Claudio Mutti, “Evola’s Diplomatic Activities in Vienna, Prague, Bucharest and Berlin” (1996)

‘L’activité diplomatique d’Evola à Vienne, Prague, Bucarest et Berlin,’ Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes, 24 (1996). Italian original, Pagine Libere (March 1996). PDF of this version here; original here.

Some time in 1938, at a date unknown to us, the Ahnenerbe brought to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler a secret report on the activities of the Baron Evola that ended with the following injunction: ‘Keep him from exercising any influence in the future on leaders and functionaries of the Party and the State; survey his propagandistic activities in neighbouring countries’ (see the document published by B. Zoratto in L’Italia settimanale [9 February 1994] titled ‘Fermate Evola, firmate SS’) [See also H. T. Hansen, introduction to Julius Evola, Revolt against the Modern World (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995), p. xviii.]. Moreover, we can concur with Piero Di Vona, who shows, in his Evola, Guénon, De Giorgio (Barzano, 1993), that the relationship between Evola and the Third Reich was ‘very complicated and obscure.’ Nevertheless, from the fact that Evola was suspected of being able to ‘influence’ ‘structures as difficult to penetrate as the Party and State of National-Socialist Germany,’ Prof. Giorgio Galli quite rightly deduces, in his preface to Marco Fraquelli’s Il filosofo proibito (Milan, 1994), that Evola ‘did in fact pursue political projects of an elitist type, not lacking in operative potentialities.’

Charles Maurras, “On the Classical Spirit” (1922)

“De l’esprit classique,” note 1 to “Trois idées politiques,” Romantisme et Révolution (Paris: Nouvelle Libraire Nationale, 1922), pp. 269–70. My translation. A short, lapidary exposition of Maurras’ conception of the classicism–romanticism dichotomy. His analysis owes much to Pierre Lasserre. Here Maurras represents the more straightforwardly political side of the classicist current within conservative-revolutionary thought, Lasserre and T. E. Hulme representing the middle term, and T. S. Eliot giving probably the most influential and most straightforwardly aesthetic formulation.

PDF: https://www.academia.edu/45025240/Charles_Maurras_On_the_Classical_Spirit_1922_

A deplorable error, due perhaps to the prejudices of the professor or the former student, led our master Taine to designate as classical the spirit that prepared the way for Revolution. On reflection, classical Antiquity played but a minute part in it. As far as classical books are concerned, the Revolutionary bibliography includes hardly more than Plato’s Republic and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives; nor would these be present had not the Father and Doctor of revolutionary ideas, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, borrowed from them more language than substance.

Golo Mann on the Conservative Revolution in Germany

Golo Mann’s discussion of the Conservative Revolution in The History of Germany since 1789 (Penguin, 1985) begins with Oswald Spengler, whose positions (anti-Hohenzollern, socialist, anti-progressive, militarist…), mark the beginning of a novel movement, “overthrowing conventional ways of thinking in politics.” For Mann, the C.R. is “confused,” a “strange combination of words,” and yet somehow, perfectly simple: Conservative Revolutionists “rejected not certain aspects of the Republic but the whole of it, and the whole present; they […] wanted to ask completely new questions and offer completely new ideas” (p. 620).

Their temperament was unsuited to parliamentarism or the new international order, though suited to poetry and the formation of groupuscules (pp. 620–1). Mann provides a perfect, lapidary, aphoristic précis of “the conservative-revolutionary attitude” (Mohler): “They wanted a new Reich without party squabbles, a Reich of the young and of masculine virtues, a great, proud gathering around a camp-fire instead of the capital Berlin. They expected much more from the modern state than it can give them at the best of times” (p. 621). Here we have their anti-parliamentarism, the spirit of the Freikorps (“the Ideas of 1914”), the bündisch spirit. And of course “the best of times,” measured by “quality of life,” which strikes them as the coming of the Last Man: see Leo Strauss on “German Nihilism” Interpretation, 26.3 (spring, 1999), specifically p. 360.

Kondylis on Conservatism with Notes on Conservative Revolution

Notes on Panagiotis Kondylis, “Conservatism as a Historical Phenomenon.” This is to my knowledge the only substantial excerpt from Kondylis’ Konservativismus (Stuttgart, 1986) available in English. The translation is by “C.F.” from “Ὁ συντηρητισμὸς ὡς ἱστορικὸ φαινόμενο,” Λεβιάθαν, 15 (1994), pp. 51–67, and remains unpublished, but discoverable in PDF format online. Page references below are to that PDF. I have altered the translation very slightly in some places.

Kondylis aims to understand conservatism not as a “historical” or “anthropological constant,” but as a “concrete historical phenomenon” bound to, and thus coterminous with, a time and a place (pp. 1–2). But even such historicist scholarship often takes too narrow a view, according to which conservatism is a reaction against, and thus “derivative” of, the Revolution, or, at best, against Enlightenment rationalism (pp. 2–3).

Stefan Breuer, Panagiotis Kondylis and the Question of “Conservative Revolution”

Alain de Benoist, “Intervista sulla rivoluzione conservatrice,” Terra Insubre (2007):

Stefan Breuer disputed that one can speak of “conservatism” or of “neo-conservatism” when it comes to the Conservative Revolution. He depended for this purpose upon the works of Panagiotis Kondylis, who, in a large work published in 1986, declared that conservatism, entering into an irreversible decline in the second half of the nineteenth century, was unable to rejuvenate itself in Germany on account of its historical links with the Ancien Régime. For Kondylis, the progressive elimination of the nobility, the caste that sustained historical conservatism, doomed political conservatism, which could not survive on its own, except by accommodating liberalism, or by “aestheticizing” certain of its foundations.

Notes on Ezra Pound (3): Epic and/or Propaganda

1—Poetry and/or Propaganda

David Barnes, “Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy,” Journal of Modern Literature, 34.1 (autumn 2010), pp. 20–1:

For the purposes of this article, it suffices to say that there is some critical debate as to whether or not the two “Italian Cantos,” 72 and 73, represent an attempt at Fascist propagandizing by Pound. Patricia Cockram takes this view, seeing the Italian Cantos as esthetic [sic] failures on Pound’s part, driven by political and economic desperation (535). Bacigalupo, however, views these Cantos as both a return “to the ‘visionary’ structure attempted…in the ‘Three Cantos’ of 1917, and an anticipation of the autobiographical Pisan Cantos” (“The Poet at War” 71). Bacigalupo argues that the poems should not be seen as aberrations, but as crucial staging posts in the development of Pound’s writing.

Barnes’ references: Massimo Bacigalupo, “Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated Translation,” Paideuma, 20 (1991), pp. 10–41; Patricia Cockram, “Collapse and Recall: Ezra Pound’s Italian Cantos,” Journal of Modern Literature, 23.3–4 (summer 2000), pp. 535–44.

Notes on Ezra Pound (2): “eternal war” and “Sagetrieb”

(My intention in the following is mainly to collect citations, drawing together a few threads through Pound’s Cantos on “the eternal war between light and mud.”)

 

1—Fango

In Canto 72, an “I” (Pound?), says to Marinetti’s unquiet spirit (who is eager to return to life and to war—“seule hygiène du monde”): “Lascia a me la parola. | Lascia a me ch’io mi spieghi, | ch’io faccia il canto della guerra eterna | Fra luce e fango” (which E.P. translates as “leave the talking to me. | And let me explain, | sing of the eternal war | between light and mud”).

The briefest of allusions at the incipit of Canto 87 suggests who the combatants in this eternal war are: “…between the usurer and any man who | wants to do a good job | (perenne).”

That this is indeed an allusion to the “guerra eterna” is confirmed in the following Canto 88, of which a passage begins, “Bellum perenne,” which goes on to cite a few significant dates (1694, 1750, 1878) in this apparently economic war. Then again a page later, in a very delicate epic allusion: “one, eight, seven, eight, | Mencius on tithing, | PERENNE. | Cano perenne.” “Arma virumque cano” (Aen., 1.1): eternal war, eternal song (see §3, infra).

Notes on Ezra Pound (1): “clear demarcation” and “the diffidence that faltered”

1—A passion for the clean line

If Pound was an anti-militarist, he wasn’t a pacifist. In the luminous opening lines of Canto 30, the Futurist doctrine of “war—the world’s only hygiene” is put into Artemis’ mouth (see Marinetti, “Fondation et Manifeste du Futurisme” [1909]).

“Pity spareth so many an evil thing.” Artemis–Diana is mistress of the hunt and of the moon, which bewitched E.P., in later Cantos especially. “Now if no fayre creature followeth me | […] It is on account that Pity forbideth them slaye.” The hunt is a test of virtù. Its ruthlessness is necessary for the triumph of the strong over the weak, beauty over “foulnesse,” form over matter.

“All things are made foul in this season, | This is the reason, none may seek purity | Having for foulnesse pity | And things growne awry.” Artemis represents this creative-destructive principle (creative destruction): removing the dross [see addendum]. The same is exemplified in that most Apollonian of arts, sculpture.

Canto 45 descants upon the same principle (or its perversion, subversion, rather): “with usura the line grows thick | with usura is no clear demarcation […] Usura rusteth the chisel.” Pound’s is a passion for the clean line; and this is itself a clean line running thru his poetic innovations (following on from Hulme’s classicism and “the forgotten school of 1909”) to his Fascism with Chinese characteristics. The nub of it: the struggle against shoddiness and obscurity of that purity of form begotten of mastery (virtù). (Or, as Canto 72 has it, “la guerra eterna | Fra luce e fango” [the unending war between light and mud]. This in the context of a neo-Ghibelline, pro-Fascist harangue. Aesthetics and politics are one, here.)

“Conservative Revolution” in England—a Sketch

“Conservative Revolution” is a phrase unfamiliar to English politics (as self-identification) or to English scholarship (as well-defined category in the history of political thought).

C.R. in Germany originated as a self-identification (Dietz [b], n. 33 to chap. 1, pp. 215–6) tied up in a self-perception of “German uniqueness” (Sonderweg) (Mohler [b], part 2). That C.R. in Germany is as disputed—from without, in scholarship—as the nation’s “special path” (Klemperer) is a sign of the category’s potency.

Since C.R., rather than a narrowly- and contingently-delimited movement or ideology, is an “attitude” (Mohler [b], p. 229)—a setting oneself against “the Ideas of 1789” on the one hand, and the timidity of mere conservatism on the other—it ought to obtain, in potency if not in act, beyond Germany’s borders.

Dugin explores C.R. in Russia; Veneziani in Italy. Mohler (a) makes some suggestions re. France.

The possibility of C.R. in England was suggested first by Hoeres, then by Dietz (a). Hoeres suggests T. E. Hulme as a figure significantly analogous to German Conservative Revolutionists. Dietz (a) suggests that “neoconservative” Conservative Party circles around Douglas Jerrold and Charles Petrie might constitute an analogue to the Jungkonservativen (see Mohler [b], part 5.2).

Dietz revises his position slightly in (b), detailing “Neo-Tory” goings-on in and around the Conservative Party between the Wars. “Neo-Toryism,” in Dietz’s outline, is regrettably unknown by English politics (as self-identification) and scholarship (as well-defined and potent category). His analogies are worth developing; but he leaves valid analogies unmade. I’ll just sketch both here.

Aleksandr Dugin, “Evola’s Conservative Revolution in Metaphysics” (1994)

My provisional translation of Dugin’s 1994 address to the Fondazione Julius Evola. These fifteen pithy theses expose the bare bones of Dugin’s reading of Evola. Dugin’s political preoccupations at the time are present in the emphasis on Evola’s “metaphysical leftism” and the possibility of an at once spiritual and political “third way” (as in terza posizione, etc.). Printed in Orion 9 (1994) in Italian. This translation was made from a French version in Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes 6 (1994).

Of Dugin’s trip to the West, the editor of N.S.E. reports that

In June of this year, Aleksandr Dugin visited France, Spain and Italy. Accosted by the police at the moment of his landing in Paris, Aleksandr Dugin was interrogated for three hours by the boorish rozzers, and was made to hand over issues of his journal, Elementy (so that he was subjected to censorship!), thereby depriving a number of official French institutions (the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, etc.), who had requested review copies, of these texts! Does the police have the right to prohibit researchers from accessing documentation? In Italy, he was received triumphantly at the Institute of International Relations in Milan, by General Jean at the Italian Ministry of National Defence, and by numerous cultural organisations. Our readers will appreciate the difference between a country governed by regular politicians, and a country governed by uncultured thugs, by boors and by scoundrels.

Armin Mohler, “Zeev Sternhell, New Historiographer of Fascism” (1986)

My translation of Armin Mohler’s “Zeev Sternhell, nouvel historiographe du fascisme,” from Généalogie du fascisme français (Geneva: Idhuna, 1986). Mohler gives an excellent review to Sternhell’s study of the birth of fascism out of French socialism and nationalism. Mohler finds in Sternhell a kindred spirit. Of particular interest is the “conceptual rhyme” between Sorel’s account of myth and Sternhell’s account (per Mohler) of historical realities.

French original:

http://www.archiveseroe.eu/sternhell-a48288056

PDF of this translation:

https://www.academia.edu/42202245/Armin_Mohler_Zeev_Sternhell_New_Historiographer_of_Fascism_1986_

Armin Mohler, “Homage to Oswald Spengler” (1982)

My translation of Mohler’s “Hommage à Oswald Spengler,” Orientations 1 (1982). Mohler presents Spengler as aligned with the Conservative Revolution, emphasising his Nietzschean aspects, and placing him in a tradition of implicitly anti-Platonist and “nominalist” thought (in Mohler’s special sense of the term).

French original:

http://www.archiveseroe.eu/spengler-a48363374

PDF of this translation:

https://www.academia.edu/42178159/Armin_Mohler_Homage_to_Oswald_Spengler_1982_

Armin Mohler, “Before History: Some Unsystematic Remarks” (1975)

My translation, rather provisional, of Armin Mohler’s “Devant l’histoire: quelques remarques non-systématiques,” Nouvelle École 27–28 (1975). These few brief theses bear the marks of Mohler’s “nominalism,” his term for his rejection of the “eternally valid” in politics, and of his anti-systematic thought. If you have any critical comments on this translation in particular (but any of my efforts), please do say. These are in part an exercise for me; I'm eager to improve.

The French original can be found at

http://www.archiveseroe.eu/defis-pm-a48319952

And a PDF of this translation at

https://www.academia.edu/41660834/Armin_Mohler_Before_History_1975_

Regarding “nominalism” from Nietzsche to Mohler to Alain de Benoist:

http://unterrified.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-nominalism-of-mohler-and-de-benoist.html

Interview with Armin Mohler (1994)

My translation of an interview with Armin Mohler in Éléments 80 (1994). Of particular interest to the history ideas must be his comments on the applicability of the category “conservative revolution” to France. Mohler’s best known work is his history of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, recently translated into English by F. R. Devlin (2018), which began as a doctoral dissertation in 1949 supervised by Karl Jaspers, and went through many editions over the years.

The French original is available at

http://www.archiveseroe.eu/mohler-a48481756

And a PDF of this version at

https://www.academia.edu/41660771/Interview_with_Armin_Mohler_1994_