[Paleopsych] Michael Torigian: The Philosophical Foundations of the French New Right
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Michael Torigian: The Philosophical Foundations of the French New Right
Telos No. 117 (Fall 1999)
http://es.geocities.com/sucellus23/591.htm
"The future belongs to those with the longest memory."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
The Third Way
To understand the French New Right, it is necessary to begin with its
identitarian philosophy of history. This philosophy, however, is so
entangled in an ideological thicket of critical scorn that it is all
but impossible to approach with impartiality. Like revolutionary
conservatism, national bolshevism, and various expressions of populism
and syndicalism, the French New Right seeks a revolutionary course
beyond the Left-Right politics it rejects; and, like these other
"Third Way" tendencies, it, too, is routinely compared with the most
notorious of the Third Way movements: fascism and National
Socialism.(n1) While liberalism, social democracy, and communism, as
different expressions of the Left, are not similarly equated (and
tainted), there is a certain, if tenuous logic to these comparisons in
that all Third Way tendencies oppose the modernist order. Less certain
still is the inquisitional intent of these comparisons.(n2) Efforts by
Alain de Benoist's GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes pour la
Civilisation Europeenne),(n3) the principal French proponent of the
Third Way, to challenge the liberal paradigm or to evoke the
Indo-European heritage as a spur to cultural renewal, have led to
numerous McCarthy-style allegations of Nazism and "Aryan
supremacy"(n4) -- even though for thirty years Benoist and his
Grecistes have denounced Nazism as a "brown Jacobinism" and have
characterized racism as an offshoot of the totalizing modernity they
oppose. The greatest obstacle to understanding the Third Way may stem,
however, from the fact that these comparisons mistakenly assume that
ideology, an "outgrowth of modernity" that reduces the world to
itself, and philosophy, which is an opening to the world, are
analogous, and that, therefore, the philosophical disposition of a
school of thought, such as the GRECE's, can be deduced from its
politics.(n5) Since all these stigmatizing comparisons endeavor to
delegitimate, rather than to explain such non-conformist tendencies,
it is hardly surprising that they also have succeeded in marginalizing
them.(n6)
Europe's Identitarian Crisis
An interest in the past generally begins with an interest in the
future. As its appellation suggests, the GRECE's interest is European
civilization. Unlike globalists and Altanticists, who tout its wealth
and economic prominence, Grecistes believe Europe is in decline.(n7)
The continent, they argue, is no longer governed by European criteria.
Self-serving technocracies, guided by liberal managerial imperatives,
now rule its lands with a generic conception of man that disparages
its particularistic cultures and historic continuities.(n8) The
ensuing weakening of collective identities has been compounded by a
stunted system of socialization, educational policies that denigrate
traditional standards, a proliferation of social pathologies and
cretinizing spectacles, and a vast influx of inassimilable Afro-Asian
immigrants.(n9) Buttressed by the liberal "Right" and the Social
Democratic Left, as they converge in extolling the virtues of the
world market, these technocracies focus almost exclusively on "the
battle for exports" and the dictates of globalization, seemingly
indifferent to the breakdown of social-cultural solidarities.(n10)
Even more deleterious than these technocratic threats to European
identity has been the loss of sovereignty that followed in the wake of
the "Thirty Years' War" (1914-1945), when Europe was occupied and
divided by the two extra-European powers. The fall of the Berlin Wall
and the end of the Cold War allegedly altered only the character of
this heteronomy. Though accepting Heidegger's contention that the
techno-economic civilizations of communist Russia and liberal America
were "metaphysically the same," with similar materialist philosophies
of history, Grecistes believe the American occupation was the more
pernicious: where the Soviets crushed any assertion of East European
independence, the US not only occupied Western Europe militarily in
the name of defending it, but colonized it culturally in ways that
decomposed and Americanized European life.(n11) "A people," Raymond
Ruyer has written, "more often perishes by losing its soul than its
resources."(n12)
To Grecistes, this seems to be the case today. In their view, the US
represents the purest embodiment of liberal modernity, and thus the
chief worldwide force for cultural homogenization. Nowhere, they
argue, were the modernist principles born in the 18th-century
Enlightenment --the principles of equality, rationality, universalism,
individuality, economism, and developmentalism -- as thoroughly
realized as in the new republic "liberated from the dead hand of the
European past."(n13) In this spirit, the US was founded on a concept
of its citizenry as autonomous self-interested subjects, homo
oeconomicus, oriented to market exchanges and contractual relations,
but devoid of high culture or ethnic identification. As such, the
denizens of this modernist "enterprise" (constituting a demos, rather
than an ethnos) have tended to substitute mercantile conventions for
tradition, to define themselves in terms of a materialist way of life,
and to elevate "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," i.e.,
the monadic conception of freedom, to the pinnacle of their concerns.
Any notion of a "people" or of particularistic cultural organisms
imbued with historically-shaped destinies, has been entirely foreign
to their "national" project.(n14) For this reason, the
"culturally-primitive upper class" (Oswald Spengler) of this former
colony, in its role as modernity's elect, has been occupied almost
exclusively with promoting consumer choice in open markets and
enhancing the "rationality" of these choices by disembedding
individuals from their communities and ascriptive ties. US power was
accordingly imposed on Europe as if the entire continent, not just the
US, were frozen in an eternal here and now, concerned solely with
matters of economic advantage. Aided by marketing and media lures that
circumvented elite structures and catered to the libidinous impulses
of mass taste, Europe's postwar Americanization displaced, if not
discredited much of the continent's millennial heritage. Grecistes
thus look on America as a "murderer" of culture and history, a
civilizational no-man's-land bent on turning the world into a single
global market where everything is exchangeable.(n15) As Benoist
writes, the US "is not like other countries. It is a country that
seeks to destroy all others."(n16) This Greciste view of the New World
as a cultural threat to the Old World's survival is especially
relevant, since many Europeans have succumbed to America's hegemonic
designs and have abandoned not a few of their defining particularisms.
As John Gray writes,(n17) Europe today "confronts the phenomenon of a
culture permeated throughout by a hatred of its own identity."
The Longest Memory
To strip a people of their culture and history, as America's
universalist and homogenizing project entails, is tantamount,
Grecistes argue, to severing a people's roots, and a people can no
more live with severed roots than can a tree. Without a memory of its
collective past and the foundational myths that define and distinguish
it from others --without, that is, the encompassing forrces that tie a
multiple of related individuals to a larger identity -- a people
ceases to be a people.(n18) For this reason, Grecistes consider the
erosion of Europe's cultural foundations to be the greatest danger
facing its civilization. Consequently, the cultural front has become
the primary theater of their operations.(n19) In defending Europe's
patrimony, their line of march has commenced with a metapolitical
assault on the cosmopolitan forces of modernity. Like Antonio Gramsci,
they believe that power and politics follow culture, and that Europe
continues to betray itself as long as its culture remains infused with
anti-European influences. To combat the hegemony of American-style
modernity and to instill in their people a will to be themselves, they
have taken up a Gramscian metapolitics that treats culture as if it
were a strategic high-ground to be contested by "organic
intellectuals" beating different views of what it means to be
European.(n20) In this spirit, they straggle for a re-Europeanization
of the continent.
Unlike conservative and traditionalist critics of liberal modernity,
Grecistes' metapolitics attacks what many consider the core religious
component of European identity.(n21) From their perspective, the
Christian religious heritage constitutes not simply the spiritual
foundation of modernity, but an ideology inimical to all forms of
indigenous culture.(n22) They point out that Christianity arose in a
multicultural world filled with anomie and deracination, that it was
multi-ethnic in conviction, and that it rejected all communal
particularisms, deigning only to be "in the world, not of it."(n23)
Beginning with their affiliation to the early Greco-Roman church,
Christians identified with a people and a history (those of the Bible)
that were not their own, abandoning, in effect, their native identity.
In this spirit, the church's "new covenant" was made between God and
all humanity, which gave it a universal, rather than a national
mission. Accordingly, history, culture, and ethnicity, from which the
complexities of earthly identity are fashioned, have been irrelevant
to its adherents, who see themselves as God's children, indifferent to
the ascriptions obscuring the equality of every soul and obstructing
the spread of His word. As Louis Pauwels puts it, Christians have no
patrie, only God's promise land.(n24) Relatedly, in focusing on the
hereafter, their salvational calculous neglects the holistic communal
relations that animated pagan religiosity and nurtures a social ideal
radically opposed to the classical idea of tradition, hierarchy, and
hearth.(n25) By privileging individual salvation and deprecating
attachment to everything unrelated to redemption, Christianity
prepared the way for egoistic and, ultimately, anti-identitarian
social forms.(n26)
Even more consequential in Grecistes' eyes is Christianity's dualistic
cosmology. Unlike pagans, Christians see the natural world not as the
body of the gods, infused with the sacred, but as a creation called
forth out of nothing by a transcendent Creator who stands outside and
above it. By sharply differentiating between creation and Creator
--making the latter the source, not the result, of the former, as
pagans held -- they posit the primacy of the God who created, rules,
and eventually will preside over the end of the world. Subordinated to
this Supreme Being, man's world becomes comprehensible solely in terms
of His logos: i.e., in terms of the divine rationality ordering
creation. Accordingly, all world events and all human actions, despite
their apparent incoherence and antagonism, partake in the logos'
universality. This belief in the raison du monde makes Christianity,
like Judaism, an ultra-rationalist religion, with "all aspects of
man's life [subject to] a myriad of prescriptions, laws, and
interdictions."(n27) Moreover, by replacing the sacred, mythic
elements of pre-Christian Europe with the logos' higher rationality,
and by conceiving of divinity in otherworldly terms, the cosmos is
desacralized, nature objectified, and creation devalued.(n28) Apart,
then, from God, the Christian world is drained of significance; what
Max Weber refers to as "disenchantment" is, for Grecistes, an
innovation not of modern rationalism, but of a cosmology that
separates an all-perfect Creator from a creation that imperfectly
reflects Him.(n29)
From Christian dualism, an entirely new view of time emerges. Because
man (in the form of "Adam and Eve") tainted creation by disobeying
God, Christians look on history as a tale of his fallen state.(n30)
Their "logocentric" intent is hence directed beyond the "vale of
tears" to the end of time, when man, or at least the saved among men,
are to be returned to His grace.(n31) "Instead of being [a] religion
of life, here and now," Christianity, as one of the great modern
pagans characterizes it, becomes a "religion of postponed destiny,
death and reward afterwards, 'if you are good'."(n32) This finalist
(or eschatological) vision of history, whose culmination is to be the
Last Judgement, Genesis' antipode, gives rise to Christianity's
unilinear conception of time, in which the present issues from a
former determination and the future follows the "path of time" to
something better. Within the frame of this irreversible progression --
running from the fall to salvation, from the particular to the
redeeming universal -- time ceases to function as a recurring cycle of
nature and becomes a vector whose continuous temporality ascends from
creation (occurring but once), to Moses, to Jesus, to the
Resurrection, and, finally, to the world's end. History is thereby
homogenized into a sequence of successive now-points, with events seen
as different stages in salvation's progression along this ascent, each
stage representing a present ("the now") distinct from a past ("the
no-longer now") and a future ("the not-yet-now").(n33) With the advent
of Christianity, then, the nature of historical enquiry undergoes a
radical change, as the mythic adjunct of a specific cultural tradition
(history) is transformed into the study of a creation that
irreversibly progresses as an essentialist-defined being traverses a
fixed course of becoming.(n34)
Because it posits a rational necessity underlying history's
"progression," Grecistes believe the Christian concept of history has
the cultural-ontological effect of denigrating the past and locking
man into an abstract temporal continuum whose single possible outcome
corrupts "the innocence of becoming" (Nietzsche). Modernity, they add,
gives this concept a no less determinist cast, for Christianity's
secular progenies, liberalism and Marxism, have allegedly embraced a
similar "telos of redemption" -- framed in materialist, rather than
spiritual terms, with the GNP replacing Jesus as the chief idol,
happiness as salvation, and reason as faith, but, nonetheless,
understood as the progressive development of a purposeful teleology
that supersedes the past's errant legacy.(n35) In other words,
modernists, refuse Christian appeals to transcendent values only to
re-establish them in immanent ones.(n36) They might have emptied the
heavens of the gods, but their rationalist notion of history is still
simply another expression of a supra-historical process governed not
by life, but by a metaphysics that seeks light and vision from what
lies ahead -- in this case, "the global triumph of economic
rationality."(n37) Moreover, in the form of the now discredited,
though still implicitly dominant Whig and Marxist interpretations,
modernist historiography not only gives new impetus to the
teleological impulse of the linear view by dismissing the "no longer
present" and by privileging the Great Narrative whose telos is the
universal and timeless, it deprecates all particularisms, concerned as
it is with the single evolutionary goal to which progress or class
struggle (the secularized equivalents of the divine logos) is heading
and the universal solution this logos messianically offers for all
social, moral, and political problems. The developmental impulse of
this historiography assumes, as a consequence, a directional, uniform,
and causal form that optimistically anticipates a more rational and
perfect future.(n38)
Against the Christian/modernist concept of history, which
"dialectically" negates an erring past in the name of an expiated
future, Grecistes adopt the perspective of the longue duree, evoking
from the continent's primordial origins its longest memory, which
"rises up in us whenever we become 'serious'."(n39) In privileging the
immemorial of Europe's past, this millennial perspective presupposes a
tradition of community whose organic, cultural, and mythic references
reach back into the far recesses of time and encompass all the
European peoples.(n40) From this heritage, Grecistes hope to
differentiate between what is properly European and what has been
imposed as a foreign, self-denying admixture. The question immediately
arises, though, as to how cogent it is to think of Europe as
comprising such a community. Scholarly convention long held that the
ancient Near East prepared the seed bed of European culture, and that
Europe's very existence stemmed not from itself, but from another
civilization. Grecistes, however, dismiss this ex oriente lux thesis,
claiming it reflects the deracinating impulse of Christian/modernist
universalism and a hostility toward native culture.(n41) Therefore,
they reject the prevailing accounts that situate Europe's roots in the
Euphrates River valley -- "We come from the people of The Iliad and
the Edda, not the Bible" -- and argue instead for the integrity of
European origins.(n42) In this, their historiographical apostasy, they
have been especially fortunate in not having to await the vindication
of another Schliemann or Evans, for recent archeological advances,
especially the radiocarbon dating of Colin Renfrew and his team at
Cambridge, already have uncovered evidence for the autochthonic
origins of European civilization. This, in turn, has provoked a major
revision in prehistorical studies, reframing them in terms that more
closely accord with the GRECE's "Eurocentrism."(n43) And while this
revision does not detract from Near Eastern achievements, it should,
Grecistes argue, alter the conventional view of the continent's
"barbarian" origins and its alleged debt to non-European sources.(n44)
Grecistes further contend that the historiographical disparaging of
archaic Europe, with its culturally negative implications, pales in
comparison to the indifference or hostility shown to its Indo-European
founders. Despite their pivotal role in prehistory and the popular
interest they continue to generate, their study is largely ignored in
current university curriculum. Stigmatized by the Nazis' Aryan cult,
the Indo-Europeans are studied today in but a few universities, and
there only on the margins of what already are marginalized
disciplines. Yet they, especially their Celtic, Germanic, Slavic,
Latin, and Hellenic families, are the ones, Grecistes claim, out of
whom the bedrock of European culture was formed. This emphasis on the
"Aryan" core of European sensibilities has, to be sure, armed their
critics, adepts at reductio ad Hitlerum, with potentially explosives
charges. But this emphasis is cultural, rather then biological, and is
made not because Grecistes rate the Indo-Europeans "superior" to other
peoples or consider them to be the progenitors of white racial purity,
as did Hitler, but because, like Luther, they cannot do
otherwise.(n45) For better or worse, Europe's identitarian roots are
those of the peoples who conquered its lands in the 2nd millennium BC,
establishing the fundament of its languages, culture, and history. As
such, the Indo-Europeans testify to Europe's historical specificity
and stand as a challenge to the cosmopolitan pretences of modernists
and Christians. Yet, in singling out the Indo-Europeans, Grecistes
rekindle not only the compromising associations the Nazis brought to
them, they commit themselves to an intellectually daunting enterprise.
When they began formulating their metapolitical strategy in the late
1960s, Indo-European studies were virtually unknown within the French
intelligentsia, even though France was home to one of the great
Indo-Europeanists.(n46) Moreover, for the longest time (and still
today), Indo-European studies were mainly philological, unamenable to
the sort of cultural project they hoped to pursue. Only with Georges
Dumezil's work in the late 1930s -- largely neglected until the GRECE
popularized it -- did it become possible to infer anything significant
about the sociocultural character of Europe's root peoples and
challenge the ex oriente lux thesis.(n47)
Working with a knowledge of twenty Indo-European languages and
employing methods that up to then had been reserved for historical
linguistics, Dumezil spent a life time comparing the mythological and
literary remains of the different Indo-European peoples. In these
comparative studies, embracing sixty books and several hundred
articles, he related details gleaned from the Rig Veda, the Homeric
epics, the Irish tales of Cuchulainn, the Norse sagas, and other
Indo-European literatures to patterns or configurations that seemed to
make up shared wholes and to point to a common origin (or to what
Claude Levi-Strauss, in his decontextualized and dehistoricized
adaptation of Dumezil's approach, called "structures").(n48) The most
significant achievement of these studies was the discovery of a
"tripartite ideology,"(n49) which, he claimed, shaped the way
Indo-Europeans organized their societies, ordered their values and
envisaged their religious pantheons. The discovery of tripartition
constituted what is arguably the key event in modern Indo-European
studies, for the presence of a common world-view "proves," in effect,
that these peoples were not merely a language group, but also a
culture.(n50) Derived from linguistic and literary sources, Dumezil's
discovery rests empirically on the historical existence of three
castes of men -- sages, warriors, and producers --representing the
three "functions" or orders responsible for regulating Indo-European
society. These functions allegedly gave the Indo-Europeans their
distinct cultural style, and later influenced the different national
families branching off from their trunk.(n51) Although features of
this ideology have been found among certain other peoples, Dumezil
claimed it was institutionalization, and assumed conscious
articulation only among Indo-Europeans, making it the defining element
of their culture and the essence of their "living past."(n52)
In the Grecistes' reading of Dumezil, the tripartite ideology
sanctioned principles that not only accorded with Indo-European
sensibilities, but enabled the highest representatives of their people
to govern, i.e., the wise men and priests who performed the sacred
rituals and remembered the old stories, and the warrior aristocrats
upon whose courage and self-sacrifice the community's survival
depended. By contrast, farmers, stock-herders, craftsmen, traders --
the producers -- were relegated ideologically to the lowest social
order (the third caste) and refused sovereign authority. In thus
conditioning the European mentality, tripartition made wisdom and
courage more important than economic-reproductive functions. It also
gave culture its high symbols and the power of its defining ideals,
pride of place above all other pursuits, unlike modernity's inversion
of these values.(n53)
Yet, however crucial its role in constituting the basis of European
civilization, the tripartite ideology represents but a single facet of
the Indo-European heritage to serve as a Greciste foil to the liberal
order. The "folk-centric, world-accepting" values animating the Vedic,
Homeric, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic traditions of pre-Christian
paganism, most of whose pantheons reflect the tripartite ideology,
play a no less important role. Because these pagan values and the
religiosity they inspired implicitly repudiate Christianity's
"world-rejecting" monotheism, Grecistes look to them as a way of
"returning to ourselves" and of finding there a spirituality
appropriate to Europeans disoriented by the disparity between their
native identity and the universalist dictates of the
Christian/modernist project. This validation of pagan values does not,
however, mean that Grecistes have taken to worshipping Zeus and Odin.
Instead, their metapolitical activities endeavor to recuperate
paganism's nominalist avowal of difference, its theophany of the
natural world, its heroic, aristocratic conception of man, its
marriage of aesthetics and morality, and, above all, its pluralistic
rejection of biblical dualism -- in order to counter the liberal
anti-identitarian currents they oppose.(n54) Not unrelatedly, their
rejection of the linear conception of history and its unidimensional
view of the world follows largely from this adherence to pagan values.
The Wellspring of Being
The difference between mythos and logos best illustrates the spiritual
divide separating Judeo-Christian dualism, with its linear historical
vision, from the cyclical, open-ended holism of Indo-European
paganism.(n55) In siding with mythos, whose metaphoric images evoke
perspectival "truths" unfathomable to analytic method, Grecistes take
up what they consider to be the more cogent tradition. Although
Christianity initially succeeded in branding pagan myth, in contrast
to its own alleged historical foundations, as inherently fictitious,
representing the fears and irrationalities of early man, the truth
claims of mythos (not to be confused with mythology) are no less
compelling than those of logos, whose rationalist procedures of
thought (i.e., logic) are "an invention of schoolteachers, not
philosophers."(n56) Grecistes further point out that all thinking is
mythic in form, since thought is conceptual, based on images
signifying objects and processes ultimately incommensurate with their
representation, and thus subject to interpretation. They even note
that logos itself was originally simply a phase, another of mythos'
expressions, for the image of the idea precedes and is frequently more
pregnant than its discursive formulation.(n57) This makes mythos not
the opponent of reason, but rather its metaphoric expression, which
logos later renders into the objectivist terms of a subject whose
conception of the world derives from a free-floating intellectualism.
Finally, as logical proposition ignoring the perspectival nature of
truth, logos differs from mythos in saying nothing about the meaning
of the world, and thus of man's historicity.
Contrary to Christians and modernists, Grecistes claim that mythos (or
myth) has little to do with an irrational rendering of a fantasized
past. Instead, its main function is to explain how the chaos inherent
in the world becomes the cosmos of specific cultural traditions. In
this sense, myth immortalizes those "exemplary precedents," however
encrusted with legend and poetry, that once occurred and reoccur
whenever a people, in response to what becomes the paradigmatic themes
of its heritage, imposes its order upon the world.(n58) Fictitious or
not, these primordial acts embody "truths" about the nature of reality
that elude formylaic or analytic proposition, based as they are on a
culture's interpretative encounter with it. Through the mythic
inscription of these truths and the heritage they found, the fundament
of a culturally defined existence is perpetuated. As such, myth treats
the past as a living trace, and transmits not the ancient, but the
permanent in a heritage, establishing a framework of continuity that
renders discontinuity and innovation into a coherent history of
tradition. As Mircea Eliade explains, myth is "creative and
exemplary," revealing how things come to be, defining their underlying
structures, and suggesting the multiple modalities of being they
imply.(n59) It does not describe reality "objectively," but roots it
in a heritage of significance that prescribes and affirms it as a
manifestation of original being. Intuitively seized by its believers,
mythic truth enables man to engage his world and to participate in its
re-creation.(n60) Its teachings are thus existentialist, not
essentialist; they can never be refuted, only rejected.(n61) Indeed,
myth has little to do with the rationalist notion of truth (verum),
for its power resides not in its correspondence to an object's
noumena, but in its aesthetic accordance with a state of soul and in
its capacity to inspire man's being with certum.(n62) In this vein, it
can be argued that the mythic revelations inscribed in the Voluspa or
the Tain Bo Cuailnge are as cogent as the scientific verities Of the
Origin of Species or the Principia Mathematica. Both as existentialist
postulate and "child of the imagination," myth apprehends those
certitudes which tradition accepts as true. For Benoist, it is what
justifies existence.(n63)
Likewise, the paradigmatic principles elaborated in mythic accounts of
origins generate the unquestioned presuppositions legitimating a
people s historical vocation.(n64) Its certitudes are summoned
whenever a people attempts to re-create its world and hence itself. If
there is no myth to preserve the particular truth of its original
being -- the particular truth (or illusion) that overcomes the world's
chaos and creates the values sustaining its will to power -- there can
be no re-creation. And if there is no re-creation, there can be no
destiny, and no people.(n65) In other words, myth orients a people in
the regeneration of its world through an affirmation of its original
inception. Without myth, "every culture loses the healthy natural
power of its creativity," for it is the creative and exemplary force
of myth that alone prompts a people to forge their common values into
a destiny that presses "upon its experiences the stamp of the
eternal."(n66) Mythic time is correspondingly reversible, as the
origins it recounts are repeated in each act of renewal.(n67) Myth, in
sum, knows no immutable truth, yet serves as a source of meaning and
certitude in an inherently meaningless and uncertain world.(n68)
Not coincidentally, the first major thinker to lend himself to the
GRECE's historiological project was Nietzsche, for his rejection of
the Western metaphysical tradition and his embrace of the old Greek
myths to counter the rationalism of the "dialecticians" (Socratic,
Christian, or modernist) anticipates many of the Grecistes' own
concerns. More importantly, in its appeal to "we good Europeans,"(n69)
his philosophical opus is steeped in historiological issues pertinent
to the problems of cultural renewal and historical fatigue. From these
have emerged not only the most profound and the least understood of
his ideas -- the thought of Eternal Return -- but also the inspiration
for the Grecistes' confrontation with the finitudes and determinisms
of the Christian/modernist project.
Contrary to the usual interpretations, Eternal Return does not imply a
literal repetition of the past. It is an axiological, not a
cosmological principle, representing the will for metamorphosis in a
world that is itself in endless metamorphoses. In fact, it is a
principle of becoming that knows neither beginning nor end, but only
the process of life returning to itself. As such, Eternal Return
affirms "will to power" --characteristic of the mythic spirit off
Indo-European paganism -- and not the dialecticians' negation,
sublation, and evolution which follow logos in cleaving to an
objective and thus otherworldly truth. Against the dialecticians'
narrow fixation on reason and self-preservation, Nietzsche exalts
life's ascending instincts and the old noble virtues that sought to
forge those instincts into a heroically subjective culture. Homer's
Greeks, he well knew, were dead and gone. Yet, whenever "the eternal
hourglass of existence is turned upside down," "opening" the future to
the past, he thought the epic spirit, as that which bears returning,
might be roused and something analogously creative achieved.(n70)
Life, he argued, is not a predetermined and timeless essence with an
inscribed telos. As being, it is becoming, and becoming is will to
power. Eternal Return represents an affirmation of man's original
being, an assertion of his difference with others, and, in its
infinite repertoire of exemplary past actions, the anticipation of
whatever his future might hold. In this sense, its recurring past
functions as a "selective thought," putting memory's endless
assortment of experience in service to life. Man has only to envisage
a future similar to some select facet of the past to initiate its
realization.(n71) The past cannot exist, then, as a momentary point on
a line, a duration measurable in mechanical clock time, understandable
as an onward succession of consecutive "nows." Rather, it recurs as a
"genealogical" differential, whose origin inheres in its wilful
assertion and becomes recoverable for futural re-enactments that seek
to continue life's adventure.(n72) In a word, the past never ends. It
returns in every successive affirmation of will, in every conscious
exertion of memory, in every instant when will and memory become
interchangeable. This makes it reversible, repeatable, and
recoverable.
Moreover, the past of Nietzsche's Eternal Return is of a whole with
other temporalities. One can never be younger, but as time advances,
the future recedes. In the present, these temporalities meet.
Consequently, the human sense of time encompasses an infinity of
temporalities, as past, present, and future converge in every passing
moment. And since this infinity is all of a piece, containing all the
dimensions of time, as well as all the acts of man, affirmed in their
entirety "whenever we affirm a single moment of it," the present acts
as an intersection, not a division, between past and future.(n73)
Linked to this polychronous totality, man's will accesses time's
infinity, where there is no prescribed end. As to historical teleology
or finality, for Nietzsche they are merely a derivative of
Christian/modernist nihilism, with its indifference to life's temporal
play. In response to the prompting of his will, it is man, as he
participates in the eternal recurrence of his original affirmation,
who imposes order on the world's underlying chaos, and man alone who
shapes the future -- not some external, supra-human force that goes by
the name of God, Progress, or the laws of Historical Materialism.(n74)
In the spirit of the ancient Hellenes, who treated life's transience
as the conjuncture of the actual and the eternal, of men and gods,
Nietzsche's Eternal Return testifies to the completeness of the
present moment.(n75)
In addition to affirming willful action, Nietzsche's breaks with
linear temporality infuses man with the idea that he always has the
option of living the thought of Eternal Return. Just as every past was
once a prefiguration of a sought-after future, every future arises
from a past anticipation, that can be anticipated again. "The
impossible," as teleologically decreed, "is not possible."(n76)
Indeed, in seeking to overcome that which resists, life's will to
power is manifested. Only belief in the underlying unity and purpose
of "creation," the logos, resigns man to time's alleged eschatological
properties. Nietzsche's Ubermensch, the antithesis of modern man, is
steeped in the longest memory, not because he bears the accumulated
wisdom of the past, but because he rejects the weariness of those
governed by an imagined necessity and instead imposes his will, as an
assertion of original being, upon the vagaries of time.(n77) This
validation of ancient affirmations that identifies being with becoming
should not, however, be taken to mean that the genealogical spirit of
mythic origins -- the spirit of an eternally open and purposeless
world subject solely to the active force of will -- gives man the
liberty to do whatever he desires. The limits he faces remain those
posed by the conditions of his epoch, as well as by his nature. In the
language of social science, Nietzsche fully acknowledges the
inescapable constraints of structures, systematic forces, or what
Comte called "social statics." Yet, within these limits, all that is
possible is possible, for man's activities are always prospectively
open to the possibilities inherent in the moment, whenever these
possibilities are appropriated according to his own determinations:
i.e., whenever man engages the ceaseless struggle that is life.
"Necessity," Nietzsche argues, "is not a fact, but an
interpretation."(n78) What ultimately conditions historical activity
is less what acts on man from the outside ("objectivity") than on what
emanates from the inside (will), as he "evaluates" the forces
affecting him. Nature, history, and the world may therefore affect the
way he lives, but not as a "mechanical necessity."
Given this rejection of immanent and transcendental determinisms,
Nietzsche's concept of history is far from being a literal
recapitulation of the traditional cyclical concept. According to
Eliade, the thought of Eternal Return found in archaic societies
implies an endless repetition of time, i.e., another sort of "line" (a
circle) or necessity refusing history.(n79) By contrast, Nietzsche
eschews time's automatic repetition by seeing Eternal Return in
non-cyclical, as well as non-linear terms. The eternity of the past
and the eternity of the future, he posits, necessitate the eternity of
the present, and the eternity of the present cannot but mean that
whatever has happened or will happen is always at hand in thought,
ready to be repotentiated.(n80) In assuming that being is becoming,
chance the verso of necessity, and will the force countering as well
as partaking in the forces of chaos, the eternity of the Nietzschean
past inevitably reverberates in the eternity of the future, and does
so in a life-affirming manner.(n81) The past of Eternal Return is thus
nostalgic, not for the past, but for the future.
As Grecistes understand it, Nietzsche's concept of historical time is
spherical. In time's "eternally recurring noon-tide," the different
temporal dimensions of man's mind form a "sphere" in which thoughts of
the past, present, and future revolve around one another, taking on
new significance as each of their moments becomes a center in relation
to the others. Within this polychronous sphere, the past does not
occur but once and then freeze behind us, nor does the future follow
according to determinants situated along a sequential course of
development. Rather, past, present, and future inhere in every moment,
never definitively superseded, never left entirely behind.(n82) "O my
soul," his Zarathustra exclaims, "I taught you to say 'today' as well
as 'one day' and 'formerly' and to dance your dance over every Here
and There and Over-There."(n83) Whenever the Janus-headed present
alters its view of these temporalities, its vision of past and future
simultaneously changes. The way one stands in the present thus
determines how everything recurs.(n84) And since every exemplary past
was once the prefiguration of a sought-after future, these different
temporalities have the potential of coming into new alignment, as they
phenomenologically flow into one another. Recollected from memory and
anticipated in will, the past, like the future, is always at hand,
ready to be re-realized.(n85) As this happens, and a particular past
is "redeemed" from the Heraclitean flux to forge a particular future,
the "it was" becomes a "thus I willed it."(n86) In this fashion, time
functions like a sphere that rolls forward, toward a future
anticipated in one's image of the past.(n87) Existence, it follows,
"begins in every instant; the ball There rolls around every Here. The
middle [i.e., the present] is everywhere. The path of eternity is
crooked."(n88) Moreover, this recurrence goes beyond mere repetition,
for the re-enactment of an archaic configuration is invariably
transfigured by its altered context. Likewise, the conventional
opposition between past and future gives way before it, as the past
becomes a harbinger of the future and the future a recurrence of the
past.
When the man of Eternal Return, who rejects the resentment and bad
conscience of the teleologists, steps fully into his moment, Nietzsche
counsels: Werde das, was Du bist! He does not advocate the
Marxist-Hegelian Aufhebung, liberal progress, or Christian salvation,
but a heroic assertion that releases him from the nihilistic or
deterministic exhaustion of the present and imbues him with the
archaic confidence to forge a future true to his higher,
life-affirming instincts. Becoming what you are thus entails both a
return and an overcoming. Through the longest memory, man ("whose
horizon encompasses thousands of years past and future") returns to
and thus transvalues the spirit of those foundational acts which
marked his ancestors' triumph over the world's chaos; at the same
time, this memory shaping his sense of history aids him in overcoming
the resentment that dissipates his will and the bad conscience that
leaves him adrift in the random stream of becoming. In the process,
the will to power implied in Eternal Return compels him to confront
what he believes to be the essential and eternal in life, imparting,
in turn, something of the essential and eternal to the "marvelous
uncertainty" of his own finite existence, as he goes beyond himself in
imitating the gods. In this way, wilful becoming defines the character
of his being, as the return of the essential and the eternal reaffirms
both his origins and the values -- the mode of existence -- he
proposes for his future. Since such a disposition is framed in the
genealogical context of a primordial origin, Eternal Return does not
foster an atomized, discontinuous duration, in which becoming is out
of joint with being, but a self-justifying coherence that unites
individual fate and collective destiny in a higher creativity--even if
this "coherence" is premised on the belief that the world lacks an
inherent significance or purpose. Based on a select appropriation of
the past that serves as a principle of value, each individual act
becomes inseparable from its historical world, just as the historical
world, product of multiple individual valuations, comes to pervade
every individual act. "Every great human being," Nietzsche writes,
"exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in
the balance again."(n89) Whenever, then, the thought of Eternal Return
puts the past and future in the balance, as the present casts its
altering light on them, it reestablishes "the innocence of becoming"
which allows the active man, the heir to past valuations, to decide
his own fate -- in contrast to the life-denigrating man of mechanical
or teleological necessity, who fixes his past and awaits his future as
if the world's course were already ordained.(n90)
The final, and today most important component of the GRECE's
historical philosophy comes from Heidegger, whose anti-modernist
thought began to influence its metapolitical project, and to supplant
that of Nietzsche in the early 1980s.(n91) Like the author of
Zarathustra, Heidegger rejects Christian/modernist metaphysics and
views man and history, being and becoming, as inseparable and
incomplete. The past is gone and will not return, but its significance
is neither left behind nor ever permanently cast. Further, when
experienced as authentic historicity, it "is anything but what is
past. It is something to which I can return again and again."(n92)
Thus, while the past belongs "irretrievably to an earlier time," it
may still exist in the form of a heritage or an identity that is able
to 'determine 'a future' 'in the present."(n93) In this spirit,
Heidegger claims "the original essence of being is time."(n94)
Unlike other species of sentient life, Heideggerian man has no
predetermined or ultimate ontological foundation: he alone is
responsible for his being and its potentiality. Indeed, he is that
being whose "being is itself an issue," for his existence is never
fixed or complete, but open and transient.(n95) He alone leads his
life and is, ipso facto, what he becomes. Man is thus compelled to
"make something of himself," and this entails that he "care" about his
Dasein. As being-in-the-world, i.e., as something specific to and
inseparable from a historical-cultural context, human Dasein is
experienced as an on-going possibility (inner, rather than contingent)
that projects itself toward a future that is "not yet actual."
Relatedly, the possibility man seeks in the world into which he is
"thrown" is conditioned by temporal conditions, for time is not only
the open horizon against which he is thrown, it is the ground on which
he realizes himself. Because time "draws everything into its motion,"
the possibility man seeks in the future (his project) is conditioned
by the present situating him and the past affecting his sense of
possibility. Dasein's projection cannot, then, but come "toward itself
in such a way that it comes back," anticipating its possibility as
something that "has been" and is still present at hand.(n96) The three
temporal dimensions (ecstases) of man's consciousness are, therefore,
elicited whenever some latent potential or possibility is
pursued.(n97) Birth and death, along with everything in between,
inhere in all his moments, for Dasein equally possesses and equally
temporalizes past, present, and future, conceived not as fleeting
now-points, but as simultaneous dimensions of mindful existence.(n98)
And though it occurs "in time," Dasein's experience of time --
temporality -- is incomparable with ordinary clock or calendar time,
which moves progressively from past to present to future, as the flow
of "nows" arrive and disappear. Instead, its temporality proceeds from
the anticipated future (whose ultimate possibility is death), through
the inheritance of the past, to the lived present. Thus, Dasein's time
is not durational, in the quantitative, uniform way it is for natural
science or "common sense," but existential, i.e., experienced
ecstatically as the present thought of an anticipated future is
"recollected" and made meaningful in terms of past references.
Because the "what has been, what is about to be, and the presence"
(the "ecstatical unity of temporality") reach out to one another in
every conscious moment and influence the way man lives his life,
Dasein is necessarily infused with the historical. "History," however,
should not to be confused with the sum of momentary actualities" which
historians fabricate into narratives; rather, it is "an acting and
being acted upon which pass through the present, which are determined
from out of the future, and which take over the past."(n99) When man
chooses a possibility, he makes present what he will be through an
appropriation of what he has been.(n100) This decision has nothing
arbitrary or willful about it, but follows from the process that
allows him to open himself to and "belong to the truth of being," as
that truth is manifested in its ecstatical unity. For the same reason,
this decision does not imply the past's triumph over the present and
future, for it is made to free thought -- and life -- from the inertia
of what already has been thought and lived.
Man's project has little to do with causal factors acting on his
existence from "outside" (what in conventional history, which
Heidegger calls Historie,(n101) is the purely factual or "scientific"
account of past events), and everything to do with the complex
ecstatical consciousness shaping his view of possibility (i.e., with
the ontological basis of human temporality, Geschichte, which
"stretches" Dasein through the past, present, and future, as Dasein is
"constituted in advance"). Because this ecstatical consciousness
allows man to anticipate and to authenticate his future, Dasein
remains constantly in play, never frozen in an external world of
essences or bound to the linearity of subject-object relations.
Further, the events historically situating it do not happen "just once
for all nor are they something universal," but represent past
possibilities that are potentially recuperable for futural endeavors.
The notion of an irretrievable past simply does not make sense for
Heidegger, for the past is always at hand. Its thought and reality are
irreparably linked: its meaning is part of man, part of his world, and
invariably changes as his project and his perspective changes. The
past, then, is not to be seen in the same way as a scientist observes
his data. It is not something independent of belief or perspective
that can be grasped wie es eigentlich gewesen. Rather, its
significance (and even its "factual" depiction) is mediated and
undergoes ceaseless revision as man lives and reflects on his lived
condition.(n102) This frames historical understanding in existential
terms, with the "facts" of past events becoming meaningful to the
degree that they belong to his "story," i.e., when what "has been"
still "is" and "can be." In Heidegger's language, projection is
premised on thrownness. While such an anti-substantialist
understanding of history is likely to appear fictitious to those
viewing it from the outside, "objectively," without participating in
the possibilities undergirding it, Heidegger argues that all history
is "experienced" in this way, for what "has been" is meaningful only
to the degree that it is recuperable for the future. As long,
therefore, as the promise of the past remains something still living,
still to come, it is not a disinterested, apriori aspect of something
no longer present. Neither is it mere prologue, a stepping stone
leading the way to a more rational future, but something with which we
have to identify if we are to resolve the challenges posed by our
project, for only knowledge of who we have been enables us to be who
we are.
Like Nietzsche, Heidegger believes that whenever Dasein "runs ahead
toward the past," the "not yet actual" opens to the inexhaustible
possibilities of what "has been" and what "can be." He also follows
Nietzsche in viewing the regenerative impulses of mythic time as
inherent to history. In thus emphasizing man's inherent temporality,
both Heidegger and Nietzsche reject the abstract universalism of the
mechanical and teleological conceptions of becoming (suitable for
measuring matter in motion or the Spirit's progression toward the
Absolute), just as they both dismiss decontextualized concepts of
being (whether in the form of the Christian soul, Descartes' ego
cogito, Marx's species man, or Rawls' disembodied individual).
Heidegger, however, differs from Nietzsche in making being, not will,
the key to temporality. Nietzsche, he claims, neither fully rejected
the metaphysical tradition he opposed nor saw beyond beings to
being.(n103) While denying modernity's faith in progress and perpetual
overcoming (the Aufhebung which implies not only transcendence, but a
leaving behind), Nietzsche's "will to power" allegedly perpetuates
modernity's transcendental impulse by positing a subjectivity that is
not "enowned" by being. As a possible corrective to this assumed
failing, Heidegger privileges notions of Andenken (the recollection
that recovers and renews tradition) and Verwendung (which is a going
beyond that, unlike Aufhebung, is also an acceptance and a deepening)
-- notions implying not simply the inseparability of being and
becoming, but becoming's role in the unfolding, rather than the
transcendence of being.(n104)
Despite these differences, the anti-metaphysical, anti-modernist aims
Nietzsche and Heidegger share makes them both apposite allies of the
GRECE's philosophical project. This is especially evident in the
importance they attribute to becoming and to origins. Heidegger, for
example, argues that whenever being is separated from becoming and
deprived of temporality, as it is in the Christian/modern logos, then
being (in this case, abstract being, rather than being-in-the-world)
becomes identified with the present, a now-point, subject to the
determinisms governing the inorganic objects of Newtonian
physics.(n105) This implicit denial of ecstatical temporality
allegedly causes the prevailing philosophical tradition to "forget"
that being exists in time, as well as space, and is not an essence
posited by God or the laws of nature.(n106) By rethinking being in
terms of human temporality and restoring it to becoming, Heidegger,
like Nietzsche, makes time the horizon of all existence, thereby
freeing the existential from the inorganic properties of space and
matter. Moreover, since it is inseparable from becoming, and since
becoming occurs in a world-with-others, being is necessarily situated
in a "context of significance" saturated with history and tradition.
As man pursues his project in terms of present worldly concerns, the
various existential modes of these concerns, as well as the "world"
itself, are informed by interpretations stemming from a history of
interpretation. Just as "every age must write its own history afresh"
(R. G. Collingwood), every man is compelled to engage his existence in
light of what has been handed down to him -- in light, in other words,
of the totality of meaning and purpose defining his world.(n107) His
future-directed project is indeed only conceivable in terms of the
world into which he is thrown. Man therefore makes his history, but
does so as a "bearer of meaning," whose convictions, beliefs, and
representations have been bestowed by the past.(n108) This
meaning-laden matrix constitutes the "t/here" [da] in Dasein, without
which being (qua being-in-the-world) is inconceivable.(n109) And
because there can be no Sein without a da, no existence without a
specific framework of meaning and purpose, man, in his ownmost nature
qua being, is inseparable from this matrix that "makes possible what
has been projected."(n110) Being is indeed inherent only in "the
enowning of the grounding of the t/here."(n111)
In contrast to inauthentic Dasein that "temporalizes itself in the
mode of a making-present which does not await but forgets," accepting
what is usually taken as the imperatives of being (but which, situated
as it is in "now time," is usually a corrupted or sclerotic
transmission confusing self-absorption in the present with the
primordial sources of life), authentic Dasein "dredges" its heritage
in order to "remember" or to retrieve the truth of primordial
possibility and to "make it productively its own.(n112) The more
authentically the potential of this "inexhaustible wellspring" is
brought to light, the more profoundly man becomes "what he is."(n113)
In this sense, authentic historicity "understands history as the
'recurrence' of the possible."(n114) Here, the "possible" is "what
does not pass," what remains, what lasts, what is deeply rooted in
oneself, one's people, one's world; it is the heritage of historical
meaning that preserves what has been posited in the beginning and what
will be true in the future.(n115) "I know," Heidegger said in 1966,
"that everything essential and everything great originated from the
fact that man.., was rooted in a tradition.(n116) By contrast, the
uprooted, detemporalized man of modern thought is deprived not only of
a means of rising above his necessarily impoverished, because isolated
self, he lacks access to the creative force of his original being and
the "greatness" -- the truth -- it portends. When Heideggerian man is
"great" and rises to the possibilities latent in his existence, he
invariably returns to his autochthonous source, resuming there a
heritage that is not to be confused with the causal properties of his
thrown condition, but with a being whose authenticity is manifested in
its becoming. "Being proclaims destiny, and hence control of
tradition."(n117) Here again, Heidegger concurs with Nietzsche,
linking man's existence with the "essential swaying of meaning" that
occurred aborigine, when his forefathers created the possibilities
that remain open for him to realize. From the presence of this
original being, enduring in tradition and constituting its truth, man
is existentially sustained and authenticated, just as a tree thrives
when rooted in its native soil.(n118)
Although a self-conscious appropriation of origins does not resolve
the problems posed by the human condition, it does free man from
present fixations with the inauthentic, and remind him of the
possibilities inherent in his existence. 119 The "first beginning"
also brings other beginnings into play, for it is the ground of all
subsequent groundings.(n120) Without a "reconquest" of Dasein's
original commencement (impossible in the linear conception, with its
irreversible and deracinating progressions), there can never be
another commencement: only in reappropriating a heritage, whose
beginning is already a completion, does man come back to himself,
achieve authenticity, and inscribe himself in the world of his own
time. Indeed, only from the store of possibility intrinsic to his
originary genesis, never from the empty abstractions postulated by the
universal reason transcending historicity, does he learn the finite,
historically-situated tasks "demanded" of him and open himself to the
possibility of his world. Commencement, accordingly, lies in front of,
never behind him, for the initial revelation of being is necessarily
anticipated in each new beginning, as each new beginning draws on its
source, accessing what has been preserved for posterity and
rediscovering being's highest possibilities. Because the "truth of
being" found in origins informs Dasein's project and causes it to
"come back to itself," what is prior invariably prefigures what is
posterior. In this sense, the past is future. History functions not as
a progression from beginning to end, but, rather, as a return
backwards, to foundations, where the possibility of being remains
ripest. This makes origins all important. They are never mere
antecedent or causa prima, as modernity's inorganic logic holds, but
"that from which and by which something is what it is and as it is
.... [They are] the source of its essence" [i.e., its ownmost
particularly] and the way truth "comes into being... [and] becomes
historical.(n121) As Benoist puts it, the "original" (unlike
modernity's novum) is not that which comes once and for all, but that
which comes and is repeated every time being unfolds in its
authenticity.(n122) In this sense, origins represent the primordial
unity of existence and essence affirmed in myth. And because origins,
as "enowned" being, denote possibility, not the purely "factual" or
"momentary" environment affecting its framework, Dasein achieves
self-constancy (authenticity) whenever it is projected on the basis of
its original inheritance, for Dasein "comes toward itself" only when
anticipating its end as an extension of its beginning.(n123) Thus,
origins designate identity and destiny, not causation (the "wherein,"
not the "wherefrom"). Relatedly, the historical-spiritual world in
which Dasein originates persists throughout life, preserving what "has
been" and providing the basis for what "continues to be," given that
origins are not "out there," but part of us and who we are. Because
origins constitute the ground of all authentic existence, "gathering
into the present what is always essential," what "will be" springs
ever anew from what "has been."(n124) This confrontation with "the
beginning of our being," as Benoist reiterates, is requisite for
"other, more original commencements."(n125)
The original repose of being that saves man from the "bustle of mere
events and machinations" is not, however, easily accessed. To return
Dasein to its ground and to "recapture the beginning of
historical-spiritual existence in order to transform it into a new
beginning" is possible only through "an anticipatory resoluteness"
that turns against the present's mindless routines.(n126) Such an
engagement (and here Heidegger's "revolutionary conservative"
opposition to the established philosophical tradition is categorical)
entails a fundamental questioning of the "rootless and self-seeking
freedoms" concealing the truth of being -- a questioning, that draws
"its necessity from the deepest history of man."(n127) For this
reason, Heidegger (like Grecistes) sees history as a "choice for
heros," demanding the firmest resolve and the greatest risk, as man,
in anxious confrontation with the heritage given him, because of his
origins, seeks to realize an indwelling possibility in the face of an
amnesic or obscurant conventionality.(n128) This heroic choice ought
not, however, to be confused with the subjectivist propensities of
liberal individualism. A heroic conception of history demands action
based on what is true and "original" in tradition, not on what is
arbitrary or wilful. Similarly, this conception is anything but
reactionary, for its appropriation of origins privileges the most
radical opening of being.
Finally, this heritage that becomes meaningful when choosing a
project, this reaching forward that reaches back, validates what
Heidegger calls "fate."(n129) In his definition, fate is the
"enowning" embrace, not causality's fatalistic acceptance, of the
heritage of culture and history into which man is thrown at birth. In
embracing this heritage, i.e., in taking over the unchosen
circumstances of his community and generation, man necessarily
identifies with the collective destiny of his people, as he grounds
his Dasein in the truth of his "ownmost particular historical
facticity."(n130) This makes individual identity inseparable from
communal identity, as being-in-the-world recognizes its
being-with-others (Mitsein) and accepts its participation in the
larger existence of its people. Against the detemporalized,
deracinated individual of liberal thought, "liberated" from organic
ties and conceived as a phenomenal "inside" separated from an
unknowable "outside," Heideggerian man achieves authenticity through a
resolute appropriation of the multi-temporal, interdependent ties he
shares with his community. He makes himself out of the immediacy of
his world, as well as what has been bequeathed to him by his
forefathers and what is to be passed on to his heirs. In so doing, he
affirms his mindful involvement in the time and space of his own
destined existence, along with the destiny of his people's existence.
The community of one's people (Mitsein) becomes, then, "the in which,
out of which, and for which history happens."(n131) And because
authentic Dasein is unavoidably Mitsein, human existence is
quintessentially social. Dasein's social nature has, though, little to
do with the thoughtless conventions of everyday life, but rather
inheres in the very texture of human Being and in that which is
ownmost to a people. For this reason, Dasein's pursuit of possibility,
even in opposing the prevailing conventions for the sake of individual
authenticity, is necessarily a "cohistorizing" with a community, a
co-historizing that converts the legacy of the far-distant past into
the basis of a meaningful future.(n132) In fact, history to Heidegger
is possible only because Dasein's individual fate--its inner necessity
-- connects with a larger social-historical necessity that struggles
against the perennial forces of decay and dissolution, as a people
seeks "to take history back unto itself." The destiny it shares with
its people is, indeed, what grounds Dasein in historicity and links it
to the heritage that determines and is determined by it.(n133)
The Future of the Past
In the present, the past and future co-exist -- as memory or
tradition, anticipation or project. It is up to man to determine how
to relate to these different temporalities. From pagan myth and the
works of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Grecistes propound a historical
philosophy that endeavors to free Europeans from the deculturating
determinisms of the Christian/ modernist project. Following Guillaume
Faye, this philosophy may be called "archeofuturism," for it posits
that there can be no destining future without an original
pre-destination.(n134) If Europeans are to regain the creative spirit
of their being and to play a historical role again, they have no
alternative but to rediscover "the original essence of their
identity." This obliges them to reappropriate their longest memories
and to face the future with the conviction of their ancestral lineage.
Like Plato's anamnesis, this recovery seeks to release them from
time's irreversibility, and make possible another beginning. If, on
the other hand, Europeans continue to forget their origins and reject
the "European idea" as their myth fondateur, archeofuturists fear that
they are likely to succumb to the "end of history," where the past
ceases to return and the future folds in on an eternal "now."(n135)
Archeofuturism's emphasis on origins should not be taken to imply that
Europeans are bound to repeat the foundational acts that defined their
forbearers, such as occurs in "cold societies"(n136) (i.e., those
primitive communities whose synchronic principles play a commanding
role in the thought of Levi-Strauss and other anti-historical
thinkers). Instead of perpetuating the identitarian vestiges of a
former golden age, archeofuturists seek only the original impetus of
archaic possibilities so as to create new ones. Indeed, identity for
them is real only when under construction, deconstruction, or
reconstruction. "We," Benoist writes, "assume a heritage in order to
continue it or to re-found it."(n137) It is, he argues, neither
rationale for present conditions nor occasion for folkloric revival,
but simply requisite for a meaningful future.(n138) Archeofuturism
posits, then, neither a return nor a repetition, but only an unfolding
of identity on the basis of the history and culture that situate it.
Unlike the denizens of Levi-Strauss' cold societies, Europeans attuned
to the Faustian possibilities of their world invent, improvise, and
make new choices that endeavor to begin the beginning again --"with
all the strangeness, darkness, insecurity that attend a true
beginning."(n139) It is, therefore, the regenerative impulse of the
Indo-European heritage, not its nostalgic re-generation, that
reconciles past and future, origin and project.(n140) Archeofuturists
feel Europeans do justice to who they are only when they look forward,
providing their heritage another opening to the future. In Heidegger's
formulation, "remembrance of [our] inception is not a flight into the
past, but readiness for what is to come."(n141) In this spirit, the
longest memory of the European past is summons, because there the
possibility of the future is disclosed in its primordial fullness, and
because there, where causality cedes to destiny, being commences anew.
As Grecistes emphasize, every great revolution envisages its project
as a return to origins.(n142)
References:
1. Zeev Sternhell is typical of those who characterize the rejection
of the right-left continuum as inherently fascist. See his Neither
Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. D. Maisel
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). For a Greciste
critique, see Gilbert Destrees, Les Non-Conformistes des annees 30:
entre doctrine et action (Paris: GRECE Pamphlet, n.d.). For an
alternate account, see Marc Crapez, Naissance de la gauche (Paris:
Eds. Michalon, 1998). Of the numerous works on the different Third Way
tendencies, the most impressive is Armin Mohler, Die konservative
Revolution in Deutschland, 1918-1932, 5th ed. (Graz: Leopold Stocker
Verlag, 1999). On the Third Way per se, see Arnaud Imatz, Par dela
droite et gauche. Permanence et évolution des ideaux et des valeurs
non-conformistes (Paris: Godefroy de Bouillon, 1996).
2. David Barney et al., La Nouvelle inquisition. Ses acteurs, ses
methodes, ses victimes: Essai sur le terrorisme intellectuel et la
police de la penseé (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1993); also De la police de
la penseé et la nouvelle inquisition: Actes du XXXLe colloque national
du GRECE (Paris: GRECE, 1998). On the censorious nature of the
contemporary intelligentsia, see Reagis Debray, Teachers, Writers,
Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, tr. by D. Macey
(London: Verso, 1981); Jean Sevilla, Le terrorisme intellectuel de
1945 a nos jours (Paris: L'Aencre, 2000); Klaus J. Groth, Die Diktatur
der Guten: Political Correctness (Munich: Herbig, 1999).
3. When discovered by the French media in the late 1970s, the GRECE
was labelled "Nouvelle Droite. This term not only lacks substance, it
is used in the most contradictory ways. See Jean-Christian Petitfils,
Le extreme droite en France (Paris: PUF, 1983), p.119. While it may be
inaccurate to translate Nouvelle Droite as New Right, since this term
is usually reserved for the union-busting, budget-cutting
Anglo-American right of the 1970s and 1980s, as represented by the
governments of Thatcher and Reagan and the theories of Friedrich Hayek
and Milton Friedman, there is no better term. Programmatically, the
American New Right was a neo-liberal tendency that sought to diminish
state intervention in the economy, dismantle the Keynesian system, and
mobilize popular electoral around populist and
Christian-fundamentalist themes. By contrast, the Nouvelle Droite(i.e.
the GRECE) is anti-liberal and anti-Christian, hostile to the
Anglo-American Right, and more concerned with culture than economics.
Typical of the prevailing inability to make these distinctions is Ruth
Levitas, ed., The Ideology of the New Right (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1986). For a Greciste's critique of the Anglo-American New Right, see
Alain de Benoist, Hayek: A Critique, in Telos 110 (Winter 1998); Alain
de Benoist, Le libéralisme contre les identités, in Aux sources de le
erreur liberale, ed. by B. Guillemaind and A. Guyot-Jeannin (Lausanne:
Le Age d'Homme, 1999); Guillaume Faye, Le libéralisme, j'a ne marche
pas," in Élements pour la civilisation europenne (hereafter Elements)
44 (January 1983). On the GRECE's project, see Alain de Benoist and
Charles Champetier, The French New Right in the Year 2000," in Telos
115 (Spring 1999). See also Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and
Equality: The European New Right (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); and
Telos 98-99 (Winter 1993-Fall 1994), devoted to The French New Right:
New Right -- New Left -- New Paradigm?
4 .Unlike their liberal critics, Lepenistes and Catholic
traditionalists are wont to accuse the Grecistes of pro-communism and
crypto-gauchisme. From a different angle, the non conformist Left also
rejects the prevailing characterizations. Some members of the PCF and
the Left/nationalist wing of the Socialist Party (most notably Reagis
Debray and Jean-Pierre Chevennement), along with independent leftists
associated with Esprit, Jean-Edern Hallier's Le Idiot internationale,
the Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (MAUSS) of
Serge Latouche and Alain Caillé, and parts of the Italian far Left,
dismiss the accusation of fascism and have, at times, collaborated
with the GRECE. Certain prominent Franco-Jewish intellectuals, such as
the late Raymond Aron and Annie Kriegel, while unsympathetic to the
GRECE's project, have similarly repudiated the accusation of
"fascism."
5. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), tr.
by P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)
6 .On several occasions, Pierre-André Taquieff has denounced the
extraordinary abasement of the reigning intelligentsia and the
terroristé vigilante tactics it employs to stifle debate. See, e.g.,
Sur la Nouvelle Droite (Paris: Descartes et Cie, 1994), pp. 314-36.
The situation, moreover, is not qualitatively different in the U.S. In
assessing the recent literature on the Right, Glen Jeansonne has
warned that: We are rapidly approaching the point at which scholarship
becomes propaganda, ceases to liberate the spirit of the individual,
and simply replaces old dogmas with new ones [i.e. with those of the
present left-liberal Establishment]. See Women of the Far Right: The
Mothers Movement and World War Two (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), p. 186.
7. Julien Freund, La Decadence (Paris: Sirey, 1984). Cf. Robert M.
Adams, Decadent Societies (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), p.
36.
8. Guillaume Faye, Le systéme a tuer les peuples (Paris: Copernic,
1981), p. 144.
9 .Alain de Benoist, La Europe sous tutelle, in Eléments 59 (Summer
1986); Philippe Malaud, La révolution libérale (Paris: Masson, 1976).
10.Alain de Benoist, Idéologies: c'est la lutte finale (1984), in La
Ligne de mire. Discours aux citoyens europeens 1972-1987 (Paris: Le
Labyrinthe, 1995); Pierre Joannon, Pavane pour une Europe difunte, in
Eléments 19 (December 1976); Alain de Benoist, Die Religion der
Menschenrechte, in Mut zur Identitat, ed. by Pierre Krebs (Struckum:
Verlag f. Ganzheitl. Forschung u. Kultur, 1988). See also Pierre
Thuillier, La grande implosion: Rapport sur lé effrondrement de
l'Occident 1999-2002 (Paris: Fayard, 1995); Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad
vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (New
York: Ballantine Books, 1996).
11 .Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. by R.
Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 37; Alain de
Benoist, Orientations pour les années décisives (Paris: Le Labyrinthe,
1982), pp. 29-31, and L'ennemi principal, in Eléments (March-April
1982); Guillaume Faye, Pour en finir avec la civilisation occidentale,
Eléments 34 (April 1980); Marco Tarchi, La colonisation subtile:
American way of life: dynamique sociale, in Le défi de Disneyland:
Actes du XXe colloque national de la revue Eléments (Paris: Le
Labyrinthe, 1987); Jordis von Lohausen, Main basse sur l'Europe, in
Eléments 84 (February 1996). Cf. Julius Evola, Americanisme et
Bolchevisme (1929), in Le visionnaire foudroye, ed. by Jean Mabire
(Paris: Copernic, 1977); Gerd Lundestad, Empire by Integration: The
United States and European Integration, 1945-1997 (Oxford:Oxford
University Press, 1998); Jacques Thibau, La France colonisé (Paris:
Flammarion, 1980).
12. Raymond Ruyer, Les cent prochains siécles: Le destin historique de
l'homme selon la Nouvelle Gnose américaine (Paris: Fayard, 1977), p.
320; Alain de Benoist, Vers l'indépendence! Pour une Europe souveraine
et libére des blocs!, in La ligne de mire, op. cit.; Guillaume Faye,
Nouveau discours a la nation européenne (Paris: Eds. Albatros, 1985)
13. Although the Grécistes acknowledge the European roots of
modernity, they claim European modernity lacked the truly universal
impulse which Americans (former colonials shallowly rooted in the
Western tradition and without a homogeneous cultural heritage) have
imparted to it -- somewhat in the way socialism was European in
origin, but not in the totalizing/universalizing manner of the
Soviets. See Guillaume Faye, Les nouveaux enjeux idéologiques (Paris:
Le Labyrinthe, 1985), p. 56. Cf. Jean Baudrillard, America,tr. by C.
Turner (London: Verso, 1988), p. 73; Eric Werner, L'avant-guerre
civile (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1998), pp. 27-29
14. Alain de Benoist points out that the English word -people is not
the equivalent of the Freench peuple or the German Volk, but closer in
meaning to gens or Leute -- i.e. terms denoting an indeterminate
plurality of not necessarily related individuals. There is, moreover,
no English equivalent for patrie, and home for the American is where
-he hangs his hat. See Démocraie: Le probléme (Paris: Le Labyrinthe,
1985), pp. 30 and 40; and Robert de Herte(Alain de Benoist) and
Hans-Jürgen Nigra (Giorgio Locchi), Il était une fois l'Amérique, in
Nouvelle Ecole 27-28 (January 1976). See also Herman Keyserling,
America Set Free(New York: Harper and Bros., 1929), and Robert Aron
and Arnaud Dandieu, Le cancer américain(Paris: Rieder, 1931), two
works informing much of the GRECE's anti-Americanism. Cf. Jacob
Burkhardt, Reflections on History, tr. by M. D. Hottinger
(Indianapolis: Liberty Classics,1979), p. 39; Stendhal et les
Etats-Unis de Amérique, in Etudes et recherches 4-5 (January 1977); J.
G. Jatras, Rainbow Fascism at Home and Abroad, in Chronicles(June
1998).
15. The vocation of the human race, they [Americans] believe, is
American. See Thomas Molnar, The Emerging Atlantic Culture (New York:
Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. 22. In this vein, Robert Kennedy
spoke of America's right to the spiritual direction of the planet;
George H. W. Bush, in announcing the New World Order, proclaimed the
inexorability of America's global leadership; and William J. Clinton,
as the latest exemplar of his nation's moral superiority, designated
America as the world's "indispensable nation." See Claude Julien, "
America's Empire, tr. by R. Bruce (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), p.
31; Pierre-Marie Gallois, Le soleil d'Allah aveugle
l'Occident(Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1995), p. 25; and Zbigniew
Brzezinski, The Great Chessboard: American Primacy and Its
Geostrategic Imperatives(New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 195. See
also Jean Cau, Le triomphe de Mickey, in Etats-Unis: Danger -- Actes
du XXVe colloque national du GRECE(Paris: GRECE, 1992); Henri Gobard,
La guerre culturelle: logique du désastre(Paris: Copernic, 1979), pp.
62-92. As to America's new-found mania for multiculturalism, it has
less to do with cultural sensitivity than with globalist and
managerial imperatives hostile to all forms of indigenous culture. See
Paul Edward Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the
Managerial State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p.
103. Not unrelatedly, the GRECE's anti-Americanism is accompanied by a
similar coolness to the English. The only Anglophones contributing to
its cultural arsenal have been the Irish, whose lovers and dancers
long incurred the wrath of what W. B. Yeats called Cromwell's
murderous crew -- i.e. the Puritan-mercantile forces of the
Anglo-American world.
16. Benoist, Vers l'indépendence, op. cit. See also Alain de Benoist,
Europe, Tiers monde,méme combat(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980); Pierre
Bérard, Ces cultures queon assassine, La cause des peuples: Actes du
XVe collogue national du GRECE(Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1982)To the
degree they resemble Russian, Indian, and Chinese critics of America's
universalist pretensions, the Grécistes are a good example of what
Samuel P. Huntington refers to as "the mainenemy" in The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order(New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1996).
17. Quoted in The Nature of the Right: American and European Politics
and Political Thought since 1789, ed. by Roger Eatwell and Noél
Sullivan (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), p.181. See also Jean Cau,
Discours de la décadence(Paris: Copernic, 1978), pp. 176 and 188;
Alain de Benoist, Quest-ce que l'identité: Réflexions sur un
concept-clef, in Eléments (n.d. [Spring 1993?]); Pierre Krebs, Das
Thule-Seminar: Geistesgegenwart der Zukunft (Horn: Burkhart Weecke
Verlag, 1994), pp. 23-24. Cf. Richard Bessel, "European Society in the
Twentieth Century," in The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern
Europe, T. C. W. Blanning, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996), pp. 252
18. Jean Varenne,Le héritage indo-européen, in Eléments 40 (Winter
1982); Benoist, Orientations pour les années décisives, op. cit. pp.
52-53; Pierre Krebs, Im Kampf um das Wesen(Horn: Burkhart Weecke
Verlag, 1997), pp. 16-20; Faye, Le systéme a tuer les peuples, op.
cit.,pp. 164-77; Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, tr. by R.
J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 63.
Cf. Hellmut Diwald, Mut zur Geschichte(Bergisch Gladbach: LoGbbe
Verlag, 1983), p. 8.
19. By its very nature, culture aspires toward self-sufficient unity
in its representational modes. Because its centripetalism tolerates
only limited amounts of the foreign, culture is inherently
exclusive.This makes its members part of a living whole, distinct from
others. See Alain de Benoist, Culture, in Nouvelle Ecole 25-26 (Winter
1974-75); Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of
Our Time (Bryn Mawr: Intercollegiate Studies, 1995), pp. 3-21; Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Le regard eloignée (Paris: Plon, 1983), pp. 24-30. Given
culture's inherent exclusiveness, the GRECE's critics consider its
culturalism a sophisticated form of traditional racism -- in that it
allegedly replaces notions of biological inferiority with those of
cultural difference -- little concerned that culturalism and racism
partake of radically different realms. For a typical example of this
confusion, see Alain Bihr, Le Actualité de un archaísme: La pensée de
extréme droite et la crise de la modernité (Paris: Eds. Page Deux,
1998), pp. 15-40; see also Pierre-André Taguieff, Le néo-racisme
différentialiste. Sur le ambiguité de une evidence commune et ses
effets pervers, in Langage et Société 34 (December 1985). These
critics also dismiss the GRECE's advocacy of le droit a ladifférence
and la cause des peuples. See Alain de Benoist, Le droit a la
différence, and Gilbert Destrées, Différentialisme contre racisme, in
Eléments 77 (n.d. [Spring 1993?]). Ironically, the GRECE's
culturalism is profoundly equalitarian and hence modernist, stemming
from the Enlightenment's programmatic affirmation of the equality of
all peoples and cultures - an affirmation which Grécistes
philosophically oppose but tend to accept in cultural practice.
Relatedly, Paul Piconne links the GRECE's critique of left-liberal
anti-racism to the critique of anti-Semitism made by Max Horkheimer
and Theodore W. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. by John
Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972 [1944]). By today's
hyper-liberal standards, Horkheimer's and Adorno's defense of Jewish
identity, like the culturalism of the French New Right, would be
considered racist, because it opposes a homogenizing universalism
threatening particularisms with extermination. See Confronting the
French New Right, in Telos 98-99 (Winter 1993-Fall 1999).
20. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci,ed. and
tr. by Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (New York: International Publishers,
1971), pp. 3-13; Pour un Gramscisme de droite: Actes du XVIe colloque
national du GRECE (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1982); Pierre Vial, Die
Weltbewegende Kraft der Ideen, in Elemente für de europaische
Wiedergeburt 2 (January 1987).
21. For the relationship between conservatism, traditionalism, and
Christianity, see Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner, ed., Antichristliche
Konservative: Religionkritik von rechts (Munich: Herderb Gecherei,
1982).
22. Alain de Benoist, La religion de l'Europe,in Eléments 36 (Fall
1980); Louis Rougier, Celse contre les chretiens, with an introduction
by Alain de Benoist (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1997). Cf. Prudence Jones
and Nigel Pennick, History of Pagan Europe (New York: Barnes and
Noble, 1999), pp. 59-77. For a critique of the GRECE's
anti-Christianism, see Daniel Cologne, Nouvelle droite et subversion
(Paris: Collection Métapolitique et Tradition, 1979); Georges Hourdin,
Le nouvelle droite et les chrétiens (Paris: Eds. du Cerf, 1980).
Grécistes acknowledge Christianity's syncretistic character: it
absorbed many traditional pagan elements and ultimately adapted itself
to the Indo-European world view. Yet, they claim it never fully
conquered Europe, and that the greatest European achievements, whether
in the form of the Gothic Cathedrals or the music of Bach, were
essentially pagan in inspiration. See Patrick de Plunkett, Analyses,
in Nouvelle Ecole 27-28 (January 1976); Pierluigi Locchi, La musique,
le mythe, Wagner et moi, in Etudes et recherches 3 (June 1976).
Despite their recognition of its syncretistic character, the GRECE's
anti-Christianism (or, more accurately, its anti-Catholicism)
emphasizes Christianity's Hebraic rather than European roots and
underplays the powerful Europeanizing influences exerted by
traditional Catholicism, which, unlike its post-Vatican II counterpart
or its Protestant offshoots, bore little resemblance to the oriental
forms of early Christianity. Cf. James C. Russell, The Germanization
of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Given the GRECE's implicit
Islamophilism, its strident anti-Catholicism seems curiously
inconsistent, if not duplicitous, especially considering Islam's more
faithful distillation of Near Eastern monotheism. See Dossier: Les
Arabes, in Eléments 53 (Spring 1985); Alexander del Valle, Islamisme
et Etats-Unis: Une alliance contre Europe , 2nd ed. (Lausanne: L'Age
d'Homme, 1999), p. 53; and Guillaume Faye, La colonisation de
l'Europe: Discours vrai sur le immigration et l'Islam (Paris:
L'Aencre, 2000), pp. 73-85, 329-36.
23. Alain de Benoist, Les idées a la endroit (Paris: Hallier, 1979),
pp.167-84. Cf. Burton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making
of the Christian Myth (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1995), pp.
19-31; Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, tr. by W. Trask
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vol. 2, p. 413.
24. Louis Pauwels, Comment devient-on ce que le on est? (Paris: Stock,
1978), p. 145. Cf. Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From
Paganism to Christianity (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), pp. 30-31; Egon
Haffner, Der Humanitaraismus und die Versuch seiner FÀberwindung bei
Nietzsche, Scheler und Gehlen (Weigrzburg: Konigshausen u. Neumann,
1988), p. 75.
25. Guillaume Faye, La problématique moderne de la raison ou la
querelle de la rationalité, in Nouvelle Ecole 41 (November 1984);
Louis Rougier, Du paradis a la utopie(Paris: Copernic, 1979), p. 60.
Cf. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1950).
26. Louis Dumont, La genése chrétienne de l'individualisme moderne, in
Le Débate 15(September 1981); Pierre Bérard, Louis Dumont:
Anthropologie et modernité, in Nouvelle Ecole 39 (Fall 1982). Also
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality,
tr. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997); Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde (Paris: Gallimard,
1985), p. 77.
27 . Tomislav Sunic, Against Equality and Democracy ,op. cit., p. 74.
28. Thomas Molnar and Alain de Benoist, Le éclipse du sacré : discours
et réponses(Paris: La Table Ronde, 1986), pp. 131-47; Sigrid Hunke,
Was Tresgt aber den Untergang des Zeitalters?, in Elemente für die
europaische Wiedergeburt 1 (July 1986).
29. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in
Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 51-52; Alain
de Benoist, Le empire intérieur(Paris: Fata Morgana, 1995), pp. 32-38;
Guillaume Faye, Heidegger et la question du depassement du
Christianisme, in Nouvelle Ecole 39 (Fall 1982).
30. Sigrid Henke, Europas andere Religion: Die Àeberwindung der
religiosen Krise (Dusseldorf: Econ Verlag, 1969), pp. 27-39.
31. Benoist, Le empire intérieur, op. cit., p. 31.
32. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (New York: Viking, 1931), p. 59.
(Emphasis in the original, as in all subsequent uses of it).
33. Alain de Benoist, Sacré païen et déscralisation judéo-chrétienne
du Monde, in Quelle religion pour le Europe, ed. by Démetre Theraios
(Paris: Georg, 1990). In Catholicism, especially among its former
peasant adherents, this progressive sense was mitigated by liturgical
time, whose sacred calendar annually repeated the historical time of
Jesus. Liturgical time has, though, like other pagan encrustations,
been largely demoted in the modern church. See Alain de Benoist, Le
nouvelle calendrier liturgique, in Nouvelle Ecole 12 (March-April
1970).
34. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, tr. by W. Trask (New York: Harper
and Row, 1963), pp. 134-35. Cf. Karl Lewith, Meaning in History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Oscar Cullmann, Christ
and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, tr.
by F. V. Filson (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). The teleological is
by no means foreign to the Ancients; it is, for example, central to
Aristotle's thought. But Aristotle, like Plato and Socrates before
him, anticipated the Christian/modernist metaphysics opposed by
Grécistes-- Christianity being, in Nietzsche's phrase, a "Platonism of
the masses." The Indo-European world view that is lost and lamented
here, to use Greek examples, refers to the age of Homer, the
pre-Socratics, and the tragedians.
35. Rougier, Du paradis a la utopie, op. cit.,p. 125; Pierre Chassard,
La philosophie de l'histoire dans la philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris:
GRECE, 1975), pp. 26-40. See also Carl Schmitt, Political Theology,
tr. by G. Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 36-52; Martin
Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. by P. Emard and K.
Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)
36. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit.,
37. The social revolution . . . cannot draw its poetry from the past,
but only from the future." Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (1852), in Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1969), vol. 1, p. 400. Like those adhering to the biblical, liberal,
and Freudian traditions, Marxists conceive of origins in purely
negative terms: the long detour that began with the abandonment of
primitive communism (analogous to the expulsion from Eden/the natural
state/the patricidal act). Hence the Marxist effort to escape history.
38. Alain de Benoist, "Une bréve histoire de l'idée de progrés," in
Nouvelle Ecole 51 (2000).
39. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. by W.
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), Essay I, 3
40. Pierre Vial, Servir la cause des peuples, in La cause des
peuples,op. cit.,p. 67; Guillaume Faye, Warum Wir Kampfen, in Elemente
für die europaische Wiedergeburt 1(July 1986).
41. Pierre Vial, Aux sources de l'Europe, in Eléments 50 (Spring
1984); Christian Lahalle, Le peuplement de la Gréce et du basin Àegeen
aux hautes époques, in Nouvelle Ecole 43 (December 1985). A recent,
though dilettantish variation of the "ex oriente lux" thesis appears
in Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiactic Roots of Classical
Civilization, 2 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1987-91).
42. Théme central, in Nouvelle Ecole 17 (March-April 1972); Krebs, Das
Thule-Seminar, op. cit., p. 88.
43. Vial, Aux sources de l'Europe, in op. cit.; André Cherpillod, La
écriture en Europe a la époque préhistorique,in Nouvelle Ecole 50
(1998). Also Colin Renfrew, Before Civilization: The Radiocarbon
Revolution and Prehistoric Europe (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1979); Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe,
6500-3500 B.C. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982); Richard Rudgley, The
Lost Civilization of the Stone Age (New York: The Free Press, 1998);
Chris Scarre, Exploring Prehistoric Europe (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998); Barry Cunliffe, ed., Prehistoric Europe: An Illustrated
History(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). These recent
discoveries had long been suspected; see Geoffrey Bibby, The Testimony
of the Spade (New York: Merton, 1957).
44. The evidence should, but does not necessarily discredit the old
diffusionist view. For example, J. M. Roberts, in a typical display of
the "ex lux oriente" influence among AngloSaxon historians,
acknowledges the recent evidence that puts Europe's civilizational
origins on a par with Near Eastern ones, yet nonetheless roots
Europe's identity in the Holy Lands. See A History of Europe (New
York: Allen Lane, 1996), pp. 12-20, 54.
45. Itinéraire, in Nouvelle Ecole 21-22 (Winter 1972-73); Marco
Tarchi, Prolégomones a la unification de l'Europe, in Crepuscule des
blocs, aurore des peuples: XXIIIe colloque national du GRECE (Paris:
GRECE, 1990); Charles Champetier, Anti-utilitarisme: de nouveau
clivages, in Eléments 74 (Spring 1992); Alain de Benoist, Les
Indo-Européens: A la recherche du foyer d'origine, in Nouvelle Ecole
49 (1997). Grécistes do not view the Indo-Europeans as a racial group,
but solely as a linguistic-cultural one. The question of race,
contrary to the claims of their critics, is irrelevant here, for all
the peoples of archaic Europe, whether Indo-European or
non-Indo-European, were Europid ("white"). What is at stake is
cultural identity, not biology, though liberal universalists
(recognizing "humanity" only as an abstract zoological concept) have
had trouble following the logic of this distinction. See Alain de
Benoist, Comment peut-on étre païen? (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981)
p.174; Claude Lévi Strauss, Race et historie (Paris: Denoe, 1987
[1953]), p. 23. Moreover, given the GRECE's opposition to the former
Soviet Union and its on-going opposition to the US, it rejects all
notions of racial unity with the so-called "white world." See
Guillaume Faye, Il ne a pas de "Monde Blanc", in Eléments 34 (April
1980). This distinction between race and culture would seem, however,
to concede too much to the dominant ideology. For a trenchant critique
of the implicit equalitarianism undergirding the GRECE's culturalism,
see Guillaume Faye, La colonisation de l'Europe, op. cit.,pp. 74-84, a
work that not only revises Faye's earlier position, but one that has
brought down the state's judicial terror on this most eminent of
former Grécistes.
46. Benoist, Les Indo-Européens, op. cit.
47. On Georges Dumézil, see C. Scott Littleton, The New Comparative
Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges
Dumézil, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University " of California Press,
1982). See also Jean-Claude Riviere, ed., Georges Dumézil en la
découverte des Indo-Européens(Paris: Copernic, 1979); Jean Varenne, Le
héritage de Georges Dumézil, in Eléments 62 (Spring 1987). For a
critique of his work, see Wouter W. Belier, Decayed Gods: Origin and
Development of Georges Dumézil's idéologie Tripartite(Leiden: Brill,
1991).
48. C. Scott Littleton, Je ne suis pas . . . structuraliste: Some
Fundamental Differences between Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss, in Journal
of Asian Studies 34 (November 1974).
49. On the tripartite ideology, see Georges Dumézil, La idéologie
tripartite des Indo-Européens (Brussels: Latomus, 1958); Jean Haudry,
La religion cosmique des Indo-Européens (Milan: Arché, 1987); J. P.
Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and
Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), pp. 130-34.
50. Jean-Claude Riviére, Pour un lecture de Dumézil, in Nouvelle Ecole
21-22 (Winter 1972-1973); Jean Maibre, Les dieux mandits: Récits de
mytholgie nordique (Paris: Copernic, 1978), pp. 21-27.
51. J. H. Griswald, Trois perspectives medievales, in Nouvelle Ecole
21-22 (Winter 1972-1973). Cf. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal
Society Imagined, tr. by A. Goldhammer(Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980).
52. Georges Dumézil répond aux questions de Nouvelle Ecole, in
Nouvelle Ecole 10(September 1969); Itinéraire, in Nouvelle Ecole
21-22; Jean Haudry, Die indoeuropaische Tradition als Wurzel unserer
Identität, in Mut zur Identität, op. cit. The non political Dumézil
paid dearly for his discoveries. In the 1980s, a full-scale witchhunt
was launched against him, initiated by UCLA historian Carlo Ginsburg,
who, in Mythologie germanique et nazisme. Sur un ancien livre de
Georges Dumézil, in Annales ESC (July 1985), accused him, in so many
words, of Nazism. The charge was then taken up by Libération and made
the rounds of several politically-correct Parisian journals. The
falseness of the charge and the readiness of certain intellectuals to
use it to smear one of the century's great scholars, because his work
happened to lend credence to non-conformist ideas, has been fully
documented in Didier Eribon, Faut-il bréler Dumézil? Mythologie,
science et politique (Paris: Flammarion,1992). On the "fascist"
epithet as a political ploy for discrediting new ideas, see Hans
Helmuth Knutter, Die Faschismus Keule. Das letzte Aufgebot der
deutschen Linken(Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1993). On the living past, see
R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978), pp. 96-98.
53. Alain de Benoist, La ordre,in Etudes et recherches 4-5 (January
1977); Jean Haudry,Linguistique et tradition indo-européenne, in
Nouvelle Ecole 45 (Winter 1988-89).
54. See Benoist, La religion de l'Europe, op. cit.; Alain de Benoist
and La Commission Traditions et Communauté, Les Traditions d'Europe,
2nd ed. (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1996). More generally, see David L.
Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses(New
York: Harper and Row, 1974); and R. Faber and R. Schlesier, eds., Die
Restauration de Àtter. Antike Religion und Neo-Paganismus(Würzburg:
Konigshausen u. Neuman, 1986).
55. Benoist, L'empire intérieur, op. cit.,p. 9; Jacques Marlaud, Le
renouveau païen dans la pensée francaise(Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1986),
p. 24; Giogio Locchi, Die Zeit der Geschichte, in Elemente für die
europaische Wiedergeburt 1 (July 1986).
56. So claims not only the numinous school of comparative mythology
(Mircea Eliade, Walter F. Otto, Jean-Pierre Vernant et al., to whom
the GRECE is close), but also structuralists around Claude
Lévi-Strauss and neo-Kantians associated with Ernst Cassirer. See Kurt
Hubner, La recherche sur le mythe: une révolution encore méconnue, in
Krisis 6 (October 1990). On logical unphilosophical character and its
problematic principle of identity, see Heidegger, Introduction to
Metaphysics, op. cit.,pp. 21-36, 170-79, and 165-90; Friedrich
Nietzsche,The Gay Science, tr. by W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage,
1974), 111; and Alain de Benoist,Les fausses alternatives, in La ligne
de mire, op. cit.
57. Itinéraire, in Nouvelle Ecole 19 (September 1969); Paul Veyne, Did
the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive
Imagination, tr. by P. Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988); Nietzsche, The Gay Science, op. cit., 344. Even science, whose
knowledge of nature is similarly mediated, is a form, however
sophisticated, of mythic thought. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1970), in which the problem of competing paradigms is posed ultimately
as an aesthetic one, based less on the procedures of normal science
than on culturally-shaped appeals. Cf. J. McKim Malville, The
Fermenting Universe: Myths of Eternal Change (New York: Seabury Press,
1981); Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? (1929), in Basic
Writings, tr. by D. F. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). At any
rate, mythos and logos were originally interchangeable terms. See
Benoist, L'empire intérieur, op. cit. pp. 9, 54.
58. Roger Caillois, Le homme et le sacré, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard,
1950), pp. 132-36.
59. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, tr. by P. Mairet (New
York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 14-15.
60. Kurt Hübner, Die Wahrheit des Mythos (Munich: Beck, 1985), pp.
257-70; Alain de Benoist, Un mot en quatre lettres, in Eléments 95
(June 1999).
61. Alain de Benoist, Les mythes européens (1984), in Le grain de
sable: Jalons pour une fin de siécle (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1994);
Benoist, Les idées a la endroit, op. cit., pp. 115-21.
62. Gilbert Durand, Les structures anthropologiques de l'imaginnaire,
10th ed.(Paris: Dunod,1984), pp. 323-24; Julien Freund, Une
interprétation de Georges Sorel,in Nouvelle Ecole 35 (Winter
1979-1980).
63. Benoist, Le empire intérieur, op. cit., pp. 14-15. Cf. José Ortega
y Gasset, Historical Reason, tr. by P. W. Silver (New York: Norton,
1984), pp. 17-21.
64. Alain de Benoist, Réflexion sur l'identité nationale, in Une
certain idée de la France: Actes du XIXe colloque national du GRECE
(Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985).
65. Marlaud, Le renouveau païen, op. cit., p. 30; Vial, Servir la
cause des peuples, op. cit.
66. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, tr. by W. Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage Books, 1967), 23; Marlaud, Le renouveau païen, op.
cit., p. 29.
67. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion,
tr. by W. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1959), p. 68.
Also Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free
Spirits, tr. by M. Faber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1984), 96.
68. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?, op. cit.,pp. 3,
14-15; Les Grecs croyaient " leurs mythes: entretien avec Jean-Pierre
Vernant, in Krisis 6 (October 1990).
69. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. by W. Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage, 1966), 56; The Gay Science, op. cit., 285 and 341; Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, tr. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961),
The Vision and the Riddle and The Convalescent. And Also Phillippe
Granarolo, le individu éternal: La expérience nietzschéenne de la
éternité (Paris: Vrin, 1993), p. 37. Cf. M. C. Sterling, Recent
Discussions of Eternal Recurrence: Some Critical Comments,in Nietzsche
Studien 6 (1977).
70. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, op. cit., 24; Benoist, Les idées
a la endroit, op. cit., p. 74; Armin Mohler, Devant l'histoire, in
Nouvelle Ecole 27-28 (Winter 1974-1975).
71. Paul Chassard, Nietzsche: Finalisme et histoire (Paris: Copernic,
1977), p. 174; Clément Rosset, La force majeure (Paris: Minuit, 1983),
pp. 87-89; Jean-Pierre Martin, Myth et cosmologie, in Krisis 6
(October 1990).
72 . Granarolo, L'individuél éternal, op. cit., pp. 34-52.
73. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. by W. Kaufmann and R.
J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 1032.
74. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, op. cit., 706; Chassard, La
philosophie de l'histoire dans la philosophie de Nietzsche, op. cit.,
pp. 114-18
75. Eugene Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie (Stuttgard: Kohlhammer, 1960),
pp. 75-92
76. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, op. cit., 639.
77. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the Vision and the Riddle,
op. cit. Origins for Nietzsche do not bear the timeless essence of
things, but rather the unencumbered expression of their original
being, the "Herkunft" that serves as "Erbschaft." See Nietzsche,
Genealogy of Morals, Essay II, 12; The Gay Science, op. cit., 83. Cf.
Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,in Language,
Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,tr. by D. F.
Boucard and S. Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
78. Nietzsche, Will to Power, op. cit., 552; also 70; Giorgio Locchi,
Ethologie et sciences sociales, in Nouvelle Ecole 33 (Summer 1979).
79. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and
History, tr. by W. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1965), pp. 36, 85-86, 117; also Eliade,The Sacred and the Profane, op.
cit., pp. 108.
80. Chassard, La philosophie de l'histoire dans la philosophie de
Nietzsche, op. cit., pp. 121-22.
81. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, op. cit. 109.
82. Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des idées
contemporaires(Paris: Copernic, 1979), pp. 298-99.
83. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the Great Longing, op. cit.
[Translation modified.]
84. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, op. cit., 233; Martin Heidegger,
Nietzsche: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. D. F. Krell (San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 245; Benoist, Les idées a la
endroit, op. cit.,pp. 38-40.
85. Alain de Benoist, Fondements nominalistes d'une attitude devant la
vie, in Nouvelle Ecole 33 (June 1979); Itineraire, in Nouvelle Ecole
24 (Winter 1973-1974).
86. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of Redemption, op. cit.
87. Giorgio Locchi, L'histoire, in Nouvelle Ecole 27-28 (January
1976); and, from the same author, Nietzsche, Wagner e il mito
sovrumanista (Rome: Akropolis, 1982).
88. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Convalescent, op. cit.
89. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, op. cit., 34.
90. Granarolo, L'individu éternal, op. cit., pp. 133-44; Itinéraire,
in Nouvelle Ecole 15 (March-April 1971). Cécile Guignard-Vanuxem
probably best captures the civilizational significance of these
different concepts of time in Vercingetorix, le défi des
druides(Paris: Eds. Cheminements, 1997).
91. Lectures de Heidegger, in Nouvelle Ecole 37 (April 1982). For
those inclined to follow the fraudulent argumentation of Victor Farias
and approach Heidegger as pre-eminently a Nazi thinker, they might
consult Silvio Vietta, Heidegger, critique du national-socialisme et
du technique, tr. by J. Ollivier (Paris: Pardés, 1993); Jean-Pierre
Blanchard, Martin Heidegger, philosophe incorrect (Paris: L'Aencre,
1997); and Alexander Schwan, Politische Philosophie im Denken
Heideggers, 2nd ed. (Opladen, 1989).
92. Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, tr. by W. McNeill (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), p. 19.
93. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. by J. Macquarrie and E.
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 79.
94. Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, op. cit., 13b.
95. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 79; Benoist, Un mot en quatre
lettres, op. cit.
96. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 65.
97. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 69 and 72; Benoist, Comment
peut-on étre païen? op. cit., p. 26.
98. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, tr. by J. Stambaugh (New
York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 11-15; Benoist, La religion de
l'Europe, op. cit.
99. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 44.
100. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 65.
101. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 72, 76, and 79. The
distinction between the selective character of memory, in its function
as a people's cult of remembrance, and the scientific impulse of
history, as it breaks with moral or ideological judgement, is
emphasized in Alain de Benoist's Communisme et nazisme: 25 réflexions
sur le totalitarisme au XXe siécle(Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1998), pp.
9-13. In pointing out that memory demands affiliation and history
distance, Benoist sides with history whenever the argument turns on
the "facts" -- the objective truth -- of an issue. This, however, is a
point whose problematic relation to an identitarian philosophy of
history Grécistes have failed to clarify. As Heidegger argues, the
objective truth" of the professional historian is usually an evasion
of historical understanding insofar as this truth based on scientific
methods and rules of procedures is mainly an expression of modernity's
calculative logic: i. e. the factual explanation of "what is" is not
necessarily the same as a knowing understanding -- or, said
differently, what is scientifically correct may not be
historically/ontologically true. Although Heidegger's distinction
between correctness (in the sense of correspondence) and truth (as
enowning being) is relatively unambivalent (see Contributions to
Philosophy, op. cit., 76), Benoist often marshalls the "facts" against
the selective memory of those with whom he polemicizes, assuming that
memory based on distortion, ignorance, or repression is, ipso facto,at
odds with history, and that "facts" and "history" ought to be
understood in the conventional, i.e., objectivist, sense. While this
suggest that the GRECE's historical philosophy is not to be confused
with an identitarian solipsism, it still leaves unanswered the
question of how "truth" relates to fact. Heidegger and the
anti-empiricist tradition holds that truth, expressing being which is
neither subjective nor objective but a "happening unfolding" in the
world, alone orders "fact." Benoist, though, seems to hedge his
argument here, conflating fact and truth in ways that would be
unacceptable to Heidegger. This is especially evident in the various
articles devoted to "Mémoire et histoire" in L'écume et les galet: 10
ans d'actualité vue d'ailleurs(Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 2000).
102. Robert Steuckers, Conception de l'homme et Révolution
conservatrice: Heidegger et son temps,in Nouvelle Ecole 37 (April
1982); Charles Champetier, Homo Consumans: Archéologie du don et de la
dépense(Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1994)p. 98.
103. Martin Heidegger, The Word of Nietzsche, in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, tr. by W. Lovitt (New York:
Harper and Row, 1977).
104. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, tr. by J. R. Synder
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 51-64.
105. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 5; Miller, The New
Polytheism, op. cit., p. 48.
106. Heidegger, The Concept of Time, op. cit., pp. 12-13; Guillaume
Faye and Patrick Rizzi, Pour en finir avec le nihilisme,in Nouvelle
Ecole 37 (Spring 1982).
107. R. G. Collingwood, The Philosophy of History(1930), in Essays in
the Philosophy of History, ed. by William Debbins (New York: Garland,
1985), p. 138. Heidegger, though, goes a step farther than
Collingwood: each generation must not only confront the heritage of
its past, but appropriate what it finds essential in it in order to
establish the upon which it projects its being. See Heidegger, Being
and Time, op. cit., 65.
108. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 5.
109. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 29; Contributions to
Philosophy,op. cit., 120 and 255. To see Dasein as pure existence,
stripped of all security and standing,causes many commentators to
misread Heidegger. For example, Karl Löwith, The Political
Implications of Heidegger's Existentialism (1946), in New German
Critique 45 (Fall 1988).
110. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 65
111. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 92.
112. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 6 and 79.
113. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 74; Itinéraire, in Nouvelle
Ecole 17 (March-April 1972).
114. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 75.
115. What is it is not current events and neither is it what is
present right now. What is it is what approaches from what has-been
and, as this, is what approaches.The inability to discern this
difference between now and what is is linked to the present era's
flight from history. See Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason,tr.
by R. Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 80-81.
The development of modern historical studies and what Nietzsche
facetiously terms the historical sense has, relatedly, occurred in a
period that has almost entirely divested the past of any realÀ meaning
and made a hedonistic cult out of the moment.
116. Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel Interview with Martin
Heidegger(1966), in The Heidegger Controversy,ed. by Richard Wolin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 106; also Heidegger,
Being and Time, op. cit., 74.
117. Martin Heidegger, The Onto-theo-logical Nature of
Metaphysics(1957), in Essays in Metaphysics, tr. by K. F. Leidecker
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), p. 44; Contributions to
Philosophy, op. cit., 91.
118. Eliade, Myth and Reality, op. cit., p. 92.
119. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 76.
120. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 3 and 20.
121. Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art(1935), in Basic
Writings, pp. 149Ü and 187; Molnar and Benoist, Le éclipse du sacré,
op. cit.,p. 215. In Diwald's epic history of the German nation, the
"narrative" begins with the Yalta Conference of 1945 and "runs"
backwards" to the founding of the first Reich, in what is the most
extraordinary historiographical illustration of this key Heideggerian
idea. See Helmut Diwald, Geschichte der Deutschen (Frankfurt/M:
Ullstein, 1978).
122. Benoist, le empire intérieur, op. cit., p. 18.
123. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 65; Benoist, Le empire
intérieur, op. cit. p. 17.
124. Martin Heidegger, The Anaximander Fragment(1946), in Early Greek
Thinking, tr. by D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper
Collins, 1984), p. 18.
125. Benoist, La religion de l'Europe, op. cit.
126. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 39; Eliade,
The Sacred and the Profane, op. cit., pp. 31 and 95; Benoist, La
religion de lEurope, op. cit.
127. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit.,p. 6;
Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 117 and 184.
128. Faye, Les nouveaux enjeax idéologiques, op. cit.,pp. 68 and 78;
Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 74.
129. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 74
130. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 11.
131. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 152.
132. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 74.
133. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 74; Benoist, L'empire
intérieur, op. cit., pp. 23-26. This merger of individual fate and
collective destiny, it might be noted, intends not the sublation of
the individual ego, but rather its enrootment and growth.
134. "Archeofuturism" is a term that Grécistes have yet to embrace.
See Guillaume Faye, L'Archéofuturisme(Paris: L'Aencre, 1998), a
landmark work of the new European nationalism.
135. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, op. cit., Prologue, 5; cf.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, National Interest 16 (Summer
1989).
136. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthrologie structurale(Paris: Plon, 1973),
ch. 2. Cf. Giorgio Locchi, Histoire et société: critique de
Lévi-Strauss,in Nouvelle Ecole 17 (Match 1972). Benoist has
accordingly called America a cold society, frozen in an eternal
present, without a past or a future. See Herte and Nigra, Il a était
un fois l'Amerique, op. cit.,p. 92
137. Benoist, Les idées a l'endroit, op. cit., p. 41; Robert de Herte,
Le retour des dieux, Eléments 27 (Winter 1978).
138. Alain de Benoist, Recours au paganisme, in Dieu est-il morte en
Occident?, ed. by Daniéle Masson (Paris: Eds. Guy Trédaniel, 1998). In
a related vein, Michel Marmin points out that Yeats, Joyce, Synge, and
other luminaries of the Celtic Twilight -- arguably the greatest of
all identitarian movements -- attempted no return to Eden or recourse
to provincialism. Joyce, for example, in replenishing Irish roots . .
. sought to nurture such thick and prodigious forests in Ireland that
their shadows would be cast upon the whole world. See Les piége des
folklore,in La cause des peuples, op. cit. See also Philip O'Leary,
The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881-1921: Ideology and
Innovation University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1994).
139. Alain de Benoist, Horizon 2000: Trois entretiens(Paris: GRECE
Pamphlet, 1996), p. 15; Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, op.
cit., p. 39; Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 5.
140.Whoever wants to go very far back . . . into the first beginning
-- must think ahead to and carry out a great future. Heidegger,
Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 23.
141. Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts, tr. by G. E. Aylesworth
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 17. Cf. also Russell
Kirk, The Question of Tradition (1989), The Paleoconservatives: New
Voices of the Old Right, ed. by Joseph Scotchie (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 1999).
142. Maistra, Renaissance de l'Occident? (Paris: Plon, 1979), p. 295.
The GRECE's recent qualified support of multiculturalism (see Eléments
91 [March 1998]) would seem to render this conclusion purely
rhetorical. Yet, if Grécistes have begun to imbibe the universalism of
the dominant ideology and retreat from the political implications of
their historical philosophy, opposed in principle to any balkanization
of the lands their forefathers settled, archeofuturism has nonetheless
become part of the intellectual arsenal of other, more steadfast
Europeanists. Guillaume Faye, for one, continues to uphold it and in
several recent books has applied it to many of the most grievous
European problems, doing so in ways that have renewed and radicalized
it.
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