Archeofuturism
ARCHEOFUTURISM
European Visions of the Post-catastrophic Age
Guillaume Faye
ARKTOS
First English edition published in 2010 by Arktos Media Ltd.
Copyright to the English edition © 2010 by Arktos Media Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in the United Kingdom
isbn 978-1-907166-09-9 (Softcover)
isbn 978-1-907166-10-5 (Hardcover)
BIC classification: Social & political philosophy (HPS);
General & world history (HBG)
Translation: Sergio Knipe
Editor: John B. Morgan
Proofreader: Michael J. Brooks
Cover Design: Andreas Nilsson
Layout: Daniel Friberg
ARKTOS MEDIA LTD
www.arktos.com
Table of Contents
Foreword
A Note from the Editor
Introduction
1. An Assessment of the Nouvelle Droite
2. A Subversive Idea: Archeofuturism as an Answer to the Catastrophe of Modernity and an Alternative to Traditionalism
3. Ideologically Dissident Statements
4. For a Two-Tier World Economy
5. The Ethnic Question and the European
6. A Day in the Life of Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov[1]
A Chronicle of Archeofuturist Times
Foreword
‘We have kept faith with the past,
and handed down a tradition to the future.’
– Patrick Pearse, 1916
Guillaume Faye was long associated with that school of thought, which, in 1978, the French media labelled ‘la Nouvelle Droite’ – though it was Right wing in no conventional sense, representing, as it did, the distinctly postmodern cause of ‘European identitarian nationalism’.
Not to be confused, then, with the various neo-liberal, implicitly Protestant, and market-oriented tendencies bearing the same designation in the English-speaking world, the French New Right grew out of GRECE (the Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne), an association formed in 1968 by various anti-liberals hoping to overcome the failed legacies of Pétainism, neo-fascism, Catholic traditionalism, regionalism, colonialism, and Poujadism – in order to resist the cancerous Americanisation of their homeland.
To this end, GRECE’s founders believed they would never overthrow America’s liberalising hegemony, as long as the general culture remained steeped in liberal beliefs. In the formulation of its master thinker, Alain de Benoist: ‘Without Marx, no Lenin’.
That is, without the ascendence of anti-liberal ideas in the general culture and thus without a revolution of the spirit, there would be no viable movement against le parti américain.
GRECE was established, thus, not for la politique politicienne, but for the sake of metapolitically rearming European culture.
And in this, it was not unsuccessful. For GRECE’s philosophically persuasive revival of anti-liberal thought and the subsequent affiliation of several prominent European thinkers to its banner made it an influence of some immediate import. Indeed, it can almost be said that for the first time since the Action Française, ‘Rightists’ in the ’70s achieved a level of sophistication and attraction nearly ‘comparable’ to that of the Left, as France’s ‘intellectual right’ threw off the defenceless conservatism that came with Americanisation to challenge the liberal consensus imposed in 1945.
* * *
While still working on his doctorate in Political Science at the elite Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Science Po), Guillaume Faye began gravitating to GRECE. By 1973, he had become its ‘number two’ advocate, a role he would play until 1986.
Like other Grécistes in this early period, Faye was influenced by those European currents that had previously countered the imposition of liberal ideology.
Foremost of these counter-currents were the Conservative Revolution of the German 1920s (Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck, Schmitt, Freyer, Heidegger, Jünger, etc.); the traditionalism of Julius Evola; the Indo-Europeanism of Georges Dumézil; and the heritage of pre-Christian paganism.
Contemporary anti-liberal ideas in stream with these deeper currents – such as the ethology of Konrad Lorenz, the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen, or the illusion-destroying field of genetics – were similarly incorporated into GRECE’s anti-liberal curriculum.
Faye, though, took to these ideas differently (more radically, in my view) than de Benoist – perhaps because of his earlier affiliation with the Situationists and the ‘aristocratic’ ex-Communist Henri Lefebvre; more probably because of his apprenticeship with the Italian journalist, Germanist, and post-fascist firebrand Giorgio Locchi; and ultimately, of course, because of his specific temperament.
Less prolific and encyclopedic than de Benoist, the younger Faye was considered by some the more creative (le véritable moteur intellectuel de la nouvelle droite). He played second fiddle, though, to the master, who seemed bent on blunting the edge of New Right radicalism. There was, as a consequence, a certain implicit tension between their different notions of the anti-liberal project.
* * *
For reasons explained in the first chapter, Faye quit GRECE in 1986. During the next dozen years, he worked in the ‘media’ as a radio personality, journalist, and occasional ghost writer.
The publication of L’Archéofuturisme in 1998 signaled his return to the metapolitical fray.
At one level, this work accounts for the dead-end that de Benoist’s GRECE had got itself into by the mid-1980s, suggesting what it could have done differently and with greater effect.
At another, more important level, it addresses the approaching interregnum, endeavouring to ‘transcend’ the historical impasse, which pits the ever changing present against the heritage of the past, between European modernism and traditionalism.
To this end, Archeofuturism calls for ‘the re-emergence of archaic configurations’ – ‘pre-modern, inegalitarian, and non-humanist’ – in a futuristic or long-term ‘context’ that turns modernity’s forward, innovative thrust (totally nihilistic today) into a reborn assertion of European being, as the temporal and the untimely meet and merge in a higher dialectic.
Archeofuturism is thus both archaic and futuristic, for it validates the primordiality of Homer’s epic values in the same breath that it advances the most daring contemporary science.
Because the Anglophone world outside the British Isles is a product of liberal modernity, the struggle between tradition and modernity, pivotal to continental European culture, has been seemingly tangential to it.
This struggle, however, nevertheless now impinges on the great crises descending on the U.S. and the former White dominions.
Faye’s Archeofuturism holds out an understanding of this world collapsing about us, imbuing European peoples with a strategy to think through the coming storms and get to the other side – to that post-catastrophic age, where a new cycle of being awaits them, as they return to the spirit that lies not in the past per se, but in advance of what is to come.
– Michael O’Meara
Saint Ignatius of Loyola Day, 2010
Michael O’Meara is the author of two vital books on the subject of the New Right
in English, New Culture, New Right and Toward the White Republic
and has published many articles on related topics.
A Note from the Editor
As Faye’s text did
not originally contain any footnotes, all of those present in this edition were added by myself. Faye was writing for a primarily French audience who could be expected to be familiar with the many figures and concepts from the French New Right and from French literary, political and philosophical history to which he refers, but which may be unfamiliar to an English-speaking reader. As such, I have added footnotes where I felt they could serve to explicate such references. Likewise, Faye occasionally makes reference to contemporary political events of which the average reader might have been aware in 1998, but which may be unfamiliar today, more than a decade later. I have therefore added details about some of these events where I felt it was appropriate.
– JOHN B. MORGAN
Introduction
The thread of this book is formed by three logically connected theses. The first argues that current civilisation, a product of modernity and egalitarianism, has reached its final peak and is threatened by the short-term prospect of a global cataclysm resulting from a convergence of catastrophes. Many civilisations have disappeared in the past, but these were disasters that only affected certain areas of the Earth, not the whole of humanity. Today, for the first time in history, a world civilisation – the global extension of Western civilisation – is threatened by converging lines of catastrophe produced by the implementation of its ideological plans. A dramatic chain reaction of events is converging towards a fatal point which I believe may occur in the early Twenty-first century, between 2010 and 2020. This will plunge the world as we know it into chaos and cause a genuine cultural earthquake. These ‘catastrophe lines’ concern the environment, demography, economy, religion, epidemics and geopolitics.
The present civilisation cannot endure. Its foundations are contrary to reality. It is clashing not so much against ideological contradictions – which can always be overcome – but, for the first time, against a physical wall. The old faith in miracles of egalitarianism and the philosophy of progress – which suggests one can have his cake and eat it too – is now coming to an end. This fairytale ideology has led to a world of illusions that is less and less credible.
Second thesis: the individualist and egalitarian ideology of the modern world is no longer suitable in an increasing number of spheres in our civilisation. To face the future, it will be more and more necessary to adopt an archaic mind-set, which is to say a pre-modern, non-egalitarian and non-humanistic outlook – one capable of restoring the ancestral values that inform ‘orderly societies’. Already the advancements made in technology and science, particularly in biology and computer science, can no longer be managed with modern humanistic values and ways of thinking; already geopolitical and social events point to the tumultuous and violent emergence of problems connected to religion, ethics, food production and epidemics. It is necessary to return to primary issues. Hence the new idea I am suggesting: Archeofuturism. This idea enables us to make a break with the obsolete philosophy of progress and the egalitarian, humanitarian and individualist dogmas of modernity, which are unsuited to our need to think about the future and survive the century of iron and fire that is looming near.
Third central thesis: we should already envisage the aftermath of the chaos, the post-catastrophic world, according to the principles of Archeofuturism, which are radically different from those of egalitarian modernity. This book gives an outline of them. It is useless to try and conceive reforms inspired by provisional wisdom and rationality: man is incapable of doing so. Only when man finds himself with his back against the wall, in an emergency, does he react. What I will offer here is a sort of mental training for the post-catastrophic world.
* * *
The term ‘Conservative Revolution’, which is often used to describe our current of thought, is not enough. The word ‘conservative’ has demobilising, anti-dynamic and rather outdated connotations. Today it is not a matter of ‘conserving’ the present or returning to a recent past that has failed, but rather of regaining possession of our most archaic roots, which is to say those most suited to the victorious life. One example, among others, of this inclusive logic: to synthesize technological science and archaism – to reconcile Evola[1] and Marinetti,[2] Doctor Faust and the Labourers.[3]
The controversy between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernists’ has grown barren. We should be neither of these things, but rather Archeofuturists. Traditions are made to be purged, screened and selected: for many of them breed viruses, of the kind that are exploding today. As for modernity, it probably no longer has a future.
The world of the future will be precisely as Nietzsche and the great but unjustly – or perhaps justly – ignored philosopher Raymond Ruyer[4] foresaw it.
In this book, I also aim to positively define the flexible and rather neutral concepts of ‘post-modernity’ and ‘anti-egalitarianism’ by constructing a new term that describes an ideology to be developed: vitalist constructivism.
‘Convergence of catastrophes’, ‘Archeofuturism’, ‘vitalist constructivism’: I have always tried to come up with new concepts because only through ideological innovation can we avoid rigid and obsolete doctrines in a world that is rapidly changing and where dangers are taking shape. In such a way, an idea armed with ever new weapons can win the ‘war of words’, shock reality and stir people’s conscience.
I am showing some paths, not formulating dogmas; my aim is not so much to assert my theses (which belong to what Socrates called doxa – ‘opinion’ that is open to question), but rather to launch a debate on crucial problems, in such a way as to make a break through the ideological insignificance, blindness and poverty that have intentionally been created by the system to divert people’s attention and conceal its own complete failure. In a society that considers all genuine ideas subversive, which seeks to discourage ideological imagination, and which aims to abolish thought in favour of spectacle, the main goal must be to awaken people’s consciences, raising traumatising problems and sending ideological electroshocks: shocking ideas.
* * *
I did not want to write a traditional essay, divided into chapters and with a rather cumbersome structure, so I proceeded through glimpses and sketches, each shedding more or less light, to make the book easier to read. Besides, I do not strictly confine my discussion to its central theme, but also seek to engage with related issues such as the crucial problem of the current demographic colonisation of Europe by Afro-Asiatic peoples, and which is prudishly called ‘immigration’. Towards the end of the book the reader will find a futuristic political fiction that will immerse him in the Archeofuturist post-catastrophic world, in the year 2073, at the heart of the Eurosiberian Federation.
* * *
We should make a break with soft ideas, now that the real issues are becoming central again. Some people may regard many of my suggestions as ideologically delinquent in the context of the ruling ideology and pseudo-virginal chorus of the self-righteous. Well, they are.
You may wonder why I have not published any ideological texts in thirteen years and have only now resumed my battle of ideas. It is mainly because after spending a long time ‘with the enemy’, I have understood many things and have been able to renew and adjust my position. To be radically opposed to a given model of society, it is necessary to know it well, from the inside. It is always very interesting to stand at the heart of the military apparatus of the enemy, to be in the world without being of the world: the cobra tactic.
Moreover, the growing stakes and increasing gravity of the signs that herald imminent catastrophes have led me to return to the battlefield and revise many positions I had once adopted, when active in the Nouvelle Droite,[5] in order to seek paths more appropriate for the ‘exceptional case’ (Carl Schmitt’s Ernstfall[6]) we are currently facing. No doubt, the new courses I am suggesting we should take are far more radical than those I promoted thirteen years ago – ‘radical’ being a synonym not of ‘extremist’, but of ‘fundamental’.
Our current of thought is being offered a real historical chance
, for: first, facts are proving us right; second, the global system established by our ideological enemy is about to collide with the wall of reality and plunge into the abyss, both in France and worldwide; and third, the ruling ideology has nothing new to offer – no solutions – unless it contradicts itself. Its only answer consists of simulacra and pretences, in an attempt to make people forget and to divert their attention: what Guy Debord[7] described as the strategy of ‘spectacle’ at a time when this was still going strong. Instead, today, despite being a thousand times more sophisticated, this strategy is seizing up and shaking like a motor with an empty tank. We are facing a deafening ideological silence, made of worn-out, softened values and a lack of conviction in their own beliefs. Nor do establishment intellectuals have any intellectual Viagra to get some stimulation. This is a critical combination of circumstances which we should grab by the hair.
* * *
We must take up the idea of Revolution again, a notion that has been misinterpreted and betrayed by the charlatans of the Left for over two centuries. Once, the newspaper Combat[8] used the nice slogan ‘from Resistance to Revolution’. It is not a matter of simply resisting the destruction that unfolds before our eyes and is spreading with a power we find hard to conceive, but rather of envisaging an ‘aftermath of the system’, on the basis of a worldview (and of the ideologies and doctrines stemming from it and which it will be worth describing) that is genuinely revolutionary: a worldview, that is, which makes a radical break with contemporary values and morals, in order to train spirits for the world of the future and create active minorities ready to experience this break and adopt an Archeofuturist ethic with detachment.
Our current of thought, broadly conceived, must necessarily unite on a European level, forgetting about provincial disputes and narrow doctrines, in such a way as to seize the opportunity it is being offered: to acquire the monopoly over alternative thought – rebel thought. Let us take advantage of the present global crisis and formulate suggestions that may stir the conscience of the young.
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