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Ernst von Salomon – Revolutionary, Conservative, Lover – Philitt – October 7th 2016

10 Thursday Aug 2017

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In The Outlaws (1930), Ernst von Salomon retraces his madcap political adventure shortly after the Great War. His literary persona became emblematic of the German Conservative Revolution and the work became a prophecy for the lost generations. His lesson: nihilism can be conquered by a passion stronger than the torments of History. The outlaw thus finds his salvation in the warrior experience that precedes the elevation of the spirit.

The Outlaws opens with a quote by Franz Schauweker: “In life, blood and knowledge must agree. Then the spirit rises.” That is the entire lesson of the work, which contrasts knowledge and experience and concludes by discovering that these two opposites inevitably attract. Then a question is posed: must we let these two attractions cancel each other, striking and destroying each other, and the one who experiences them as well; or must the tension be resolved in creation and thought.

A lover distraught by a Germany in tatters, spurned by history at the twilight of the First World War in which he was too young to participate, Ernst von Salomon embodied the Revolutionary Conservative passion in action when he chose to participate within the Freikorps in order to continue the fight. But if Dominique Venner could describe this mythic epic as a nihilistic adventure, the irrational stubbornness of Salomon appeared as an authentic quest for meaning which he pursued throughout his entire journey as warrior and then militant. Despite the surrounding disarray and the lack of purpose from which some hot heads seemed to suffer, the dropout Salomon always expressed the instinct to reconquer a cherished nation. In his eyes, only revolution could return Germany’s former splendor, which he had been taught to die for.

The Troubled Revolutionary

Ernst von Salomon was just 16 years old when the armistice was signed on November 11th 1918, an age of razor sharp follies, ideas, and passions which prevent resignation. If confusion is the first feeling that the author confesses at the start of The Outlaws, hope soon follows and it’s this permanent tension between these two contrary inclinations that creates the relentless struggle between reason and life. As the life of the author, at the start of his work, seems to only sustain the pursuit of his ideal, which he doubtlessly already perceived as a mirage even though he refused to abandon it. Thus he admits: “We were ready to act under the impulse of our feelings alone; and it didn’t matter if we could prove the righteousness of our acts. The accomplishment of the act is what matters these days.” It’s not reason, it’s not ideas that guide the enamored lover of Germany, vexed by a humiliating peace, but a sentimental rage that he cannot control. Thus the revolutionary instinct arises, the essentially destructive instinct whose sole objective is to overthrow the established order, including the internal, spiritual, and moral order of the one guided by it. He challenges the world by challenging himself to test himself before pretending to know.

Movement before anything else, action from every angle appeared as the only way of salvation, the sole conviction of this frustrated generation was that nothing good could arise in the era of parliamentarianism and the ruling bourgeoisie. Maybe he doesn’t understand it yet, but what matters is the struggle against the immobility of systematic thought, whether liberal or Marxist. And if we speak of salvation, it doesn’t solely mean collective salvation through the restoration of German grandeur. War, then defeat and the conditions of the peace are morally destroyed the individual as well. So movement is the condition for the survival of everyone, a vital attempt to rediscover meaning: “In the attack we hope to find deliverance, a supreme exaltation of our forces; we hope to be firm in the conviction of being up to our destiny, we hope to feel the true values of the world in us. We march, nourished by no other certitudes than those that could be worthy for our country.” Lines that join those from Battle as an Inner Experience by Ernst Jünger and show the extent of the spirit of revenge that motivated and shaped warrior instead of soldiers, free men rather than replaceable parts.

It’s the expression of an impatient folly, a lover’s folly. Refusing immobility, ceaselessly putting oneself in peril as one questions himself, is the sign that the nationalist revolution rejects the Platonic love of an idea. Because the beloved nation has been lost, it should be conquered again, by occupying the borders, not by seducing it. Yet a moment comes where action no longer suffices to nourish hope. Exalted violence can destroy the one who endures it and the once who exercises it alike. The author avows, “We have ignited a pyre that not only burns inanimate objects, it burns our hopes, our aspirations, but also the laws of the bourgeoisie, the values of the civilized world, it burns everything, the last remnants of the vocabulary and beliefs in the things and ideas of this time, all this dusty junk that still lingered in our hearts.” The ideal annihilates, the idealist tends towards nihilism. Fate is increasingly obvious, obligating the warrior to reconsider his aspirations, or to die from having used up all that resided in his heart. In order to survive, it is necessary to project a new ideal, to cut an alternative from the tarnished banner that one brandishes without believing in it. Movement becomes an empty shell that demands only to be filled by a production of the spirit, experience is useless without knowledge. It is no longer a question of moving to survive, but of knowing how to move, towards what goal. Then, revolutionary passion, remembering that it was born from reaction, proposes an audacious conservative goal.

Intellectual and Violent: The Outpouring of the Spirit

The permanent tangle of individual and collective considerations in the work creates the perfect psychological portrait of the revolutionary, of the militant in the strict sense (ie military methods). But in the political struggle of the immediate after war era, the young Ernst von Salomon firstly revealed himself to himself, intellectual and violent, rather than advancing an idea. From the start, the political will of the author and his accomplices was at best a quest, a will to find points of reference in the fog of the surrounding crisis, more than a real inclination. But if simple reflection was not the beginning of this quest, it’s a sign that the German ideal of the nascent Conservative Revolution was not purely philosophical. It was more encompassing, more total: it’s a “worldview” (Weltanschauung), certainly impregnated with philosophy, guided by intellect, but also concretely experienced, visceral. This worldview nourishes will as much as thought and expresses itself sentimentally in lyrical, dreamlike, suggestive, or allegorical terms that defy jargon and rationalist concepts. The emblematic style of the German Conservative Revolution that we find in the prose of Ernst Jünger or Carl Schmitt aims to suggest, touch, project rather than simply expose. The outlaw that Salomon embodies is not a man of the drawing room. With him, experience comes before knowledge. The young man’s feelings precede his intellectual formation and metapolitical consciousness. It’s only through writing that he seeks the truth of eternal values in the extremes of lived experience, in order to transform experience into knowledge. Thus the work takes its meaning in order to raise it to another level, to raise it to the rank of a tool accessible to all.

Here one finds a magnificent expression of the paradox of Revolutionary Conservative thought, modern among the anti-moderns in that it proposes to turn modernity against itself, but also and especially in that it can seem to accord priority to action, the driving impulse comes from the domain of the senses, and not from the domain of ideas. What is not experienced is only bourgeois equivocation, as one of Ernst von Salomon’s comrades says about a book by Walter Rathenau – assassinated with the complicity of our author by Organization Consul- entitled In Days To Come, inspiring this terse comment: “So many sparks and so little dynamite.” Salomon himself admits to feeling shipwrecked, when he swears with spite that the considerations of high politics have made the Freikorps useful idiots in the service of foreign interests. And the will to act towards and against everything in a permanent headlong rush only seems to spare those who, like von Salomon, are capable of sublimating action into thought and extracting a little truth from it, clarifying a worldview, proposing a goal. Revolutionary folly, the irrational and anarchic impulse, channeled like so, moderated by conservative instinct, calls for a much greater wisdom and an indispensable effort of conceptualization.

But Salomon would not find this equilibrium, though he had the intuition, until his release from prison. Still too fevered, too extreme in his will to act at any price, until the crime, until a damnation that he didn’t even seem to fear. The outlaws were the outcasts thrown into the arms of the devil by the blows of history, exclusion would destroy the weakest of them, and reinforce the others in a besieged citadel. A bit before his death, more than 40 years after the publication of the Outlaws, he confessed to having really questioned the meaning of his action during his second imprisonment, after which he fully espoused the Conservative Revolutionary Movement by initiating the “revolution of the spirit,” already mentioned and presented in his work in embryonic form. Namely a task of redefining concepts, like the French encyclopédistes of the 18th century, presumed precursors of the French Revolution. But as if the tension between knowledge and experience was fundamentally insurmountable, history would confront this task, this knowledge, with the experience of politics and cause to it languish through the ideological and political deviation of National-Socialism.

Source: https://philitt.fr/2016/10/07/ernst-von-salomon-revolutionnaire-conservateur-amoureux/

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Fiume – The Avant-Garde of History – Idiocratie – April 18th 2016

23 Tuesday May 2017

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The demonstrators of “La nuit debout” have such an inventive poverty, between the hackneyed slogans of the radical left and the obsolete practices of participative democracy, that we propose to them, in the guise of a meditation – if this word still has meaning to their conformist spirits – a shot of adrenaline, a pleasurable more-than-life that they are unlikely to encounter in their “convivial” assemblies whose debilitating gestures have even gone so far as to replace the hollow words.

“Having reached my destination, I offered red roses to Frate Francesco in the Vatican, I threw more red roses, as proof of love, for the Queen and the People above the Quirinal. Over the Montecitorio [the Italian parliament], I threw a rusty iron utensil attached to a red rag, with a few turnips attached to the handle and a message: Guido Keller – from the wings of the Splendor – offers to the parliament and government that has ruled thanks to lies and fears for quite some time, a tangible allegory of its merit.”

Rome, 14th day of the 3rd month of the Regency.1

That’s how Guido Keller – adventurer and futurist aero-poet – recalled the “bombardment” of the Italian parliament that he accomplished on November 14th 1920 on board his Ansaldo SVA 5.2 monoplane, to protest against the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo on November 12th 1920 by Italy and Yugoslavia. The “aero-romantic” escapade of Gabrielle D’Annunzio’s principal lieutenant symbolically marked the end of one of the most surprising post-war enterprises: the seizure and occupation of the frontier city of Fiume and the transformation, for a year, of the city into a vast field of aesthetic – political experimentation, that we can consider more as a womb of radical European avant-gardism than as a womb of the new political phenomena that emerged as a result of the conclusion of the First World War, in particular Italian Fascism.

The city of Fiume, or Rijeka in Croatian, had benefited from its status as an autonomous free port accorded to it by the decree of Charles VI of Austria in 1719, and then renewed by the empress Maria Theresa. In 1848, Fiume had been briefly occupied by Croatia before regaining its independence in 1868. An international city par excellence, Fiume was, in 1919, inhabited by Italians, Croats Hungarians, and Germans. Italian remained the dominant language and the local dialect, “Fiumian,” was similar to Venetian, while the dialect of the surrounding countryside corresponded more to a variant of Croatian. This mixture conferred a very strong identity to the city and Fiume could be considered as an example in miniature of the multiculturalism that marked, and also undermined, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In 1919, the prime minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando left Paris, where the peace conference between the victors of the First World War was held, appalled by the decisions taken regarding his country. Denying their promises from 1915, the allies had in effect ignored the conditions by which they had negotiated Italy’s entry into the war on their side against the Central Powers,2 notably the cession of the famous irredentist territories, including Fiume, to Italy. Nevertheless, the president of the council, Francesco Saverio Nitti, more concerned by the social troubles that shook Italy in the Biennio rosso3, accepted the conditions offered to Italy by the allied powers and officially signed the armistice on September 10th 1919.

Among all the voices that were raised at this moment to denounce the policy of Nitti, was that of the “poet-warrior” Gabrielle D’Annunzio, which seemed to overpower all the others. Not content with publicly accusing Nitti of cowardice, he surrounded himself with a small group of faithful followers and at the head of a veritable personal army of demobilized soldiers and adventurers, made the decision to march on the city of Fiume, from which he expelled the American, English, and French expeditionary corps that occupied it without difficulty, with the goal of restoring the city to the Italian state. However the Italian government disappointed his expectations by refusing his offer. Then D’Annunzio made the decision to establish a government in Fiume based on the charter composed by the anarcho-syndicalist Alceste de Ambris, taking the place of a constitution for the city of Fiume, and presaging the creation of an “anti-League of Nations” allied with all the “oppressed peoples of the earth.” The “Regency of Carnaro,” thus created and named by D’Annunzio, initiated a political experience singular in Europe that would run from September 1919 to December 1920. Around D’Annunzio the new masters of the city of Fiume thronged: the Arditi4, but also Futurists, Dadaists, anarchists, monarchists, and all sorts of adventurers from every ilk. Bolshevik Russia was the only state to recognize the existence of this insurrectionary city-state in which local notables observed, terrified but powerless, their city transforming itself into an immense stage where baroque settings in honor of the Vate were performed and public debates in which free love, the liberation of women, and the abolition of prison were discussed. “Masquerade, raillery, and derision serve as their language,” wrote Claudia Salaris. “Futurists, Dadaists, and anarchists experiment in the laboratory of Fiume, discussing themes as daring for the era as woman’s liberation, drugs, the abolition of money and prisons.”5

In general, the escapade of Fiume is only considered as a proto-Fascist demonstration of the spirit of revenge that animated a part of the Italian elites mutilated by the victory. But, it is suitable to understand the episode from a much less reductive angle. From the foundation of the Regency of Carnaro, the principal artisans of the adventure of Fiume actually considered their enterprise as the point of departure for a revolutionary movement that should respond to both to the political, as well as the most radical social and aesthetic, aspirations of the postwar avant-gardes and déclassés, conscious of being part of a devastated country which henceforth only belonged, in their opinion, to the rearguard of the victors. A heteroclite mixture of nationalist claims, anarchist passions, libertine sensibilities, a tumultuous aggregate of soldiers on the loose, adventurers, artists of the grenade, enraged Futurists, Dadas of combat, frenzied monarchists, fantastic criminals, poets in uniform, revolutionaries without a cause, and some veritable candidates for the insane asylum, the “republic of Carnaro,” decreed by D’Annunzio on September 12th 1919 from December 30th 1920 constituted a unique experience in the chaos of post-war Europe. Proclaimed as a place of love and perpetual festivity, it stirred the curiosity of Mussolini who remained doubtful, but didn’t forget to draw essential lessons from the permanent theater organized by D’Annunzio throughout his revolution for himself. On the other hand, it excited the disdain of Marinetti who only saw in the activists of Fiume a collection of gypsies thrown into the same hysterical fray of anarchists, Futurists, and monarchists. The charter of Carnaro, drafted by the Italian anarcho-syndicalist Alceste De Ambris, showed Fiume’s new masters’ contempt for the modern state and intended to truly base itself on popular sovereignty, but it also inscribed in the new constitution a certain number of social advances hardly imaginable for the era. Besides the fact that the charter was famed for having declared music as a fundamental principle of the state, it authorized divorce, gave women the right to vote, legalized homosexuality, the usage of drugs, and nudism. The Belgian poet Léon Kochnitzky, close friend of D’Annunzio, saw “Fiumanism” as a universal revolutionary enterprise, capable of overthrowing the established order of the old world:

To rally the forces of all the oppressed peoples, nations, races, etc, of the world into a compact formation. And use it to fight and triumph over the oppressors and imperialists who want their financial interests to prevail over the most sacred sentiments of man: faith, love of country, individual liberty, and social dignity.6

Ludovico Toeplitz, Italian filmmaker and polyglot, was charged with the foreign relations of the Regency of Carnaro and, as such, he was also tasked with establishing the League of Fiume, a veritable “anti-League of Nations,” according to Gabrielle D’Annunzio’s wish:

I made contact with all the malcontents of various countries around the world: with Zaghloul Pasha, not yet prime minister but then leader of the party of Fellah; with Kemal Pasha, the power leader of the Young Turk party, who would doubtlessly take power next. In Fiume, we founded the Anti-League of Nations, in opposition to the iniquitous treaty of Versailles.7

The resupplying of this modern pirate city, besieged since the start of 1920 by the Italian army, was assured by audacious surprise attacks, supervised by the D’Annunzio’s principal lieutenant: Guido Keller, a personality so fantastic that he still seems today only capable of existing in a novel. Veteran of the Italian air-force, Futurist aero-poet and fantastic mystic, Keller reinvented in the air a form of the courtly duel consisting of taking the lead over his opponent before letting him nobly flee. He was also the founder of a fraternity of barbers, which he joined after having demonstrated that he was capable of cutting his hair in flight, and had installed a tea set in his plane, which he piloted most of the time in his pajamas.

In Fiume, within the beautiful milieu of joyous anarchy constitutionally established by the Regency of Carnaro, it was not rare to see Keller spending a part of the day in the simplest garb or eventually made up as Poseidon. He slept in the trees, was a vegetarian, and considered any opportunity to detonate a grenade as a manifestation of joy. “When he he had free time,” Atlantico Ferri wrote in the Testa di ferro, “he climbed trees, completely nude, and performed all functions that most men fulfill at the ground level– including the most natural – in his airplane.” Thick black hair, Mephistophelian beard, Keller seemed nearly more Faun than human being. One of his favorite pastimes also seemed to be scaring the young couples who went to kiss near the cemetery of Fiume by making the howls of beasts at night to the point where commander D’Annunzio had to order a company of soldiers to prove that no zombie or werewolf hid there. Specialist in surprise attacks and acts of piracy through which the city survived, Keller also drafted a circular inviting all of Italy’s insane and asylum bound to demand their freedom in order to join Fiume8 and was also the founder of a secret Yoga society that entertained relations with Futurists of all stripes and nationalities as well as the German Dadaists9 and Russian and Hungarian Bolsheviks. Lenin declared before the war that he considered D’Annunzio as the only true revolutionary leader in Italy10; he forgot to mention the indispensable companion of the Vate, Guido Keller, who was as capable of organizing a romantic and theatrical assault – entitled “The Castle of Love” – on the presidential palace of Fiume, as he was of stealing fifty horses from under the nose of the Italian army. Keller was convinced that Fiume had become both “the city of Holocaust” and “the city of Love,” the epicenter of an earthquake that would shake history, liberate peoples, and overthrow the assassin states and impostor governments.

The episode of Fiume, anachronistically modern, seems both suspended beyond time and at the same time installed at the heart, at the hinge, of European history. The revolutionaries of Fiume united together to establish the complete invasion of existence by art, and at the same time the complete politicization of art. The gesture of revolt became the artistic manifestation of revolution, war, combat an aesthetic demonstration: the ultimate allegory of life’s movement, from death and chaos. The Futurists, the Dadas of combat, the revolutionary monarchist, anarchist, or nationalist poets that one could encounter in Fiume had predecessors in the 19th century whose slogans they reprised, reproducing their poses and reissuing in part their engagements, on a city-wide scale and in a somewhat crazy experience during which aesthetics and action formed a single gesture.

The establishment of the government of Fiume was accompanied by the partial seizure of power within the city by the Yoga society which had the duty of affirming the avant-garde and internationalist vocation of the Fiumian movement. In la Testa di ferro, magazine of the Yoga society directed by the Futurist Mario Carli, nicknamed “Our Bolshevik” or “the Little Father of Bolshevism,” they celebrated “the Italian city of Fiume – city of new life- liberation of all the oppressed (peoples, classes, individuals) – discipline of the spirit against all formal discipline – destruction of all hegemonies, dogmas, conservatisms, and parasitisms – crucible of new energies – few words, much substance.”11 The Yoga Union designated its wishes as a “lyrical order” capable of liberating both peoples and the creativity of the individual by fighting any form of alienation. “Revolutionaries not for or against a party, but revolutionaries against what we are,” proclaimed the first issue of the magazine, published November 13th 1920. The motto that the members of the Yoga society gave it demonstrated the art of rhetoric as much as the art of war. It was “conquer the adversary through irony, expose it to ridicule by depriving it of any barbaric authority, as well as the foolishness it deserves,” 12 in other words, to oppose conservatism with irony and to speak out:

Against golden safety goggles

Against ‘goodbye my dear’

Against throaty ‘r’s

Against posing

Against madness proper, organized in the serious and spiritual home for exhibitionist purposes13

The Yoga Society transformed the atmosphere of the city of Fiume into a permanent theater, proliferating surprise actions and spontaneous public demonstrations that latter day avant-gardists would call “happenings,” in the middle of the street, under the eyes of the stunned population and to the great dismay of the city’s notables. They also organized public consultations during which they touched upon every subject, where they spoke of everything, quickly, with the enthusiasm of those who imagined that liberated speech would accelerate the fall of the old world or simply with the ardor of the forlorn who basically knew that “end times” were doubtlessly coming soon.:

At the heart of the old city of San Vito we found the plaza to gather. A big tree protected the harmony of speech under its expanse… One night, we spoke of the abolition of money, another of free love, another yet, of the politician, the regulation of the army, the abolition of prisons, the embellishment of the city… That was how conversation flowed, admirably, on the old plaza, in perfect harmony between the prostitute and the poet, between the navigator and the antiquarian, between the banker and the intellectual, while the presence of animals, in their silence, was appreciated.14

Thus Margherita Keller Besozzi, Guido Keller’s cousin and feminist figure decreed that: “The woman of Fiume is nothing other than the mother of the modern woman,” the revolutionaries, via their magazine, launched always more radical slogans, in a measure that seemed to follow the tragic fate of the adventure of Fiume:

So block the trains and ships, flood the obscene mines, close the workshops (cages of fools invented by devils), set fire to offices, ministries, stock exchanges where they earn what isn’t worth earning … and save life! … With what voluptuousness would I set fire to your stupid “academies,” your putrid “museums,” full of the remains of faded beauty (created by workers for princes) that you are no longer capable of understanding, to your “schools of art,” where in grand pomp buried corpses teach those without genius how to become more mediocre than their master.15

The “bloody Christmas” of December 24th 1920 ended the adventure of Fiume and D’Annunzio’s attempt at an esoteric and a-historical revolution, forcing the evacuation of the city after a week of rough combat against the Italian army. The Vate would end his life nearly confined to his home on Lago di Garda, having become an invalid after having mysteriously “fallen” from his window on the night of August 13th or 14th 1922.

For Guido Keller, the failure of Fiume was the beginning of a wandering that would lead him from Italy to South America, where he attempted to give life to his libertine dreams. He firstly tried to establish a flying circus show entitled “The Conquest of the Sun,” and then exiled himself to Turkey to establish a pilot school, before becoming a military squadron officer in Benghazi Libya. Defeated by the rebels, he would sympathize with them before embarking for South America and Peru – “Fatherland of coca – the generous princess” – where he would launch a revolutionary attempt, bloodily crushed. “The dead are similar to those in Fiume,” he wrote to Sandro Pozzi. “I am on the route traced by destiny: I sought out my distant land, and like Ulysses, I exchanged a one-eyed horse for a blind mount.” The last act of his existence saw him associate with the painter and sculptor Hendrik Andersen in order to create a “city of life” on a lost island in the Aegean where no law or form of order should exist and where only artists and adventurers would be authorized to live. The project never came to fruition. In 1929, Guido Keller died, victim of a motorcycle accident on a road in Italy, like Thomas Edward Lawrence, called Lawrence of Arabia, six years later. As for D’Annunzio he died in 1938 and Mussolini accorded him a national funeral, which he doubtlessly wouldn’t want, he who had become a political undesirable confined to his home by the Fascist regime. The time of dreamers and poets was no more and Europe was once again handed over to the confrontations of empires, carnivorous ideologies that would devour whole peoples and utopias.

Notes:

1) Guido KELLER. Signed notes. in Janez JANSA. Il porto dell’amore. Texts by Domenico Cuarenta. Quis contra nos 1919-2019. www.reakt.org/fiume

2) Negotiations that promised Italy, in exchange for its participation in the conflict, the cession, after the war of the regions of Trentino, South Tyrol to the Brenner, Istria, Dalmatia, the cities of Trieste, Gorizia, and Gradisca, a protectorate over Albania, sovereignty over the port of Vlora, the province of Anatolia in Turkey, plus the Dodecanese and other colonies in East Africa and Libya. The near totality of these agreements would be ignored at the Paris Conference in 1919.

3) This expression designates the two years, from 1918 to 1920, which after the end of the war were marked by very strong social agitation in Italy and the fear of a communist seizure of power, henceforth named “the Red Biennial.”

4) The “Ardent.” Companions of D’Annunzio, for the most part former soldiers, whose uniform, rallying cry, “me ne frego,” and organization became the major inspiration for Mussolini during the creation of his Fasci of Combat.

5) Claudia SALARIS. A la fête de la révolution. Artistes et libertaires avec D’Annunzio à Fiume. Paris, Éditions du Rocher, 2006. p. 11

6) De Felice, D’Annunzio politico 1918-1938, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1978, p. 73. Cited by Janez Jansa. Il porto dell’amore. Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

7) Ludovico Toeplitz, Cial a chi tokka, Milano, Edizioni Milano Nuova, 1964, p. 49

8) At the same time, Marinetti proclaimed: “It is time that we also make a conscious and evolved art from madness (the overthrow of logical relationships).” This type of declaration of course recalls the surrealist declarations and attempts in Germany realized by SPK at the end of the 1970s to liberate psychiatric hospitals. Attempts that ended in the armed intervention of the German GIGN against an establishment “self managed by the ill.”

9) The expedition of Fiume was warmly saluted by the Dada Club in Berlin, in a telegram sent to the Correrre Del Sierra : “Conquest is a great Dadaist action, and we will employ all means to assure its recognition. The Dada Dadaco global atlas already recognizes Fiume as an Italian city.”

10) The illegal government of Fiume quickly made contact with Bolshevik Russia which was the only state to recognize its existence.

11) Slogan appearing in a number of issues of La Testa di ferro.

12) Sandro Pozzi in La Testa di ferro.

13) Manifesto-poster: “The Founding of the Yoga in Fiume”

14) Giovanni Comisso. Il Il porto dell’amore. Longanesi [Biblioteca di narratori]. 2011.

15) Yoga n°2. 20 novembre 1920.

Source: http://idiocratie2012.blogspot.com/2016/04/fiume-lavant-garde-de-lhistoire.html

The Misery of Deconstruction: “French Theorists” Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida in the service of American nihilo-globalism – Yannick Jaffré – Katehon -January 24th, 2016

26 Thursday Jan 2017

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If the United States were the social laboratory of post-modernism, the Europeans, the French in the vanguard, were the theoreticians. As is often the case, Americans do first, think second, and, philosophically almost never by themselves. Thus the dissolution of the patriarchy, economic – juridical individualism, the reign of consumerism, and moral relativism were experimented with in the United States with more spontaneity and radicalism than in Europe. But the post-modern wave owes its concepts to the work of French philosophers. Without American hegemony combining material power and social imitation, hard and soft power, the anti-world of the last forty years would surely have been impossible; but without the elaborations, or lucubration, conducted in Europe by certain thinkers, it would have not exercised the same intellectual seduction.

On both sides of the Atlantic, however, this hegemony was never complete. History has no end, and no era is perfectly synchronous, and all domination finds its counterweight. Against post-modern nihilism, the Katehon did well – By the inertia of cultural traditions and family structures, through a patriotism impregnated with religiosity and a populism that just bore Trump to power in America, by a movement of reaction against the human rights “moralism” which must still find its political translation in Europe. I am one of those who thinks that the nihilo-globalist configuration is dead, on the spiritual level as on the material one. But the corpse continues its destruction, like a zombie. So we must still dispose of the remains.

On the other hand, it is useless to enter into the subtitles, altogether quite optional, of deconstructionist philosophy. The internal diversity of its currents, really, is not essential. All its variants are joined together on the same front line by their common targets: historical rootedness, philosophical substantiality, moral decency, and in the strictly political scheme, nations in their identity and states in their sovereignty. In all, deconstruction intertwines both principal 68er ideologies: post-Marxism and libertarianism, which have quickly surpassed their initial antagonism. The first can be represented by Toni Negri whose “global multitudes” will succeed national classes, whose first passion, more than the anti-capitalist struggle, is to destroy “this shit of the national state” (sic). As for the other current generalized by Mai 68, libertarian and “other-idolizing”, cosmopolitan and “self-phobic”, it brought about the immigrationist “moral left”. It’s what I address here through its gurus Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida.

The Americans, who offered them seat after seat, group them under the label “French Theory” with a few others. This favor speaks on their behalf. If great artworks reach a place in eternity, major philosophies actually remain, for the most part, children of their time. It is not only permitted, but necessary to appreciate them them in the context of their Fatherland. This “geo-localization” even becomes indispensable when a philosopher pretends to fight against what dominates his epoch. In this respect we could be amused by the intellectual popularity that the deconstructionists enjoy in the United States among the so-called liberals: occupying the left wing of the democratic party, progressive in moral matters, leaving the pillars of economic liberalism intact, they are, in other words, libertarian – liberals. Major actors of post-modern capitalism in its ideological superstructure, and beneficiaries of its economic infrastructure, have made the French deconstructionists their erudite servants – similar to the Greek slaves in antiquity who would chide decadent Roman youth. With the difference that they would maintain the foundations of European history that the deconstructionists want to destroy. Speaking of the “70s”, these philosophers were the post-modern “servants of capitalism.”

Read from Columbia to Berkeley, thus Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida are the most famous figures of French Theory. I will briefly outline the common ground of their thought. Having thrown around Heidegger’s opportunistic sentence that the biography of thinkers counts for nothing, I will also say a few words about their personal political journeys

Deleuze forges powerful, Nietzschean concepts animated by the forces of art and life. A naturalist, he believed in following the growths of political “biotope.” Thus he proposed, in the ABC-book that helped to popularize his thought a great deal, the notion of “revolutionary becoming.” A situation that comes to this unsustainable point that ends in an explosion of liberty which uproots the “trees” – metaphors for all oppressive orders. On this ground the swarming “rhizomes” then return, which designate unpredictable libertine freedom in Deleuzian botany. As liberty would sprout there, in the undisciplined, anarchic, “flux”, between “branches”, before freedom-killing trees quickly strike back back and fatally take root. Deleuze calmly states that revolutions “go bad” without truly saying why, to him oppression seems to need “to happen” with liberty in a sort of cosmic balance.

Evidently we cannot imagine an eventual positive role for the state with him, not in the value of substance, of what endures in the Stoic sense, as we are caught up in “desiring” fluxes. Flux whose consumer – destructor potential occupies the blind spit of this thought. And it’s without flagrant injustice that the Deleuzian vocabulary of “nomadism,” “deterritorialization”, and thus “flux” finds itself in the language of country-less financial capitalism today. And it’s also unsurprising that it serves to dissolve the identities of peoples with immigration, and with it, their political sovereignty. Deleuze, resistant to the rigors of Hegelian dialectic, despises stopping points, of rest and constraint, in other words the institutions indispensable to collective liberty. Thus he dismisses the necessary negative political moments – coercion, institution, authority – as Spinozaist “sad passions,” Nietzschean “weak forces,” in other words the pathologies of submission. And his thought offers the viewpoint of a sort of artistic anarcho-naturalism, which by constitution, has very poor historical support. Not understanding European history through its great cultural works, he supremely ignores it as civilizational destiny. For those who make this destiny their fight, Deleuze only offers booby traps.

As for this personal journey, we can recognize a certain fidelity and Stoic probity there. It certainly cultivated the fetishism of the marginal in the joyous (?) disorder of the university of Vincennes, then evaded the embarrassing questions on the social and existential consequences of leftism, refusing, in short, to look the black sun of May 68 in the face. But after having embraced the vitalist streak of 68, without ever looking back, he never personally chased after the selfish or material benefits of the avant-garde.

With Foucault we sometimes read sparkling theoretical prose, as in the unforgettable openings of his two masterworks, “Discipline and Punish,” and “The Order of Things.” We also learn much there as a body of facts – historical, scientific, and aesthetic – giving each essential proposition provisional support. But despite such a positivist will, the Foucauldian concept of power slips between the fingers like the water of Thales: the universal element filling everything, at this point it would be spread through institutions, discourses, and daily practices, it becomes unthinkable. With this logical consequence we can only escape omnipresent oppressive power by traveling along extraordinary lines of flight. As Deleuze fell into the idolatry of the marginal cultivated by his epoch, thus Foucault reserved the experience of liberty to the insane, criminals, parricides, transsexuals. Since the state (and all institutions that comes from it) was in effect only a pure agent of oppression, anything -literally from Maoism to human rights through the Iranian Revolution – becomes a possible resource for him. Yet having well understood the passage of hierarchical “vertical” societies to societies of “horizontal” control, Foucault, entirely repulsed by the state, does not imagine mobilizing against new forms of domination. As for individual “subjectifications,” of which he undertakes an original history from the Greeks onward, finding, not by chance, a particular predilection for the Cynics, they are now marvelously accommodated in new consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism absorbs all alternative lifestyles as long as they do not touch, through rigorous and substantial thought, its reactor core. It accumulates the benefits of its own criticism by employing an army of “impertinent” servitors (including the “rebel-ocracy” of the spectacle, according to Philippe Murray’s expression, occupying the furthest end of the leash).

Honored by the thinker, the institutions of the republic were not such bad mothers for the university academic. Until 68 he led a good career without making waves, which he pursued at Collège de France. A bit after Mai he became a “fellow traveler” of Maoists specializing in the question of incarceration, before intellectually addressing the Islamic Iranian Revolution at the same time as “les nouveaux philosophes.” (Deleuze had the good taste to keep them in the contempt they deserved). He completes his path with them by joining human rights, which invaded the political field in the late 70s, with hedonism to form the infernal couple of the two following decades. Things get even worse postmortem because the principal editorial heir of Foucault, François Ewald, became a consultant, moreover for the Fédération française des sociétés d’assurance (French Federation of Insurance Companies), the ex-Maoist Denis Kessler became the director of Medef (Movement of the Enterprises of France, the French employers organization). I believe that Foucaldianism no longer fears turning into liberalism one day, it is not against its apparent atmosphere, but in step with it. It’s done. In his life, Foucault adopted the stances of institutional, majority criticism, freely and without risk. With such a sign we can suspect that his claimed positivism, which should a priori lodge its deontology in respect for facts, of having sheltered a deaf servility to implied hegemonic fact, shamefully or unconsciously, under the flamboyance of concepts and poses.

Finally Derrida. He delivered some powerful texts in the epoch of “Writing and Difference” (1967) before strengthening the idea that between concept and metaphor, philosophy and literature, borders should be erased in favor of the notion of “écriture” – which cannot be confused with style according to him. Placing himself in the track of Heidegger, Derrida intends to “(de)construct” the fundamental equation of the Greek philosophical project: the understanding of the essence of things by rational thought. If there is no reason to exclude this project from criticism, which is one of its fundamental gestures, it doesn’t exhaust all its potentialities. We could risk seeming like a humble naif to linger for a moment, despite what disgust, melancholy, or consternation the future of the contemporary West inspires in us, on the highest realizations of the Logos. Thus it would be for Derrida to urgently deconstruct, or more subtly, he would teach an internal deconstruction that thought should garner. But while Heidegger intended to make a “Greco-German” voice more ancient than the calculations of technical rationality, Derrida received his inspiration, from a source close to himself, in Hebrew letters. It draws from, after Lévinas and many other Jewish intellectuals, philosophy from Athens to Jerusalem. He lost himself there without return. While the world is supposed to escape to the logos which endeavors to illuminate it, he henceforth closes himself off in an “écriture” indefinitely undecipherable, in effect we take the route of a desert theology.

Derrida naturally enough adopts the tone of Ecclesiastes belittling the vain human edifices, thus referring the great philosophers to their unthinkables, that which is repressed by their conscious logic, their rational intentions to a letter that, “disséminante” and “ différante”, surpasses them because the infinite works in it. He passes the distinctions on which Western thought rests (cause and effect, substance and accident, object and subject) to the Kabbalistic steamroller with a formal fury that expresses a sort of cold hate. In such an atmosphere of confusion, we move against the spirit of logos with its livable determination. Nothing here seems capable of subsisting, enduring, establishing itself or affirming itself, except maybe, the figure of the prophet philosopher who seems to possess, by himself and himself alone, the consistency of the particular and the magisterium of the universal. He judges without mercy, brandishing a Law as absolute as it is withdrawn from the common, the political works, the cultures, and the particular worlds of peoples (except Israel…) who desire to be someone in history. What remains, on the overall balance, is an impediment to thought and a Judaic contraband theology.

While Deleuze settled with his living concepts in an un-dialectical affirmation, Derrida administers to meaning an infinite correction which, only ever affirming the imperfection of the world, brought a master of obscurity to the professorship. So we go from one French theorist to the other, from the libertarian refusal of dialectic to its submersion in the cold waters of a negative theocracy. Both yield equivalent results: sharing the same hostilities – metaphysics against substance, politics against the nation – they bind philosophy to the cosmopolitanism of human rights.

Derrida showed himself to be more publicly discreet than Foucault. Enjoying comfortable marginalization in the French university, he stacked up American professorships, supported Czech dissidents, returned in 1995 to the support committee for Lionel Jospin, which he left in 2002 because he judged his immigration policy to be merciless … He ultimately accomplished the faultless path of a grand conscience of the “gauche pétitionnaire” – Sephardic Antigone of the amphitheater against the evil Creon of the state – who ventures onto the battlefield only sheltered under the Paraclete of cosmopolitan natural law.

Unless we believe in the Trojan Horse strategy, doubtful in general, we must return to the evidence: insomuch as these thoughts are highly desired by the centers of the “post-modern” capitalist world, which mix hedonism and legalism, they are unfit to fight its toxins. Worse, they expand them. Intellectually emasculating the political capacity of peoples, deconstruction distrusts the state and nation – the actor of power and its legitimate source – to the benefit of unaccountable resistances. Through nature according to Deleuze, through facts with Foucault, by law in the terms of Derrida, we end up losing measure of things, the authority of facts hesitates and the spirit of the laws become unthinkable. By driving away from leftists their patriarchal, national, and industrial configuration, they have lent their ample thoughts to the capitalist enemy, who I would say, have advanced to the puerile stage with them, globalist and consumerist. Through their particular cases the magisterium of 68 is to blame, with its “impossible heritage.”

The French Theorists deconstructed, criticized, or subverted the categories of the Western philosophical tradition. But the weight of things constantly thwarts their vanguardist pretensions of surpassing what, in this tradition, shelters the conditions of a livable world. Even when they approach it more humbly, the same logic of their thought causes them to mistreat “post-modern” history, they do not search in their own epoch, and so they only find expiration dates, shaking with pleasure for each death notice that they think they can announce. In reality, they are complacently posted wherever the “old world” is already dead, they only conjure up past threats by blinding themselves to the present dangers.

Let it be understood: I am not saying the intellectuals in question are behind the times. No, I am quite on the contrary shocked by their collusion with capitalism which seems to inform their critique. If they were “untimely” or “importune,” they would have played as Nietzschean hammers. If they surpassed their epoch, they would follow the totem of philosophers according to Hegel, “The owl of Minerva takes flight at the fall of dusk.” In short, if they thought about their epoch by moving away from it, by surmounting or surpassing it, they would have fulfilled the modern role to which they pretended. But by espousing the elite’s path of 68, they are bygones from a so-called Marxist libertarian revolution to the vintage “anti-racist human rightism” of the 80s. So onward to American universities. But they subsist today, the time of their splendor has passed, an implacable logic returns: by ignoring the basic permanence of things and rushing to the vanguard of the critique of domination, they were irredeemably condemned to espouse the forms that domination stipulated.

Basically old Jacques Duclos was right. In a small work published in the summer of 1968, the Stalinist leader warned against the descendants of Bakunin throwing stones in the Latin Quarter. These leftists he warned, spread a disastrous revolutionary “amorphousness”: their hatred of forms, mores, and institutions condemned them to define liberty as pure negation or, equivalently, as pure plasticity. “To destroy is to create,” thus said Bakunin the eternal adolescent.

At the dawn of modernity, Descartes had a premonition of the terrible audacity that would rise before infinite, unlimited and Promethean will whose power had been revealed by the new science. Power that could be exerted not only against an imperfect intellectual tradition, but also, and it was Descartes’ fear, against all moral and political orders. Thus he did not cease to warn in his “Discourse on Method” against a “democratic” extension of radical doubt that he practiced in the domain of pure thought. From the apprehensive grandeur of these beginnings, we have passed to consumerist “68er” leftism. If it retreats into the past, it continues to irradiate our present as a buried but still active geological stratum.

For forty years, modern liberty thus failed on an artificial beach which, after 1968, buried the hard, virtuous paving stones of the “Gaullo-Communists.”

A hateful little “me” acts there, made from fickle paste, who demands an allowance, and to consume without cleaning his room. Soon a father in roller skates singing Vincent Delerm, he doesn’t hesitate to wear dreadlocks, which are quite accepted at his “job,” hurting his case before the eternal judge of all styles. With age, he takes upon the aspects of an old, arrogant and whiny baby, claiming the nasty air of enjoyment again and again, and who resembles Dany Cohn-Bendit trait for trait, annoying everyone … But Cohn-Bendit will die soon, his world is in its terminal phase, and deconstruction will remain in the history of European thought as the symptom of a passing depression. Political realism, ethical decency, and philosophical consistency have begun their insurrection. But that’s another story. It’s opening before us.


Source: http://katehon.com/fr/article/misere-de-la-deconstruction-deleuze-foucault-derrida-french-theorists-au-service-du-nihilo

Interview with Zakhar Prilepin – Breizh-Info – November 22nd, 2016

01 Thursday Dec 2016

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This Saturday, the journal Éléments organized its colloquium in Paris “Russie : à l’est, du nouveau ?” Among the invitees present, there was Zakhar Prilepin, who spoke for a long time, in Russian, with a translator at his side, before a full room – nearly 250 people, many of whom came from the Russian diaspora in France.

Zakhar Prilepin, whose real name is Evgenii Nikolaevitch Prilepin, was born in 1975 in a village in the Ryazan region. A journalist, linguist, and Russian politician, since 1996 a member of the National Bolshevik Party, and the Other Russia coalition, he opposed Putin and the liberal and pro-European orientation of Russia. In 2014, with Russian Spring and the return of Crimea, followed by the start of the independence war in Donbass, Russian power became more interventionist in the economy, more conservative and patriotic, in unison with civil society. Zakhar Prilepin, who became a war correspondent in Donbass and gathered humanitarian aid for its population, abandoned his opposition to Putin. An author of books – many of which have been translated into French, he is also a journalist on Russian television (Ren TV, Tsargrad TV) and has written for many print and web Russian media outlets (Ogoniok, Svobodnaia Pressa, Izvestia, Novaya Gazeta).

After his speech, we met with Zakhar Prilepin.

Breizh Info : Zakhar Prilepin, what do you think about Putin today, to whom you were opposed in the past?

Zakhar Prilepin : Putin gave Russia a big chance to have a new history. I hope that he will change the liberal course of the economy, set the bar a bit further left. On this subject, it’s will be important to know who will replace Ulyukayev [the economic development minister, a convinced liberal, fired after having been implicated in a corruption scandal].

Breizh Info : The German newspaper Die Press announced in a recent article that Russia is less dependent on petroleum revenue and it will renew economic growth in 2017. Furthermore, it is today experiencing a new industrial and agricultural revolution, with numerous factories opening. Is the economic crisis finished?

Zakhar Prilepin : There is no visible economic crisis and far fewer criminal or ethnic gangs in the streets of Russian cities, as was the case in the 1990s… or today in the big European cities. That said, it’s evident that the population was impoverished during the 2015-2016 crisis, but the social attitudes towards the crisis changed. Increasingly people leave cities in order return to country, while rural exodus was important from the immediate post-war era until the 2000s.

Breizh Info : The demographic statistics for Russia from January to August 2016 were just published. They testify to a natural balance of births and death of 8,200 people, with a birth rate stronger than a mortality rate in 28 regions – including the rural regions which were in decline until now – and decrease in abortions by a third in four years, from 735,000 thousand in 2011 to 447,000 in 2015. Is this the end of the Russian deep demographic decline?

Zakhar Prilepin : Certainly the situation for agriculture and thus the rural regions was improved thanks to the sanctions and the Russian embargo on products from Western countries. But the possibility of stopping this embargo worries Siberian peasants who demonstrate their strong opposition to the end of Russian sanctions. Yet, there is other good news: in relation to the years 1990-2000, where the objective of those who held power was to enrich themselves to the maximum, the people in power have matured and realized that there is no substitute for Russia. A self-preservation mechanism was put in place, which made it possible to dismiss the rotten and those who were determined to serve a master other than the Russian people.

Breizh Info : Do you think with Russian Spring, in 2014, a new generation of leaders will enter politics and give an extra push towards more patriotic values, more socially conservative and interventionist in the economy?

Zakhar Prilepin : During Russian Spring, there were many soldiers, who were invested in society. Once Russian Spring ended, they returned to the army. There are relatively few political leaders on that level, with the exception of the former governor of Sevastopol, Alexeï Tchaly.

Breizh Info : And the prosecutor Natalia Poklonskaya, very popular and for whom they predict a grand political future?

Zakhar Prilepin : She’s not really on that level outside of Crimea.

Breizh Info : What do you think about Ukraine’s future?

Zakhar Prilepin : By sending Russia away and launching a murderous civil war in the East, the Ukrainian power thinks it will become the locomotive of progress. But, they are at the back of the train now, dependent on the good will of Trump. If that means that the United States is no longer concerned with supporting the power in Kiev, if he says it’s in the Russian zone of influence, they’re washed up.

Breizh Info : On this subject, what do you think about Trump’s election?

Zakhar Prilepin : The American public has affirmed with force that it is white, conservative, Christian, gun bearing, and it wants to address its internal problems instead of those in the world.

Breizh Info : That’s good news for Russia?

Zakhar Prilepin : More than the election of Clinton of course. But Trump, as a good American, will try to divide Russia and China, for example by giving Russia everything it wants on the condition that it doesn’t form a bloc with Beijing. Or by pressing where it hurts, that is to say on the hypothetical possibility that the Chinese invade the Russian far east.

Breizh Info : The neighboring Chinese overflow into the great Russian emptiness there. Do you think that could happen?

Zakhar Prilepin : Honestly, no. The arrival of the Chinese in the Russian far-east is not so massive, it’s even stabilized these last few years. On the contrary, the Chinese migrate in mass towards the South, so it’s rather Taiwan that has to worry about it.

Breizh Info : What is the future of the EU after Trump’s election?

Zakhar Prilepin : Trump is concentrated on the United States itself, and will disengage from supporting the EU. He will notably encourage the European countries to pay for their own defense. Without the influence and the commanding power of the United States and Great Britain, the EU will have much less influence in the future. But that, it’s above all Germany’s problem.

Interviewer: Louis-Benoît Greffe

Source:http://www.breizh-info.com/2016/11/22/53588/zakhar-prilepine-pouvoir-de-commandement-etats-unis-lue-na-davenir