[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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