun, notes the warrior Jünger, mows down the brave and the cowardly with perfect equality, as in the total material war inaugurated in 1917 in the tank battles of the French front. The Faustian “Ego” loses its intraversion and drowns in a ceaseless vortex of activity. This Ego, having fashioned the stone lacework and spires of the flamboyant Gothic, has fallen into American quantitativism or, confused and hesitant, has embraced the 20th century’s flood of information, its avalanche of concrete facts. It was our nihilism, our frozen indecision due to an exacerbated subjectivism, that mired us in the messy mud of facts.
By crossing the “line,” as Heidegger and Jünger say,233 the Faustian monad (about which Leibniz234 spoke) cancels its subjectivism and finds pure power, pure dynamism, in the universe of Technology. With the Jüngerian approach, the circle is closed again: as the closed universe of “Magianism” was replaced by the inauthentic little world of the bourgeois—sedentary, timid, embalmed in his utilitarian sphere—so the dynamic “Faustian” universe is replaced with a Technological arena, stripped this time of all subjectivism.
Jüngerian Technology sweeps away the false modernity of the Enlightenment metanarrative, the hesitation of late 19th century literary modernism, and the trompe-l’oeil of Wagnerism and neo-pastoralism. But this Jüngerian modernity, perpetually misunderstood since the publication of Der Arbeiter [The Worker] in 1932, remains a dead letter.
THE BABBITT WITH THE SARTREAN PARADOX
In 1945, the tone of ideological debate was set by the victorious ideologies. We could choose American liberalism (the ideology of Mr. Babbitt) or Marxism, an allegedly de-bourgeoisfied version of the metanarrative. The Grand Narrative took charge, hunted down any “irrationalist” philosophy or movement,235 set up a thought police, and finally, by brandishing the bogeyman of rampant barbarism, inaugurated an utterly vacuous era.
Sartre and his fashionable Parisian existentialism must be analyzed in the light of this restoration. Sartre, faithful to his “atheism,” his refusal to privilege one value, did not believe in the foundations of liberalism or Marxism. Ultimately, he did not set up the metanarrative (in its most recent version, the vulgar Marxism of the Communist parties236) as a truth but as an “inescapable”categorical imperative for which one must militate if one does not want to be a “bastard,” i.e., one of these contemptible beings who venerate “petrified orders.”237 It is the whole paradox of Sartreanism: on the one hand, it exhorts us not to adore “petrified orders,” which is properly Faustian, and, on another side, it orders us to “magically” adore a “petrified order” of vulgar Marxism, already unhorsed by Sombart or De Man. Thus in the ’50s, the golden age of Sartreanism, the consensus is indeed a moral constraint, an obligation dictated by increasingly mediatized thought. But a consensus achieved by constraint, by an obligation to believe without discussion, is not an eternal consensus. Hence the contemporary oblivion of Sartreanism, with its excesses and its exaggerations.
THE REVOLUTIONARY ANTI-HUMANISM OF MAY 1968
With May ’68, the phenomenon of a generation, “humanism,” the current label of the metanarrative, was battered and broken by French interpretations of Nietzsche, Marx, and Heidegger.238 In the wake of the student revolt, academics and popularizers alike proclaimed humanism a “petite-bourgeois” illusion. Against the West, the geopolitical vessel of the Enlightenment metanarrative, the rebels of ’68 played at mounting the barricades, taking sides, sometimes with a naïve romanticism, in all the fights of the 1970s: Spartan Vietnam against American imperialism, Latin American guerillas (“Che”), the Basque separatists, the patriotic Irish, or the Palestinians.
Their Faustian feistiness, unable to be expressed though autochthonous models, was transposed towards the exotic: Asia, Arabia, Africa, or India. May ’68, in itself, by its resolute anchorage in Grand Politics, by its guerilla ethos, by its choice to fight, in spite of everything took on a far more important dimension than the strained blockage of Sartreanism or the great regression of contemporary neo-liberalism. On the Right, Jean Cau, in writing his beautiful book on Che Guevara239 understood this issue perfectly, whereas the Right, which is as fixated on its dogmas and memories as the Left, had not wanted to see.
With the generation of ’68—combative and politicized, conscious of the planet’s great economic and geopolitical issues—the last historical fires burned in the French public spirit before the great rise of post-history and post-politics represented by the narcissism of contemporary neoliberalism.
THE TRANSLATION OF THE WRITINGS OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL ANNOUNCES THE ADVENT OF NEO-LIBERAL NARCISSISM
The first phase of the neo-liberal attack against the political anti-humanism of May ’68 was the rediscovery of the writings of the Frankfurt School: born in Germany before the adve
nt of National Socialism, matured during the California exile of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, and set up as an object of veneration in post-war West Germany. In Dialektik der Aufklärung, a small and concise book that is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of our time, Horkheimer and Adorno claim that there are two “reasons” in Western thought that, in the wake of Spengler and Sombart, we are tempted to name “Faustian reason” and “Magian reason.” The former, for the two old exiles in California, is the negative pole of the “reason complex” in Western civilization: this reason is purely “instrumental”; it is used to increase the personal power of those who use it. It is scientific reason, the reason that tames the forces of the universe and puts them in the service of a leader or a people, a party or state. Thus, according to Herbert Marcuse, it is Promethean, not Narcissistic/Orphic.240 For Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, this is the kind of rationality that Max Weber theorized.
On the other hand, “Magian reason,” according to our Spenglerian genealogical terminology, is, broadly speaking, the reason of Lyotard’s metanarrative. It is a moral authority that dictates ethical conduct, allergic to any expression of power, and thus to any manifestation of the essence of politics.241 In France, the rediscovery of the Horkheimer-Adorno theory of reason near the end of the 1970s inaugurated the era of depoliticization, which, by substituting generalized disconnection for concrete and tangible history, led to the “era of the vacuum” described so well by Grenoble Professor Gilles Lipovetsky.242 Following the militant effervescence of May ’68 came a generation whose mental attitudes are characterized quite justly by Lipovetsky as apathy, indifference (also to the metanarrative in its crude form), desertion (of the political parties, especially of the Communist Party), desyndicalisation, narcissism, etc. For Lipovetsky, this generalized resignation and abdication constitutes a golden opportunity. It is the guarantee, he says, that violence will recede, and thus no “totalitarianism,” red, black, or brown, will be able to seize power. This psychological easy-goingness, together with a narcissistic indifference to others, constitutes the true “post-modern” age.
THERE ARE VARIOUS POSSIBLE DEFINITIONS OF “POST-MODERNITY”
On the other hand, if we perceive—contrary to Lipovetsky’s usage—“modernity” or “modernism” as expressions of the metanarrative, thus as brakes on Faustian energy, post-modernity will necessarily be a return to the political, a rejection of para-Magian creationism and anti-political suspicion that emerged after May ’68, in the wake of speculations on “instrumental reason” and “objective reason” described by Horkheimer and Adorno.
The complexity of the “post-modern” situation makes it impossible to give one and only one definition of “post-modernity.” There is not one post-modernity that can lay claim to exclusivity. On the threshold of the 21st century, various post-modernities lie fallow, side by side, diverse potential post-modern social models, each based on fundamentally antagonistic values, primed to clash. These post-modernities differ—in their language or their “look”—from the ideologies that preceded them; they are nevertheless united with the eternal, immemorial, values that lie beneath them. As politics enters the historical sphere through binary confrontations, clashes of opposing clans and the exclusion of minorities, dare to evoke the possible dichotomy of the future: a neo-liberal, Western, American and American-like post-modernity versus a shining Faustian and Nietzschean post-modernity.
THE “MORAL GENERATION” & THE “ERA OF THE VACUUM”
This neo-liberal post-modernity was proclaimed triumphantly, with Messianic delirium, by Laurent Joffrin in his assessment of the student revolt of December 1986 (Un coup de jeune [A Coup of Youth], Arlea, 1987). For Joffrin, who predicted243 the death of the hard Left, of militant proletarianism, December ’86 is the harbinger of a “moral generation,” combining in one mentality soft Leftism, lazy-minded collectivism, and neo-liberal, narcissistic, and post-political selfishness: the social model of this hedonistic society centered on commercial praxis, that Lipovetsky described as the era of the vacuum. A political vacuum, an intellectual vacuum, and a post-historical desert: these are the characteristics of the blocked space, the closed horizon characteristic of contemporary neo-liberalism. This post-modernity constitutes a troubling impediment to the greater Europe that must emerge so that we have a viable future and arrest the slow decay announced by massive unemployment and declining demographics spreading devastation under the wan light of consumerist illusions, the big lies of advertisers, and the neon signs praising the merits of a Japanese photocopier or an American airline.
On the other hand, the post-modernity that rejects the old anti-political metanarrative of the Enlightenment, with its metamorphoses and metastases; that affirms the insolence of a Nietzsche or the metallic ideal of a Jünger; that crosses the “line,” as Heidegger exhorts, leaving behind the sterile dandyism of nihilistic times; the post-modernity that rallies the adventurous to a daring political program concretely implying the rejection of the existing power blocs, the construction of an autarkic Eurocentric economy, while fighting savagely and without concessions against all old-fashioned religions and ideologies, by developing the main axis of a diplomacy independent of Washington; the post-modernity that will carry out this voluntary program and negate the negations of post-history—this post-modernity will have our full adherence.
In this brief essay, I wanted to prove that there is a continuity in the confrontation of the “Faustian” and “Magian” mentalities, and that this antagonistic continuity is reflected in the current debate on post-modernities. The American-centered West is the realm of “Magianisms,” with its cosmopolitanism and authoritarian sects.244 Europe, the heiress of a Faustianism much abused by “Magian” thought, will reassert herself with a post-modernity that will recapitulate the inexpressible themes, recurring but always new, of the Faustianness intrinsic to the European soul.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
December 13, 15, & 29, 2010
JEAN THIRIART:
THE MACHIAVELLI OF UNITED EUROPE245
EDOUARD RIX
_____________________
TRANSLATED BY GREG JOHNSON
A diligent reader of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Pareto, the Belgian Jean Thiriart (1922–1992), founder of the mythic pan-European transnational Jeune Europe (Young Europe), is the unsurpassable theorist of a Greater Europe united from Galway to Vladivostok.
Born in 1922 to a liberal family in Liège, Belgium, Jean Thiriart was a young militant in the ranks of the Marxist extreme Left as part of the Unified Socialist Young Guard and the Socialist Antifascist Union. He greeted the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 with enthusiasm: “The most beautiful, the most exciting part of my life,” he would admit, “was the German-Soviet pact.”246 Because, for him, “National Socialism was not an enemy of Communism, but a competitor.”247
FROM ONE WAR TO ANOTHER
In 1940, at the age of 18, he joined the Amis du Grand Reich allemand (AGRA–Friends of the Greater German Reich), the association in occupied French-speaking Belgium of secular and socialist supporters of collaboration, not Rexists. He also belonged to the Fichte Bund, a movement based in Hamburg that emerged from the National Bolshevik current. Condemned to three years of prison after the liberation, he gave up all political activity.
He became re-engaged only in 1960, at the age of 38, during the decolonization of the Belgian Congo, taking part in the foundation of the Comité d’action et de défense des Belges d’Afrique (CADBA—Committee of Action and Defense of the Belgians of Africa). Quickly, the defense of the Belgians of the Congo transformed into a fight for the European presence in Africa, including the French in Algeria, and CADBA turned into the Mouvement d’action civique (MAC—Movement of Civic Action). Thiriart, assisted by Dr. Paul Teichmann, transformed this Poujadist-inflected group into a revolutionary structure that effectively organized Belgian support networks for the OAS.248
On March 4, 1962, at a meeting in Venice under the a
egis of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leaders of MAC, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI—Italian Social Movement), the Union Movement, and the Reichspartei moved to found a “National European party centered on the idea of European unity.” But nothing concrete came of it.
Vowing to create a true European revolutionary party, in January 1963 Jean Thiriart transformed MAC into Young Europe, a transnational European movement under the sign of the Celtic cross. Although established in six countries, it never had more than 5,000 members in all of Europe, and this, even Thiriart admitted, “only by scraping the bottom of the barrel.” Of the total, two-thirds were concentrated in Italy. In France, because of its support of the OAS, Young Europe was banned, which forced the movement to remain semi-clandestine and explains its weak influence, its manpower not exceeding 200 members.
NATIONAL EUROPEAN COMMUNITARIANISM
In 1961, in Le Manifeste à la Nation Européenne (Proclamation of the European Nation), Jean Thiriart declared himself for “a united powerful, communitarian Europe . . . opposed to the Soviet and US blocs.”249 He presented his ideas at greater length in a book published in 1964, Un Empire de 400 millions d’hommes: L’Europe (An Empire of 400 Million Men: Europe). Quickly translated into the seven principal European languages, this work—which was supplemented in 1965 by a booklet of 80 pages, La Grande Nation: L’Europe unitaire de Brest à Bucarest (The Great Nation: United Europe from Brest to Bucharest), deeply influenced the cadres of the European extreme Right, particularly in Italy.
The originality of Young Europe lies in its ideology, National European Communitarianism, that Thiriart presents as a “European and elitist socialism,” de-bureaucratized and given a spine by European nationalism. Challenging the romantic concept of the nation inherited from the 19th century, which falls under a determinism that is ethnic, linguistic, or religious, he prefers the concept of a dynamic nation: moving, becoming, corresponding to the nation/community of destiny described by José Ortega y Gasset. Without rejecting the common past completely, he thinks that “this past is nothing compared to the gigantic common future . . . What makes the Nation real and viable is its unity of historical destiny.”250
