My translation of Dominique Venner’s short editorial, “Evola:
Philosophie et action directe,” Nouvelle Revue
d’Histoire 37 (2008). By 2008,
Venner was known as an historian; but signs of a sympathy born of youthful
activism (in French analogues of the Italian movements he describes) remain. The
text is still a good introductory overview.
But the following texts go into greater depth:
Mark Sedgwick, Against
the Modern World (Oxford: O.U.P., 2004), prologue, pp. 11–2; parts II.5,
III.9 and IV.11.
Franco Ferraresi, “Les références théorico-doctrinales
de la droite radicale en Italie,” Mots
12 (March 1986), pp. 7–27.
—, “Julius Evola: Tradition, Reaction and the Radical
Right,” European Journal of Sociology
28, 1 (1987), pp. 107–51.
French original:
PDF of this version:
Considered by some “the greatest traditionalist
thinker of the West,” Julius Evola (1898–1974) always had uneasy relations with
the Movimento Sociale Italiano, while exercising a certain influence on the
most radical circles, the Fasci di Azione Rivoluzionaria, then Ordine Nuovo or
Avanguardia Nazionale (1). Evola kept
to the margins of Fascism throughout the Ventennio (1922–43). Despite his
critiques, he would nonetheless stay in solidarity with the Repubblica Sociale
Italiana after 1943. Following at once Nietzsche and Guénon, he cultivated,
after the fashion of the first, a disdain for the plebs and a eulogy for the
self-made overman. But he joined Guénon in his interpretation of history as a
process of decadence and involution leading, according to the Hindu tradition,
to the Kali Yuga, the demoniac age preceding the return of originary chaos. He was
nonetheless ready to recognise that certain political forms, more or less in
accord with his hieratic idea of Tradition, might delay that decline. Such was
his interpretation of Fascism, to the degree that it might, by its attempt to
rehabilitate heroic values, constitute a defiance against modern society and
faceless mass man.
In the eyes of the militants and intellectuals of the
young post-Fascist generation, Evola offered the advantage of proceeding from a
vigorous internal critique of Fascism, without ceding to antifascism. He offered
a coherent and sophisticated worldview, pitiless of modernity, against which it
opposed a construction far more radical and absolute than that of Fascism. Condemning
nationalism, for example, for its “naturalist” inspiration, Evola opposed to it
“race of spirit” and “the idea, our true homeland” (Orientamenti, 1950). What idea? That of a superior
order, of which Roman antiquity, mediaeval chivalry or Prussia were
expressions. He proposed a lifestyle of severity, discipline, sacrifice,
practiced as ascesis. Evola was not a pure spirit. He’d served in the artillery
during the First World War, and had been, in his youth, an excellent alpinist,
author of admirable Meditations on the
Peaks. Upon his death, his ashes were deposited at the summit of Monte
Rosa.
Around 1950, still believing in the chances of the
M.S.I., Evola wished to give a warrior “bible” to the young militants of that movement:
this would be Men among the Ruins, an
essay prefaced by Prince Borghese. His hopes having been dashed, he distanced
himself from the M.S.I. and from all political action after 1957. He published Ride the Tiger a little later (1961), a
difficult work that contradicts the former. He essentially declares that in a
world running to ruin, nothing is worthy to be saved, the only categorical
imperative being to follow one’s interior way with a perfect detachment from
all that surrounds one, but assuming what life offers to be tragic and painful.
This message roused a lively controversy among the sect of those ironically
calling themselves “Witnesses of Evola.” Some understood it as an invitation to
retire from the world, others as an incitement to dynamite decadent society. It’s
that part of the message that led the Italian adepts to that brutal activism
which they manifested throughout the “years of lead.” What Ride the Tiger expressed reflected the disgust aroused in the most
idealist by the mire of petty parliamentary politics in which the M.S.I. was
stuck. But beyond that was the matter of the evolution of an Italian and
Western society in the grip of consumerism and materialism.
In the course of following decades, the spread of violence
and left-wing terrorism had significant effects within the radical right that
the philosopher influenced. The two principal extra-parliamentary
organisations, Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale, had been dissolved in
1973, which provoked them to illegality; but this strategy was stamped out by
repression.
However, a new generation went to work, which had
given Evola a superficial read. Born after 1950, strangers to the historical
memory of Fascism, they wilfully criticised the “veterans” of the M.S.I., and no
less such fêted figures of rightist activism as Borghese, as well as their
outmoded strategy of the coup d’état.
The end of ideology and the primacy of action were announced with conviction. For
this generation of very young militants, confronted by the void of old, dead
values, combat remained as an existential value. “It is neither to power that
we aspire, nor to the creation of a new order,” one reads in 1980, in Quex, the newsletter (bulletin de liaison) for political
prisoners of the radical right. “It’s the struggle that interests us, it’s
action in itself, the affirmation of our own nature.” The influence of Ride the Tiger was evident. But what,
with Evola, was to result from an interior ascesis, was here reduced to its
most brutal reading, through an identification with the simplistic “warrior”
myth. This drift led to the ad hoc
theorisation of “armed spontaneity” (spontaneismo
armato), as much as to the retreat to an esoteric ivory tower.
Note (1). Venner disguises complexities here.
The F.A.R. (1945/6–7) antedated the M.S.I. (1946–95). Centro Studi O.N. split
from the M.S.I. in 1956, to be succeeded by Movimento Politico O.N. in 1969 and
Ordine Nero in 1974. A.N. split from the M.S.I in 1960.
No comments:
Post a Comment